Yesterday, our family joined some friends on a outing to the North Carolina Carnivore Preservation Trust, where we saw a bunch of very large cats, including a 700-pound tiger who was truly breathtaking. The thing about cats, as Dr. John McDougall reminds us, is that they show us what true carnivores look and behave like. Spend some time around cats of any size, and you'll quickly realize that humans are not "obligate carnivores" - meaning, we don't have to eat meat to be fit and healthy.

The tiger, named Romeo, is fed three chickens a day. By law, they have to be dead, although Romeo would probably prefer the challenge of the hunt, if you can call pouncing on a chicken in a cage "hunting." But they are raw, unflavored, and unboned. Just like you'd get a whole chicken at the supermarket.

Romeo clearly enjoys his raw, unflavored meat (700 pounds of tiger represents a whole lot of consumed chicken). And if you or I were obligate carnivores, so would we.

But we're not. We can't stomach meat at all, in fact. That's why we have to do so many things to meat to make it palatable. We kill it, season it, cook it, cover it with sauce, and then we can get it down.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be eating meat. Just that we're not designed to eat meat, the way some other animals are.