Carnivore Confusion/Headscratchers


 * Why is there this general objection to birds eating chicken or turkey? Think about it: it's not cannibalism if they're not the same species! It'd be like opposing humans eating cow(because they are, you see, mammals too), and while that'd be the case if the cartoon had a vegan message to convey, that's usually not the case.
 * There really shouldn't be an objection to it, especially since raptors (eagles, owls, hawks, etc.) actually do prey on smaller birds IRL.
 * Because generally, Humans in western civilizations (and most Eastern ones, too) don't eat other primates.
 * But don't they eat monkey brains in China? Or was it Hong-Kong? Or was that just an urban legend?
 * Certain Asian and East Asian cultures eat (or use to eat) monkey brains as a delicacy. Also, in parts of Africa they eat primates. It's believed AIDS first spread to humans by consuming primates.
 * Just to go on with the taxonomy, it'd be only true for chickens and turkeys. A duck and a chicken/turkey are as close as we are to a cow(same class, different order).
 * And hence why cladistics is better than taxonomy; both fowl and waterfowl are within Galloanserae. Better would be duck and ostrich, which are as far apart within Aves as you can get.
 * But humans and cows are both in Boreoutheria, so the analogy is still valid.
 * All of the above would be valid, except Carnivore Confusion isn't strictly about cannibalism. It's about the implication of one human-level-intelligence creature eating another such creature. I'm guessing that we're mainly talking about the Donald Duck example (getting turkey or chicken dinners for holidays). The problem isn't that it's a bird, the problem is that the implication would be that Donald just went out and shot Lady Cluck or Jose Curiaco in order to have a nice Christmas dinner. It doesn't matter how closely related the species is- that's the entire point of the trope. If all the animals can talk (and the majority in the Mickey universe seem to be able to, and the few that can't show remarkable intelligence), how is it okay to eat them? Cannibalism isn't necesary for it to be Carnivore Confusion, thus why bird-eating-different-species-of-bird examples are included. It's not cannibalism, but that's not the trope anyway.
 * I once ate frog legs at a Malaysian restaurant, I thought it was chicken. :P
 * In reality, the problem doesn't arise when dealing with species, but rather when the thing you're eating was sapient in life. In other words, going back to the picture on the main page, why are Donald and his nephews sapient while the turkey they're about to eat presumably was not?
 * Why exactly is scavenging considered to be baser than outright predation? For one thing, it's a pretty sensible survival technique in most situations - takes less effort, gives an animal plenty of choices, and the corpses are (theoretically) widely available. For another thing, the scavengers aren't necessarily killers, whereas predators have to be killers by definition. I'm aware that scavenging and predation are not mutually exclusive, but even if we didn't allow that and assumed that lions were exclusively predators (they're not) and hyenas were exclusively scavengers (they're not), why does the mainstream perspective demonize hyenas but treat killer lions as 'nobler'? Is this What Measure Is a Non-Cute? in action, or is something else going on?
 * It probably comes from the idea that scavenging is somehow "cowardly" or "stealing" (and also kind of gross, but so are lots of things in nature). In the specific case of vultures and hyenas, vultures are seen as kind of ominous by many Westerners because when you see them circling you know something is either dead or about to be and hyenas have been known to eat human corpses (and attack living humans, for that matter). So it's more disgust than anything. Still doesn't make a lot of sense, but ... nothing about this trope makes a lot of sense anyway.
 * There is one explanation that might make sense. Modern humans' digestive tracts are not fit for eating rotting meat, which is pretty much a must for eating carcasses - they are not guaranteed to be fresh. Since, say, a dog can eat a piece of stinking meat with no ill effect and a human will feel unwell at the very least, we are biologically repulsed from eating "suspicious" meat. The taboo against scavenging is just a social construct meant to rationalise an instinctive disgust. Basically, our stomachs can't handle it, so our culture says it's evil. It would not be the first instance where culture says it's bad when evolution/biology says it's a bad idea (e.g. taboo regarding incest).
 * It seems to be more widespread than just us. Great apes that do eat meat will only eat things they killed themselves and never scavenge. Not sure about other primates such as baboons and monkeys.
 * Humans are scavengers though. Sure, they don't scavenge in the wild (generally, anyway), but buying meat from the grocery store is just as much scavenging as roaming the wilderness searching for rotting carcasses. There are 3 basic criteria fro what constitutes scavenging: 1. You ate it, 2. Someone or something else killed it, 3. It was meat.
 * Moreover, our hominid ancestors probably did scavenge from moderately-fresh carcasses, as it's the most plausible way they could have found the necessary fatty acids for increasingly-large brains prior to the invention of fishing. Perhaps our present-day revulsion towards scavenging animals is based more on lingering rivalry towards onetime competitors than we choose to admit.
 * If we don't allow for animals to be both predators and scavengers, then what you should do is assume that lions are exclusively scavengers and hyenas are exclusively predators, since lions scavenge much more than hyenas.
 * It might have something to do with Due to the Dead, that the scavenger is somehow defiling the dead animal.