Could people live without meat

Answer 1

The most important thing you must realize is that cows are herbivores (nor carnivores nor omnivores), therefore are not predatory animals. As herbivores, they subsist, thrive and survive on a diet of all plant matter, about 95% of that diet being grass in some form or other: as forage/roughage or grain.

To answer the question however, starts with looking at the digestive physiology of the cow. A cow has one stomach divided into four chambers, three which are forestomachs to the primary and true stomach. These four chambers are partly the reason for a cow to be adapted to a diet of roughage material, not animal flesh. However, the existence of these four chambers are not the only reason why a cow's diet is like it is. The largest contribution must go to the large population (over a billion) of microflora that reside primarily in the rumen (some in the reticulum). They consist of bacteria, protozoa and fungi; they are essentially there to feed the cow.

These microflora take the roughage material that the cow eats (as grass, hay, silage, grain, and byproducts like distillers grains (dried or wet), soybean meal and beet pulp) and put it through a fermentation process where an enzyme that can only be produced by these microflora (called cellulase) is put into service to soften and break down the usually-hard-to-digest cell walls found in plant material. These cell walls consist of cellulose, lignin and hemi-cellulose, thus the enzyme cellulase is especially useful in breaking down these compounds. Once these compounds have been broken down sufficiently, the microflora themselves gorge and consume the essential nutrients that have been let loose. Essential nutrients include protein, fats, water, CHOs, vitamins and minerals. A healthy microflora population is one that has been fed a high protein-moderately-low fibre diet. (Note too high protein and not enough fibre can contribute to gas build up in the rumen which causes bloat for the cow--a potentially fatal condition.)

Rumen microflora have a very short life--a lifespan of only 15 minutes long--where they must feed and multiply themselves before they die. What happens when they die, you ask? Well they move from the rumen through the omasum to the abomasum and the small intestine where they are digested and absorbed into the cow's system as a viable and highly effective protein source. Rumen microflora contribute to (no sources, just a guess...will correct and site source if it's wrong later) around 60% of the cow's protein requirements. The other 40 percent is obtained from by-pass protein that does not get consumed by the bacteria and ends up in the abomasum and small intestine to be absorbed in the cow's system before being passed as feces.

Thus, it can be surmized that the answer to the question above is that it's all about the microflora in the cow's rumen which makes the cow able to live without having to consume any meat in herd diet.

However, there are many myths out there surrounding the "facts" about cows being "fed meat," especially with regards to CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and their link to BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, also known as "Mad Cow Disease"). The truth is, this practice is illegal in pretty well all countries in the world, and impossible to accomplish without extensive processing of animal by-product into saleable feedstuffs. It is a common practice to feed animal by-products to hogs and poultry because it is needed as part of their diet (these animals, unlike cows, are omnivores therefore requiring animal protein as part of their diet, very much like humans do), but with various scares and past positive testing of ruminant animals with their form of BSE (TSE or Tramsmissive Spongiform Encephalopathy/Chronic Wasting Disease in deer and elk herds and Scrapie in sheep and goats), a federal law has been passed making it mandatory that all animal by-products, regardless of the source (meat, nervous tissue, offal, or bones) be prohibited from entering the food chain to be fed to any ruminant animal. To make this doubly effective, any animal suspected of having BSE, TSE, CWD or Scrapie is never to enter the animal or human food chain, but is desposed of via burning and burial. Also, all animals slaughtered have the brain and spinal column removed and discarded prior to cold-storage and butchering, regardless of the age of that animal.

Answer 2

yes, but they need some other resource of protein to live healthly.