The fact that man has four cuspid teeth affords no evidence whatever that he is either partially or wholly carnivorous as regards his dietary. If in diet he is naturally omnivorous, his teeth should have the structure and arrangement of those of omnivorous animals—as exhibited in the hog, for example.
That the cuspid teeth do not indicate a flesh dietary, either in whole or in part, is shown by the presence of the so-called cuspids in purely herbivorous animals—as in the stag, the camel and the so-called “bridle-teeth” of the horse.
I am convinced that no animals were created to eat flesh, but that so-called carnivorous animals were originally nut-eating animals (see p. 55). The squirrel eats birds as well as nuts, which closely resemble meat in composition. This view readily explains the close resemblance in many particulars existing between the human digestive apparatus and that of the so-called carnivorous animals. It is reasonable to suppose that these nut-eating animals were at some remote time forced by starvation to slay, and eat, by the failure of their ordinary food supply—just as the horses of the Norwegian coast have been known to plunge into the sea and catch fish, when driven to this extremity by starvation. Suppose the carnivorous animal’s natural diet to be nuts, in the absence of his normal food he would find nothing else so closely resembling his ordinary food as the flesh of animals, since the two have about the same proteid percentages.
Dr Kellogg, in his excellent little book, entitled “Shall We Slay to Eat?” (pp. 30-32), sums up a number of remarkable facts in favour of a fruitarian diet, or at least in favour of a non-flesh diet, as follows:—
“In carnivorous, herbivorous and omnivorous animals, the mammary glands are located upon the abdomen, while in the higher apes and man they are located on the chest. This is an interesting anatomical fact to which there is no exception.
“In carnivorous animals the colon is smooth and non-sacculated. In the higher apes and man the colon is sacculated. In herbivorous animals the colon is sacculated, as in man.” (The great importance and significance of this fact will be apparent presently, when we come to consider the physiological arguments against flesh-eating.)