Crucial Survival Podcast

Can you eat the food that other mammals and birds eat?

September 04, 2021 Steve Marvell
Crucial Survival Podcast
Can you eat the food that other mammals and birds eat?
Show Notes Transcript

Can you the eat the food that monkeys eat and the berries birds eat? This is long-standing survival "knowledge" is completely wrong!

Can you eat the food that other animals eat, and birds for that matter, in a survival situation? Can you find the foods that you can eat by observation? My name is Steve Marvell. This is Crucial Survival. I'm gonna answer that question. And no doubt you will be unsurprised as what the answer is, but I'll tell you why it is the case. Can you eat grass? No, that's because a cow has multiple stomachs and it chews the cud. And that's a process, which we simply can't do. We can't eat grass. There are lots of things that we can't eat that animals can process that we can't. And it's not simply because of having five stomachs or whatever it is, how many stomachs does a cow have? Stick it in the comments, I haven't got a clue how many stomachs a cow has. It's less than 10 and it's more than one. That's pretty much all I've got, I think it's five, but I'm not sure. Or is it three? In any case, the monkey being close, or chimp, or whatever of the ape, and associated types of animal species. It has been said that if an ape can eat it, then we can eat it. Since they're so close. This is simply not true. The way that their stomach acids work, the tolerances of different parts of their body that clean the blood: you cannot eat what monkeys eat, no matter how close they are to us. Their immune system is different. They can tolerate different bacteria, which we cannot, we need to cook our food, a chimpanzee can eat raw meat, we wouldn't know where that meat has come from. So no, you can't eat what monkeys eat. And it's also the case, the other myth that is banded around is whether or not you can eat the berries that a bird eats. This is also not true. Birds again have the ability to process or exclude toxins from certain berries, which they eat, and so from an observation perspective we can't trust that particular piece of information. So that's it. No, you simply cannot eat the food that other animals eat you cannot guarantee that because other animals eat it that we can. Doesn't matter if it's a cow or a monkey or a bird or whatever it is. You just can't do that. What have you heard that is similar in context? What have you been told that you can eat? Be it in an entertainment context like "your Bear Grylls". Or otherwise? For instance, can you eat raw fish? No, you can't. Oh, sushi, they say you can eat. You can't eat all raw fish. The raw fish that's in sushi we can eat because it's particularly chosen, that doesn't mean you can eat all raw fish. So don't do that. Cook meat, Cook fish. Do not skin a snake and try and eat, it's riddled with salmonella just because a dog, whatever it might be, wild dog can eat snake, that doesn't mean that we can eat a snake. We literally can't take any of the animal kingdom, the berries, the plants, whatever it is, and trust anything at all that animals eat. We should gather, kill, and cook everything that we're going to eat. And it can only be the things that we know without observation of what animals eat. So that's the answer to this question, can we observe animals to determine what we can eat? No, we can't, under any circumstances, at all. Any questions? I wouldn't have thought so. So if you have any other questions associated with particular topic or other topics then bang them into the comments and I will see you tomorrow.