A sentient carnivorous species trying to preserve life. How could they find a new food source?

Question

This is a bit of a strange one but I have an idea for a purely carnivorous species (land or water based, not determined yet) that gains awareness and even fondness of the animals they hunt. Not in the way we care for as they prefer hunting a prey species with a large population. They reached a point in civilization where they have become very aware of the consciousness of other animals and a caring for them almost like their preservation is a religion, but they are purely carnivorous.

An artificial or manufactured diet would be a good alternative, but, they are too early in technological development to know how to mass produce anything like that (around Roman era technology) Could there be an alternative food source for this species that would support a growing population?

Edit: Thank you to everyone who answered this question, they are all great solutions! But in the end I’m sticking with the Sacred Prey idea as it would make the most sense for the species. Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Answer 1

Sacred Prey

Your obligate carnivore species is going to have a complicated relationship with their prey species. On the one hand, animals are aware and can feel. On the other hand, your carnivores cannot survive without feeding on those animals. As your carnivore species evolves they are going to have to find a way to reconcile these two facts.

The easiest way to do that is to integrate the prey species into their budding religion. Carnivore younglings would be taught to respect and venerate the prey species. Raising them would be considered a sacred duty and be a well respected job. There would be small rituals in daily life thanking the prey for their sacrifice, and larger holidays where they are honored (possibly via fasting).

The reality is that your obligate carnivores can't do anything but eat their prey species. That is the reality they live in and no amount of philosophizing or moralizing is going to change it. There is a very good argument to be made that because they cannot survive without eating meat, doing so is not an inherently unethical action even if the prey animals are aware.

The religion would most likely focus on the natural relationship between hunter and prey. This goes back to the very earliest day of the carnivores becoming sapient, before they cared about the feelings of their prey. Back then they would still honor the animals that they ended up catching and eating. But as time moves on and cultural norms shift there would be more focus on making the prey species' lives better, before their eventual sacrifice.

Answer 2

I will point to the Yellowstone Park and use it as a comparison.

The population of wolves in the area of the US around Yellowstone Park was completely erradicated. Compare this situation to your carnivores. In your case, your race decides to stop hunting. In the case of the wolves, they are no longer able to.

The population of deer and moose around Yellowstone initially boomed, with their primary predator no longer on the scene. The large grazers spread throughout the park, loving the rich growth near the streams and easy access to water and quickly stripped the greenery from this area. Between the eating and the trampling, this resulted in quite a bit of errosion and the destruction of much of the plant growth near streams.

The widespread destruction of the plantlife reduced its viability to support the life of the smaller animals and the amount of soil being washed into the waterways reduced its viability to support a large population of the fish.

In a move towards returning the Yellowstone to a more natural state, a proposal was made to reintroduce the wolf to the area.

As the wolves established themselves, a very interesting change came over the park as a whole. With predators now a threat, the large grazers no longer felt safe in the open area near the water and would only stay near them long enough to get a drink and then retreat back to the forested areas.

With the extensive grazing and trampling reduced near the waterways, saplings, bushes and grasses were able to stablize the soil, which cleared up the water for the fish and gave the small animals a place to florish, which also allowed the smaller carnivores to flourish.

In a similar situation, it has been found that a lack of predators allows herds of animals (wild or domestic) to decimate the environment. It isn't the population of herbivores that is the problem, but the lack of an incentive to keep moving. Herds that are spread out and moving slowly can easily strip an area and begin the desertification of the area. Once the herds are forced to congregate and keep moving (either by carnivores or by human sheperds, herders, or "cowboys"), the land is able to develop a healthy groundcover of plants which is able to hold onto rainwater which greatly reduces the amount of flooding and errosion.

So, in short, if your purely carnivorous species actually loves their prey and wishes to preserve the health of the species and the environment, they will continue to hunt/herd the species.

Answer 3

I would like to present a frame challenge.

Sapient obligate carnivores WILL NOT decide to stop eating meat.

There is going to be a distinct difference in the psychology of such a species compared with humans. Even if they are a social species capable of bonding and empathising with their domesticated animals, the species still sees them as their sole source of food.

Whereas humans are opportunistic omnivores, and can choose to exclude meat from their diet in favour of different sources of sustenance, if an obligate carnivore were to make the choice to not eat meat anymore, they are choosing to die.

Answer 4

for alternative food what about a diet consist of only the unfertilize eggs.

so far as i check pure carnivore can eat egg.

and here some further information like nutritions from wikipedia link, and maybe some information there can help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_as_food#Nutritional_value

so just breed any egg laying animals like chicken,duck,or other bird, they wont get bothered by it nor it kill their populations.

also most hunting tribe has seasons or months they goes hunting to not depleting or overpopulate the prey, despite they have some moral dilemma of it they need to do it for survival and they also respect nature since they depend on it.

since look like your creature seems deep or to much involve in food chain as predator/hunter and prey.

Answer 5

They could become carrion eaters and only eat animals which died a natural or accidental death.

This might not be a good base to support a large, centralized population, though. If you want to support a large population, you need to produce food on an industrial scale. That means you need a food source which is reliable, planable and scalable. Scavenging for carrion is none of these things. So your civilization will likely need to be restricted to smaller communities until they develop the technology to synthesize their food.

Answer 6

Members of their clergy (or other guardians of public health) could use selective breeding techniques (favoring the least intelligent members of the animal population) to produce herds which express fewer obvious signs of sentience. Then, once the creatures have reached some a certain level, they could be declared officially non-sentient so that the majority of the population could hunt them guilt free.

In such a situation, the secret of the food beasts' continuing sentience would become a sacred truth, kept from the masses who are not ready to handle its' spiritual ramifications. The small group of clergy who carry the burden of this truth (and it's on-going selective breeding maintenance) might, as their penance, only eat from the sentient herds but only of the sentient animals which die of old age or accident. Their occasional fasting, during times when no sentient animals naturally die, would be accepted by those who know the truth, as punishment for their sinful deception.

Answer 7

Carnivores that rely only on eating meat are known as obligate carnivores. Cats are an example. They cannot thrive or survive without meat. While obligate carnivores might be able to ingest small amounts of plant matter, they lack the necessary physiology required to digest it. Plant cells are more difficult to digest than animal cells because they have strong cell membranes. Even omnivores like humans can't digest very many types of plants. Also, the metabolisms of carnivores are unable to synthesize essential nutrients found in meat from plants. It is unlikely that a species that has evolved to only eat meat would be able to digest and metabolize plants - assuming that the biology on your world is similar to that on Earth. You are, of course, free to imagine a world where this isn't the problem.

Milk might be a solution. Many adult animals can't digest milk, but it may be possible to process milk into something more easily digestible, like cheese. To this might be added processed proteins from nuts and beans, to accomodate the high protein needs of carnivores.

As poster Li Jun suggests, unfertilized eggs might also be a solution, if that doesn't go against the conscience of your species. On a related, if perhaps grosser, note, they might harvest the semen of some animals for food, essentially jerking them off to harvest it (they way semen from prize bulls and hogs is harvested by farmers today). Semen contains a lot of nutrients, but you would need to harvest several liters every day to feed just one carnivore.

It may also be that your species decide that some animals lack the necessary level of consciousness to be worth protecting, e.g. fish, worms or insects, and change their diet to mainly eating these, possibly in processed form. Again, this depends on the purity of their philosophy.

Last, but not least, even if they won't kill animals because they respect their consciousness, they might not be averse to eat animals that die from natural causes like old age, essentially becoming scavengers. They may breed short-lived animals and eat them right after dying, possibly processing the meat to make it more tender and juicy.

Answer 8

Most animals actually have very similar nutritional requirements, at least with respect to what nutrients they need, if not exactly how much of each. However, obligate carnivores must eat meat because there are nutrients their bodies cannot synthesize, so in the absence of the ability to manufacture these nutrients industrially, they must get them directly from eating other animals. Over many, many generations, the biological processes that produce these nutrients become broken in carnivorous species, since they are redundant. For example, cats cannot synthesize taurine from other amino acids.

It's entirely possible that your carnivorous species only lacks the ability to synthesize one particular nutrient; let's call it vitamin X. In that case, all your carnivorous species needs to do to stop eating meat is to find non-meat foods which provide all the other nutrients vitamins A through K, and which provide similar macronutrient ratios. They'll probably need to eat a lot of starchy and high fat vegetables. They might need to process them somewhat to get the macronutrient ratios correct, such as by washing the starch out of flour to leave the protein.

Then it's only a matter of manufacturing vitamin X. The best way to hand-wave this with roman era technology is going to be some sort of fermented food. For instance, vitamin B12 is synthesized in modern times using bacteria. It's not hard to imagine your race stumbled upon some fermented beverage, grain, or other food that happens to contain a bacteria, mold, or other fungus that produces vitamin X. Of course, they don't know what vitamin X even is, but they may have figured out that the symptoms associated with not eating meat appear to be alleviated by eating this fermented food.

Answer 9

They might be able to domesticate and farm a species of animal that can shed and regrow parts of its body, like lizards with their tails in our world but on a larger scale, and then subsist on the shed body parts. It’s conceptually similar to keeping animals for milk or eggs, but you get meat instead of dairy products.

Answer 10

Farm carrion

Someone made the point that eating animals who naturally deceased is morally acceptable, but it can't be done on an industrial scale because carrion is hard to find.

Yes, it can be done on an industrial scale. You farm end-of-life animals.

You create prey-animal Paradise. They have a good life. Several times a day, you move the herd to a different field. Pay close attention to the stragglers. Those go off to hospital, and the unhealable ones go off to hospice, where they are watched, or if humane, euthanized.

Next stop after hospice is the butcher.

You would use choice of animal and selective breeding to get meaty animals with short natural lives.

Answer 11

Soylent Green

Of course it has well known issues, but we'll ignore Kuru and the like for the moment.

Soylent green has the advantage of acting as both waste disposal and food supply. The supply of high protein meat based food matches the population level, and while it of course won't fully supply a population it will act as a supplement to other available food sources such as eggs and fish.

Answer 12

Milk and blood.

https://basia.typepad.com/india_ink/2007/09/got-blood.html

Depicted - Maasai with some blood to eat.

Your carnivores stick to proteins from their prey animals. They just consume proteins that it is not difficult for these animals to regenerate and so the animals do not need to die. Examples from our world are milk and blood. Milk is of course great protein and adequate to sustain young mammals of all kinds as well as serve as the basis for other food products like delicious cheese. Blood can also form the base of a variety of foodstuffs. A well-cared for domestic animal can be bled a fair bit and regenerate the lost proteins and fluids.

Milking and bleeding domestic animals is compatible with gentle loving treatment of those animals.

Answer 13

Animistic philosophy

In animistic cultures, Humans had the understanding that they weren't different from other animals, it was natural to them to consider any living creature of the forest as their peers, but still, they always have been hunting. Our anchestors weren't vegan nor vegetarian, meat has always had an important share of the diet of our hunters-gatherers anchestors. Why would they kill someone they considered as a fellow soul of the forest? Because it perfectly fitted in the natural order of things, humans weren't the only hunting species, in fact, they were hunted as well, so they could never conceive it was wrong to kill a prey to eat it. Of course rituals were performed to thank the dying pray for its sacrifice.

If your species hunts, it doesn't need animals for farm work, and could very well stick with this point of view for quite forever.

Non conscious animals

It is clearly difficult to say which animals are consciuous and which are not, but from a modern scientifical point of view, there are good reasons to think that most bigger animals are conscious, while most animals little enaugh aren't. Of course we have much better technology than your species, but we still can't tell, so it's difficult to imagine how they could decide it clearly, but it is really mostly a philophic question, so we can imagine they could chose to go for it. In that case, they could decide to base their diet on insects and little invertebrates like snails and shellfish.

Answer 14

The best way to save life it to maintain the natural order.

Carnivores are essential to maintaining a healthy herd. In the wild, wolves, lions, etc. only catch the weakest, sickest, & oldest members of the herd. This prevents the herd from being overrun by genetic disorders, diseases, and from overgrazing. Being an herbivore is so "easy", they need predators to keep them in check, and a species smart enough to realize that killing is wrong, can also rationalize that killing the few to save the many may be more moral than not killing at all.

Once the carnivores evolve far enough to begin to domesticate the herd, the temptation will be to eat the yummiest and therefore healthiest animals from the herd, but the moral predator will accept his role in maintaining the symbiotic relationship between hunter and prey. So, when they slaughter an animal, they pick out the prey who are most harmful to the herd, and spare those that the herd needs the most.

They may understand that their actions cause sadness in the herd, and this in turn may be heartbreaking for most of the predators to see. Most of the carnivores may lose the grit to actually kill for themselves; so, they rely on butchers to do the dirty work. (It's a lot easier to eat an animal you didn't have to raise and kill yourself.)

Their religion focuses on the morality of eating the right prey for the benefit of both species; so, they develop a set of rules kind of like Kosure that dictates things like, how old an animal has to be, having to eat the crippled and sick before the healthy, humane practices for raising & slaughtering the animals, not eating the meat of "intelligent" species, and so forth.

Answer 15

Consider insects, or better yet, jellyfish, which "has no brain, nor a heart" (and has more DNA tricks up its sleeve: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.html )

Your Romans may be also able to breed - or discover - a brainless mutation of a meaty organism (that may be considered invasive and mindlessly destroying the world)

Such plague may easily be used for religious motivation.

Answer 16

Short version: they don't have to

If your species is sapient (that seems like this is the case from the wording of question), they should be able to figure out a way to achieve their goals.

Assume the following guidelines are established:

1. The species do not possess the technological advancement necessary to cultivate their food artificially, they rely on animals going through their natural life cycle in order to produce meat.
2. The goal of the species is to solve a moral/ideological dilemma based on self-identifying with other sentient, but not sapient species whom they consume as food.

As a rule of thumb, when engineering a solution, focus that solution in the same dimensional space as the problem's root cause. Material solutions to moral dilemmas don't tend to work for a long time, we see this trend in suicide rates of the first-world countries, where relative suicide occurrences tend to spike in two social strata: for people who have lots of problems making ends meet materially and for people who have no worries on that front whatsoever. The wealth does not solve peoples' ideological or moral problems. Conversely, ideological solutions tend to not work in material problems for a long time either: no matter how enamored people were initially with the "american dream" and the idea that entirely uncontrolled and unchecked "business" will benefit society at large, we see a steadily growing leftist sentiment all around the world in light of the ever-growing wealth disparity that favours those who are already wealthy.

How to deal with it?

1. You can rationalize your way out of sentiment. As an example, cows and chickens are pitiful when it comes to consumption of them as food. Becoming a steak is a pretty tragic event in the life of an individual cow. Their use as a foodstuff, however, put them at the pinnacle of their success as a species: cows are now experiencing their most fortunate times in history, their population is thriving, their life problems have largely been solved: they don't struggle for food, they don't run from predators, they have shelter, they have their lowest infant mortality rate ever. Cows are pretty much using people as a tool for developing their biological potential via their caloric value.

2. You can use it as a form of natural selection. People who will be incapable of solving their moral issues personally will be filtered out by their natural environment, and so you will cultivate the trait in the population.

3. You can commodify it. Moral problems can be a fertile ground for a new market, such as a thriving economy around psychotherapy and behavioural/psychological research. They can also efficiently feed divisive propaganda and be used to divide sapient populations for better control.

Other things to consider

Chances are this issue wouldn't come up on a meaningful scale. Material species live in matter and tend to be driven by materialistic concerns. Vegetarianism, veganism, have never been major social discussion in the first place, only representing an estimated peak of 10% of the world's population when all their fringe variations are included. Historically, vegetarianism practices have been developed in regions where vegetarianism is necessary due to relative scarcity of wildlife when compared to human populations: material motivations. Sentimental veganism or vegetarianism does not come up on a any notable scale, and it's been only when environmental implications of unchecked flesh cultivation via natural means that advancements in artificial flesh cultivation were achieved. In other words, only when it became obvious that demand for it coupled with current method of production will be unsustainable. The practice developed in the environments where carnivorous lifestyle for people was not sustainable for a long time. Moral issues just don't tend to motivate material creatures in general as much as material issues do.

Answer 17

There are some good answers here already, so I can only think of one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet. While you've specified the intelligence level of the predators, you haven't specified the intelligence level of the prey. Are the prey at a point of being able to communicate with the predators and sympathize with their problem?

There are some vampire stories where people submit themselves willingly to be consumed by vampires. You've said the predators don't have the technology to create something like True Blood, but perhaps the prey would have some reason to offer themselves to the predators, either out of positive feelings like compassion or negative feelings like fear. In Cabin in the Woods, people are sacrificed to a hungry god to avoid a terrible fate. I imagine your compassionate predators wouldn't want to threaten their prey, but the prey may feel threatened all the same.

If not enough of the prey are willing to give themselves up to the predators as sacrifices, then perhaps members of the predators' own species would be willing to make the sacrifice and they'd resort to cannibalism.

Answer 18

They could somehow "legislate" or form a binding consensus that the prey animal has a "right" to a finite lifespan. So they would never kill the prey animal below a certain age.

Similarly, they could form a consensus that the prey animal should be killed humanely, or only in their sleep. They would discover that the prey animal could be put under the influence of some kind of herb or drug, which would put them to sleep, and others would would eliminate their sensitivity to pain, anxiety, survival instinct, fear of death, familial/intra-species bonding, etc.

They could take on for themselves a sense of an ethical duty to somehow "feed" the prey animal from their own bodies; for example, when a predator animal dies, there would be an "honorable burial" ritual to use its body as fertilizer to grow vegetation, or possibly to grow a high-protein mushroom or fungi species, to feed captive prey animal. Or perhaps the females of the predator species, when lactating, would "raise" the prey animal as a pet, give it a cute name, and feed it her own milk from a bottle.

I think the prey-as-sacred-animal and prey-as-pet are both helpful archetypes. The prey animal, if domesticated, would tend to bond with the predator animal affectionately, simply as a matter of breeding and upbringing. And the predator animal would become convinced that the prey is "willing" to be sacrificed and killed. They would believe that their own carnivorous nature is totally harmonious with the prey.

Answer 19

Amputation.

Like the old farmer said, "A pig that good, you don't eat all at once."

Maybe your aliens will be lucky enough to develop a taste for skinks or some other animal that can regularly discard pieces of their body.

Answer 20

Eugenics...on themselves...to change their dietary need.(gives some interesting possibilities of this solution being implemented without general consent and the associated exploration of social manipulation)

Long term solution, but it took a long time to get into the predator/prey debacle.

Slowly introduce non-prey based materials to supply some nutrition and allow reproduction between predator partners that show signs of synthesis of the missing ingredient only the prey beings can supply.

No quick solution when science cannot wave its infinite hands.