The title on The Atlantic article startled me, although I've actually blogged this fact before.
Before Europeans arrived on the West Coast in 1542, the bears thrived on diets that were roughly 90 percent vegan, as Alagona and his colleagues found in a study published this week. (The typical modern American, meanwhile, derives about a third of their daily calories from animal-based foods.) In the decades after colonizers began to introduce new settlements and animals to the West Coast, the bears probably did start eating more meat. And humans were likely the ones to blame.California grizzlies, like most other brown bears, were never averse to eating meat. Chemical signatures in the skulls, teeth, and pelts of museum specimens, analyzed by Alagona and his colleagues, reveal that land animals made up just under 10 percent of the bears’ diet, even in the precolonial era—on par with the tastes of grizzlies elsewhere. (Marine meat made up less than 2 percent of the menus of the bears sampled.) And if modern brown-bear habits are any indication, what land animals the grizzlies were eating were probably mostly small, sluggish, newborn, or already dead. Grizzlies, for all their heft and roar, are kind of crummy hunters. “By and large, they’re just too slow,” Garth Mowat, a bear biologist at the University of British Columbia, told me.Then, European colonists made meat-eating much, much easier—and perhaps more necessary. Livestock proliferated around California, many of them untended and unfenced. Indigenous populations dipped, which likely led to a bump in some wild-animal populations, Alagona told me. Swelling settlements thinned woodlands and pared back grasslands, potentially chipping away at the bears’ vegetarian menus. By the early 17th century, California grizzlies were probably eating quite a bit more meat—as Alagona’s team found, maybe nearly triple what they were consuming before.
The story continues at the link. Check the other link for a report on bears eating 40,000 moths in a day.
Based on the article, the "typical modern American", getting 1/3 of their calories from animal- based foods, could also be considered "mostly vegan".
ReplyDeleteJust seems an odd phrase to use here, especially since the vegan lifestyle is normally based on a conscious moral choice to avoid animal products. Perhaps "mostly vegetarian" is better?