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Had some more time, so I did another page.
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Pony history is probably full of brutal purges, hunts, and extermination efforts.
…killing the shit out of any aggressive animals until they have a healthy fear of you.
That’s a bridge too far for me.
That was necessary for us – although frankly it wasn’t until pretty recently that top-level predators had really learned to fear us, and then only in masses. If I’m on the Serengeti alone, I have to sleep some time, and when I do I’m easily lion meat.
But we don’t live in a world where friendship is a law of physics. It’s just as adaptive if a large proportion of primitive ponies could make friends with the heinous monsters, play one against another, and symbiotically employ their labor, or power instinctive defense and healing magic with the unity of the herd.
Think about this. In the wildest regions the show has so far visited, with the harshest beasts of Equestria, who finally dealt successfully with the manticore, the dragon, and the cockatrice? Wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Fluttershy, that’s who. The Stare is as effective as a spear.
Neanderponies could just as easily have been top of the food chain by co-opting everything else – Machiavelli instead of Sun Tzu. If all the local predators think you’re part of the pack, you don’t get eaten (any more than the usual uppity pack member).
This is also a world where spirits exist, such as the windigos (and presumably more helpful ones). That can make for a lot of shortcuts as you dominate the planet.
So meat-eating ponies, okay. Primitive ponies, sure. But primitive noble savage ponies, not primitive scream-and-kill-everything ponies.
I’d tend to agree that most intelligent life is probably predatory or omnivorous. Mainly though I think this has less to do with diet then behavior. Civilization per-disposes complete domination of the local environment and effective removal from the food chain. The most obvious way to do this is to be the meanest and best predator around. Other options aren’t impossible though adult Elephants are very nearly outside the food chain (indeed the only predator they have really is us) and fairly intelligent and social. They do this with massive size, other options might be a highly aggressive defensive posture like seen in the Cape Buffalo.
It’s not impossible to generate the energy needed to support a large brain on a herbivores diet, but it is probably harder, which is likely why most intelligent life would eat some meat, for efficiency sake if nothing else. Magic or even just the environment may allow this to be side stepped though, maybe plants in equestrian are just more nutritious on average for instance, or maybe they don’t and ponies just have to eat a lot.
Regardless the answer to that though any intelligent civilization would still be absolutely required to predate in my view, for a given value of predation anyway. We know that the pony world is pretty much a D&D style death trap out in the countryside with monsters, predators, and hostile environments a plenty. Yet the developed areas are safe and by all indication avoided by such creatures. That didn’t and doesn’t happen by accident.
Pony history is probably full of brutal purges, hunts, and extermination efforts. We know they control the environment, but we tend to focus on pushing around clouds or plowing snow. That’s part of it, but it’s the nice clean part of it. Other parts of it are slashing and burning forests for farmland, plowing under natural grassland to promote growth of preferred grazing vegetation, and killing the shit out of any aggressive animals until they have a healthy fear of you. This must also have been going on for a very long time to allow them to even begin the rise toward civilization, and such old habits and practices might well lay a foundation for certain to engage in meat-eating either for added nutrition in lean times or even ritualistic purposes. (I have to admit I find the idea of ancient pony religions involving the ‘sacrifice’ of predator species killed in defense of the herd via consumption both amusing and intriguing)
This is all also why I find most nonsense about Pony non-violence as silly as the entire “no concept of meat” stuff. You don’t get to be the dominate species by being nice. The laws of the jungle are universal and if Ponies are on top it’s because they proved the best at killing their way there. The very act of having a society means you’ve learned how to kill in the pursuit of security and resources. Which might be a bit of a dark message if you think about it, the ‘original sin’ of civilization so to speak is that violence is required and inherent in it’s birth and maintenance.
Grain really doesn’t work for a few reasons:
We do actually need a lot more B12 than we can get in eggs, hence the aforementioned deficiency in vegetarians. A couple notes on this:
That’s a surprisingly perspicacious comment which makes meat-eating ponies plausible to me. The original utility of meat eating was actually the concentrated calories, especially in fats; grass is a notoriously poor dietary staple (a ruminant eating only grass will have to eat for several hours a day). Grain is much better, but evolution to consume meat would have helped.
Still, regular addition to the diet of eggs and cheese (adult lactose tolerance) could go a substantial way toward covering those nutritional needs. We don’t need a lot of meat in terms of B12; a couple of eggs a day would do fine.
You’re forgetting some important aspects in your argument: Humans evolved from largely herbivorous animals. Even with the small amount of meat-eating that chimpanzees and other primates do, they don’t come anywhere near our natural level of meat consumption. It has been suggested that eating meat is what allowed humans to reach our level of brain development, and the fact that low levels of B12, EPA, and DHA shrink the brain (and that vegetarians and vegans have much lower levels of these nutrients), this isn’t entirely unlikely.
The ponies of MLP:FiM are clearly much more intelligent than your average horse. Could it be that meat-eating got them there?
(Canonically, no, but canon’s never stopped a fandom before)
It’s part of a Greek legend that horses can and will eat people.
I wouldn’t go that far, but some of them will certainly eat it if it’s front of them, and more so if they’re trained too, and they can digest it. Indeed fish and bone meal is still used as a supplement and is only rare because things like soy are cheaper, and the reports of various peoples feeding there horses meat, blood, and organs during long treks without ready supplies of vegetation are too numerous to ignore.
Some of them also do seem to develop a taste for it and will seek it or, or even rarely actually kill and consume other animals. (Including in some rare cases even people.)
Taken together there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the horses digestive system are more robust and adaptable then is commonly assumed by modern ‘experts’. So looked at that way it actually strikes me as quite possible certain ponies would eat meat either because they liked it, or because they lived in an area where growing crops to meat protein demands was infeasible.
Either or both ways it makes for an interesting contrast to the usual ‘aghast at the idea of a cheeseburger’ fanon.
Mm… well, within a fairly short train ride of Ponyville are arid desert-like regions
… An overnight (at least) trip is short? The Everfree is mentioned as marching to the beat of it’s own drum, weather-wise, and given the way that the ponies, only Zecora is likely to look for truffles there.
Mountains don’t really say anything about truffles.
All in all, truffles don’t grow most places, and pigs are only rarely raised for that purpose, so the simplest explanation is that truffles aren’t around there, so the Apple farm’s pigs aren’t used to find them.
I’m having a hard time picturing a pony skinning and tanning even a naturally deceased pig, though.
Harder than Fluttershy feeding animals to other animals? Rarity and Twilight both have carnivorous pets and quit of few of Fluttershy’s animal friends would do badly on a vegetarian diet. Even if the ponies don’t eat meat on a regular basis, there’s a demand for it, and since you’ve butchered the animal, why waste the rest?
It isn’t like ponies are pacifists or anything. They don’t even seem to be vegetarians because of moral concerns.
Jobs and Applejack’s parents watch over her proudly.
Mm… well, within a fairly short train ride of Ponyville are arid desert-like regions (that nevertheless support apple orchards!), overgrown temperate forest, and mountain peaks, so a truffle region seems not terribly unlikely.
Leather is a possibility, I guess. At least it’s not from cows. I’m having a hard time picturing a pony skinning and tanning even a naturally deceased pig, though.
I don’t blame AJ at all. Pass the curry.
True, but we assume that the world works like the one that we are familiar with until given reason to assume otherwise.
So far, the pigs have acted like pigs, and the truffles have been completely unmentioned. In absence of evidence to the contrary, one should assume that truffles act like truffles.
And Equestria has been implied to be their world’s version of the North American continent, with Ponyville being centrally located.
Of course, given that this is a magical world of ponies we’re talking about, One doesn’t have to assume that Equestria is a region like north-America, and that truffles grow under the circumstances we’re familiar with on earth, or that Equestrian pigs will be more likely than dogs to eat the truffles on sight. That’s the beauty about building an imaginary world. You don’t have to make everything exactly like the real world.
Actually not that true, pig CAN eat almost anything, doesn’t mean they will, they are more pick then most people think.
A pig will eat almost anything, (your feet included if you are not paying attention) so, they can produce a lot of fertilizer.
I’ve heard that real ponies actually savour meat.
Truffles aren’t generally found in North America, though… And North American truffles are mostly on the west coast, whereas Ponyville is somewhere inland, so they still aren’t in the right area. And they don’t grow around apple trees. And you can you can train dogs to find them, and dogs are less likely to try to eat them. And, I think that horses might have a good enough sense of smell to find them, although I could be completely wrong about that.
Even if Equestrians use pigs to find truffles, it’s highly unlikely that the Apple family does so.
Also, you can get leather from pigs, and at least a few things in Equestria seem to use leather, so there’s another usage for them.
Not to beat around the bush, but a few sapient species in Equestria are carnivores. Griffons in particular are basically two obligate carnivores stitched together, so a vegetarian diet isn’t really possible for them. Combined with the fact that herbivores are capable of digesting proteins, ponies eating meat isn’t really a stretch. Not common, of course, but I’d be surprised if it was unheard of. It’s not that big a jump from eating chicken eggs to eating chicken.
Scrap disposal, maybe.
And, um. Truffle hunting? Actually, yeah, pigs can be economical as truffle hunters if the truffles are sufficiently expensive. And nopony wants to spend any more time than they have to in the Everfree Forest.
I guess her parents are ‘Naturalists’. Damn Naturalists. I’ll eat what I want to eat, thank you very much.
Also Applejack eats meat? That’s my pony!