So now that I'm officially a vegan, I've been doing some thinking about the arguments people come up with as to why I'm a weirdo. One of them is "But humans are meant to eat meat, it's our natural diet". If the person who says this is somewhat intelligent it is often backed up with "That's why we have canine teeth".
Canine teeth. Let's talk about canine teeth.
Canine teeth are named, I assume, after the pointy fangs of dog-animals (wolves, foxes, jackals etc), as their family name is canidae (not to be confused with Canada, they are very different), and wolves and dogs are also from the genus canis. Let's have a look at some human canine teeth.
There they are, they're the ones coloured in red. Basically, there are 3 kinds of teeth. Incisors are the ones at the front (the blue ones), they are chisel shaped and used for cutting plant matter; think of biting an apple or a sheep nibbling grass. Canine teeth are pointy, they are used for tearing flesh and are handy if you want to gnaw meat off a bone. Then there's molars (the green ones), they are flat and ridgy and are used for grinding up plant matter that has already been chomped by the incisors.
Take a look at the set of human teeth, the incisors are actually the longest teeth, if you're canines were longer than your incisors then you'd look like a vampire and people would be creeped out. In fact, people tend to find people with big incisors quite attractive, just look at American celebrities. The widest teeth are the molars, and humans have quite a lot of them, 20 in an adult, and they are nice and flat for grinding. The canine teeth in humans are actually quite small and inconsequential. Sure they might be sharp, but they're no sharper than any of the other teeth.
The argument is that, because humans have canine teeth, they must be 'meat eaters'. It is true that some herbivores lack canine teeth, look at a cow for instance:
And elephants, in fact, lack everything except molars and 2 incisors (their tusks):
However many, nay, most, herbivores do have canine teeth. Here is a good example of canine teeth in a horse:
The thing about evolution is, it's not neat and simple. There are dead ends and there are leftovers. All animals are descendants of animals which, at some point along the line, probably engaged in a bit of flesh eating. When diets and lifestyles changed over millions of years and generations, the evidence of this didn't disappear, it just started to shrink. In animals that weren't eating as much meat as they used to, canine teeth began to shrink as they became useless. That's why herbivorous animals such as horses, sheep, and deer have little canine teeth that are not suited to meat eating. Why is this relevant? Because people have little canine teeth that are not suited to meat eating.
Cats are one of the few types of animals that are truly carnivorous. While they do occasionally eat grass, they seem to do this to make themselves vomit, rather than for sustenance. Here is a great picture of cat teeth:
Can you even see any incisors? They are virtually non-existent because they are useless to a cat. Cats don't bite apples or nibble grass. Ok, so maybe they do nibble grass, but you'll notice they awkwardly do it with their tall, pointy molars, made for slicing meat rather than grinding like our short, flat ones.
Some will say that the reason people don't have large canines and tiny incisors like cats is because we are omnivores. Is this true though? Dogs are omnivores. Their teeth look like this:
Kind of similar to a cat really. The incisors are bigger but the canine teeth are still huge and the molars are not flat. However, dogs do eat a fair amount of meat so let's take a look at an omnivorous animal that eats very little meat. Grizzly bears. People usually think of bears as carnivores and indeed some bears have to be, such as polar bears. Most bears though are omnivorous and eat mainly plant matter. The majority of a grizzly bear's diet is plant matter, with a few small animals thrown in every now and then. This is a grizzly bear skull:
