Kinshaya

[F. King Daniel]

I can't remember the exact wording and don't have the book at hand, but the FASA backstory says that the Caitians stopped eating meat once they achieved civilization. Eating meat gradually became taboo, a reminder of animalistic, uncivilized times.

It's the classic Trek "species denying their true nature" thing. It went on to say that some Caitians still did eat meat, but I imagine they get the V'Tosh K-whatever treatment.

I'd imagine the Caititans could use various supplements to survive on a vegetarian diet, but I'm reminded of the Futurama episode with the popplers ("we taught a lion to eat tofu!" - cut to really sick looking lion).

 

[Christopher]

^I think that's way too anthropomorphic, assuming that an alien species would adopt human values when it became civilized. More likely, a civilization of predators would have a value system built around predation, like the Pahkwa-thanh do in Titan. For that matter, their whole approach to civilization would have to be different from the human model, reflecting their own sense of territoriality, their own economic and subsistence needs, etc. I explored this in The Buried Age, portraying a Caitian colony as herders of a sort, living in mobile, migratory communities that followed the prey animals they husbanded. Instead of building a civilization around sedentary agriculture, they built it around animal husbandry.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

But agriculture can be used on a large scale.

Hunting wild animals, on the other hand, can not be practiced on large scale, in order to feed millions/billions.
Hunting wild animals is limited by the number of wild animals present - unless one grows them, in which case, they're essentially farm animals who are to be killed by respecting curious regulations.
Why not replicate some meat instead?

 

[Christopher]

^I'm not just talking about hunting. Just as agriculture is an improvement on gathering, so pastoralism (herding) is an improvement on hunting. It's a way to control, manage, and increase the yield of your primary food source. Humans have been herding for as long as they've been farming. The myth propagated by agrarian cultures is that nomadic herding is primitive and inferior, but that's just prejudice; in reality, nomadic pastoral cultures such as the Mongols and the Plains Native Americans used to be agrarian, but then adopted pastoralism as a better form of subsistence in plains/steppe environments, once they gained the technological advance of domesticated horses. (Really, horses weren't bred into a form that could be ridden until about 1000 BCE.)

Of course, among humans, herding doesn't entail hunting behavior; either we use the herd creatures mainly for things such as milk, wool, and the like, or we breed them to be docile so they're easy to kill for their meat, hide, bone, horn, etc. But it seems reasonable that a predatory species that developed pastoralism would incorporate predation into the process -- e.g. husband and regulate a herd of prey animals but give them enough free rein to let you chase them down rather than just breeding them to walk unresistingly to the slaughter.

And of course a warp-era culture could replicate meat, but I'm thinking about the whole process of a predatory civilization's evolution, the practices, norms, and values that would arise as it addressed the problems of developing a civilization. The Caitian colony in The Buried Age was somewhat traditionalist, as I recall.

 

[SheliakBob]

Eh. Still ain't spendin' any of my money on the gol-darned griffins. :P