Sorry, Ed, but you are very wrong there. Humans are omnivores and this high prevalence of flesh foods is rather recent in our ancestry. We lack specializations for meat eating. The very earliest primates were mostly insectivorous with high cusped molars with ridges perfect for crunching insects and even tiny thinly shelled mollusks, then omnivory became more common. Omnivory means, "Hey, we'll eat that!" Okay, not quite, but close. Omnivory in primates goes back way before any humans or protohumans, and you'll find that most primates still will eat anything from wild grains to insects, to fruits, to young leaves (and some with specializations eat older leaves), to sap, to carrion, and even for some to pilfered eggs young animals (or adult animals with Pan troglodytes, the "common" chimp). To this day we humans have incisorform canine teeth (slicing and scooping function for that shape -- fruit, vegetable, and leaf eating. Mostly primates are no meat eaters, though. We also have specialized grinding molars. Heck, we have the entire "T Complex" which was named after Theropithecus which eats a lot of grains. The T Complex includes features like grinding molars that are needed to get the best nutrition from grains, frontal sexual attractants (just notice how much more the mammaries of human women show up than in other primates), and nicely padded rear ends for a lot of sitting which is badly needed when you are laboriously pulling off a lot of small seed grains to eat. We have a long history of grain eating. It isn't as long as the fruits (frugivory), vegetable, or insect eating (which we are not specialized for but insect eating happens in the majority of Earth's human cultures to some extent). Flesh eating came later and to this day in gatherer-hunter societies the meat component is only about 25% of the Calories in the diet. There are some reasons to think that it may have been lower pre- cooking. Cooking partly digests the meat letting more nutrients be easily taken up from it. Eating large amounts of flesh came much later and is mostly a by- product of complex economic and food systems and relative wealth compared to earlier generations, and there are a large number of things that point out that we are not optimally geared to having that be quite as large a portion of diets as many let it fill, for examples, arterial plaque, intestinal malignancies (much greater with flesh eating esp. red meat), not specialized teeth for eating meat (Unlike ferrets we do not have carnassials), etc. Don't let having canine teeth confuse the issue because of the name "canine". The canine teeth precede canines and serve a range of functions depending on their forms. Now, there were some complex forms of cooking by people, like noodles, earlier than people had suspected -- known now thanks to some cool discoveries in the last decade. Sukie (not a vet) Recommended ferret health links: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/ http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html http://www.miamiferret.org/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html [Posted in FML 6293]