人类为什么不吃食肉动物？Why don't humans eat carnivores?

人类为什么不吃食肉动物？Why don't humans eat carnivores?
I'm a lover of carnivores and food, so when I sank my teeth into this question, I thought I already had a pretty good idea of what the answer was going to be.
作为一个热爱肉食动物和美食的人，当我开始深入这个问题时，我以为自己对于答案已经有了不错的预判。
But there are actually several really interesting possibilities out there about why we generally keep carnivores off the menu.
但实际上，关于我们通常不把肉食动物放在菜单上的原因，确实存在着几种非常有趣的解释。
The first reason we might avoid eating carnivores -- and this was my go-to hypothesis before this video -- is the safety, or really, the un-safety, of their meat.
我们避免食用肉食动物的首要原因——这也是我在观看这视频之前的主要假设——是出于对其肉类安全性的考虑，准确来说，是因为它们的肉存在风险。
As animals live their lives, they pick up potential nasties -- things like parasites, microbes, and heavy metals -- some of which can hang around in their bodies and cause harm.
动物在其一生中，会积累各种潜在的有害物质，如寄生虫、细菌和重金属等，这些有害物质可能会留在它们的体内，对健康造成威胁。
When one animal eats another, it adds that animal's nasties to its own nasties.
当一个动物吃掉另一个动物时，它的体内就会累积更多的有害物质。
When that animal-eater eats another animal, it'll ingest all that animal's nasties.
当这种捕食者进食另一只动物时，它也就摄取了那只动物体内的所有有害物质。
And if something should eat the eater, it'll nom up ALL those animals' nasties.
如果有东西吃掉了那个捕食者，那么就会一并吸收这些动物所有的有害物质。
The idea is that eating animals that eat lots of other animals might expose us to more nasties -- and that's not great.
这个观点是，食用那些以大量其他动物为食的动物，可能会使我们接触到更多有害物质——这并不是什么好事。
We do know that certain animal-eating species do contain high enough levels of certain nasties that make them potentially dangerous for certain humans to consume, but we don't have evidence that this problem applies to humans eating carnivores in general.
我们确实知道，某些食肉物种含有的特定有毒物质的水平足够高，对一些人来说可能构成风险，但我们并没有证据显示这个问题普遍存在于人类食用食肉动物的情况中。
So let's move onto the second hypothesis: deliciousness; maybe animals that only eat other animals just don't taste all that good.
接下来，让我们探讨第二个假说：口味。可能食肉动物的味道并不怎么样。
And, because we're dealing with deliciousness, I'm gonna hop over into MinuteFood-land for this one.
而且，由于我们讨论的是美味问题，这一次我将带你进入分钟美食的世界。
Now, there are a few reasons why carnivore meat might not be particularly tasty; the first is texture.
现在，有几个原因可能导致食肉动物的肉不那么美味；首先是肉质。
Carnivores tend to be lean, mean hunting machines -- they have to be in order to catch their prey.
食肉动物往往身形精瘦、性格凶悍，这是它们捕猎猎物所必需的条件。
The leaner and stronger an animal is, the less juicy fat it contains and the thicker its bundles of muscle fibers are, so the tougher its meat is likely to be, and in general, humans aren't big fans of tough meat.
动物身材越瘦削、力量越强，其肉中的肥美脂肪就越少，肌肉纤维束就越粗，所以它的肉质可能就越硬……一般而言，人们并不特别喜欢口感过硬的肉。
Then, there's flavor, because what an animal eats can affect how it tastes -- that's why some people care whether they're eating grass-fed or grain-fed beef.
风味也是一个因素，因为动物所吃的食物会影响肉的风味——这正是为什么一些人关心自己吃的牛肉是草饲还是谷饲。
Maybe something about eating lots of other animals -- like the urea critters tend to contain, or the icky compounds produced when meat sits around -- makes a carnivore's meat taste gross.
也许吃掉大量其他动物——譬如常含有尿素的生物或肉类久置后形成的令人反感的化合物——让食肉动物的口感变得不怎么讨喜。
And there is some anecdotal evidence for this; people who've eaten bear during different seasons of the year tend to say that spring bears -- which have been gorging on berries -- are way tastier than fall bears, which have been feasting on fish.
同时，也有一些轶事证据支持这种看法；在不同季节尝试过熊肉的人通常认为，春天以浆果为食的熊比秋天以鱼为食的熊味道更佳。
Speaking of fish though, there's a big exception to this whole "humans don't eat carnivores" thing; several of the fish species we eat only eat other animals, and they don't taste bad -- quite the opposite really.
不过说到鱼，这里其实有一个重要的例外，打破了“人类不吃食肉动物”的看法：我们食用的几种鱼是完全以其他动物为食的，但它们的味道一点也不差，实际上非常美味。
So I'd go so far as to say that the taste hypothesis doesn't hold up -- at least not broadly across all carnivores.
因此，我敢断言，关于口味的假说并不站得住脚——至少不是普遍适用于所有的食肉动物。
Let's go back to MinuteEarth-land to chat about the third hypothesis: inefficiency.
让我们回到分钟地球，讨论第三个假设：效率低下。
At least in modern times, producing enough meat to feed big groups of big, hungry humans has generally required raising animals for their meat, and doing this with carnivores doesn't make that much sense.
至少在现代，为了满足一大群饥饿人类的需求，生产足够的肉类通常要依靠饲养动物，养殖食肉动物似乎并不太合理。
There's the matter of them seeing us as food, but the bigger problem is that raising carnivores is kind of a waste.
虽然问题之一在于它们也将我们视为食物，但更大的问题在于养育食肉动物实际上是种资源浪费。
If you feed, say, a cow 10,000 calories of grass, most of that energy goes into keeping the cow alive -- only about ten percent of it goes into building body mass.
比如说，如果你给一头牛喂食1万卡路里的草，这些能量大多数会用来保持牛活着——只有大约10%转化为体重增长。
So from all this grass, you'll only end up with something like 1000 calories of beef – that's basically just a couple steaks.
因此，从这么多的草料中，你最终获得的牛肉热量可能只有大约1000卡——这大概只是几块牛排的量。
And if you feed those 1000 calories of beef to, say, a tiger, you'll get only 100 calories of tiger meat.
而如果你将这1000卡路里的牛肉喂给，比如说，一只老虎，最终你能获得的老虎肉热量只有100卡。
It's way more efficient -- and easier -- to just eat the beef yourself!
直接吃牛肉，既高效又简单！
It's even more efficient to eat the plants yourself, but that's a whole other video.
直接吃草更加高效，但那是另一个话题了。
This hypothesis -- inefficiency -- is the only one that's actually supported by the weird fact that we do eat carnivorous fish.
低效率的假说是唯一能够支持“我们确实食用肉食性鱼类”这一奇特现象的假说。
The very same energy loss happens in the ocean too, but since we've spent most of history just opportunistically catching fish -- rather than raising them ourselves -- inefficiency here hasn't really mattered to us.
同样的能量损耗也发生在海洋里，但因为我们在大多数历史时期是依靠机遇捕鱼，而不是自己饲养，所以这种低效对我们来说并没有太大影响。【贝贝英语网】