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ErroneousBoshtoday at 11:02 AM1 replyview on HN

No, if anything plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet.

Ideally animals with a fairly high energy budget need to be omnivores, like for example humans. If you look at animals of comparable weight, all the herbivores are ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful.

Even fairly small horses, for example, have a really bad time trying to get enough nutrition from their diet and if they eat a tiny bit too much or too little they pretty much just die an agonising death from stomach problems. This is after thousands of years of us trying to breed the strongest healthiest horses we can, incidentally - the very earliest horses were the size of cats and lived for a year or two at most judging by the fossil record. Even at the dawn of agriculture horses were horribly fragile creatures.


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deepvibrationstoday at 3:25 PM

Just going to address a few points here in case people believe this!

> plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet The idea that herbivores have a "less diverse" diet is rubbish. Lots of herbivores (like elephants or deer) eat hundreds of different plant species.

> "ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful" This is also rubbish. Horses, Rhinos, Elephants, and Rabbits are all highly successful non-ruminants.

Oh and the reason horses can die from too much is because they have a one-way digestive valve, so if they eat something toxic/gas-producing, they can suffer from colic, which can be fatal. Saying they only lived "a year or two" is pure speculation btw and they aren't "fragile" because of evolution, they are "fragile" because humans have bred them for extreme speed and aesthetics, at the cost of general health etc.

I don't know where you get your information from, but it all seems very biased or hyperbolic to fit a certain viewpoint.

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