The Beast Wore an Apron, Part 1

Because if if you look at the relationship that humans have with food versus the at least obvious relationships that we can see on the surface level between most wild animals and their food, there were some pretty stark differences. So you know, you watch like a grazing herbivore mammal that's eating grass or eating leaves, it doesn't seem like they're putting the vegetation through any kind of external processing. It's just there in the environment. They bite it, they

chew it, and they swallow it. Though once they swallow it, of course, if you're talking about like you know, ruminant mammals or something, plenty of interesting things happened to the food after it has been processed, say by the teeth in the mouth, there might be multiple different interesting stages of digestion, but in that first stage, before the food reaches the mouth, there's not really anything complex going on that There's just some material in the environment that has

nutritional value. The animal comes within reach of that food, they bite it, they chew it up, they swallow it, they just eat it. And if you compared that to all of the sometimes mind bogglingly complex stages of manipulation, combination, and alteration of raw plant and animal materials that go into making a standard human meal, even meals that we

would perceive as kind of simple. Like if you think about all of the pre processing and alteration that goes into the foods that make a cheeseburger, the difference is overwhelming. Oh yeah, I mean even if you're I mean, you can go even simpler than that. I guess if even if you just you don't even take into accounts, say meat, because meat processing, especially something like a hamburger, Uh, there's a lot of there are a lot of grotesque details

that go into that. But but just like thinking about yeah, like the bread, uh, the the you know, the vegetables, even you know, being prepared the various sauces. I mean all the things that go into it. Uh, it's it's it's quite a lot. And yeah, coming back to what you said earlier that we think about animals, we think

about purely internal food processing and in human cuisine. Human cooking is the externalization of various processes um things that that that we we tend to imagine generally only take

place within the bodies of animals. We found ways to do them externally to give our internal digestion of break as well as to make things that are otherwise inedible edible exactly right, and of course the central idea, the thing that most people think about when you say the word cooking is the narrow sense of cooking, meaning causing chemical and structural changes to food by the application of heat, specifically heating. Uh. This is one of the most common

ways of processing food before we eat it. And this does exactly the things you're talking about. It takes foods that would not otherwise be edible to humans and makes them edible, or makes them safe to eat, or increases the availability of nutrition from the same starting quantities of food. So you take a mass of raw food, you cook it. You can usually increase its nutritional efficiency, you can get

more nutrition out of it. And so to come back to the question of are there animals that cook, I would say, based on my research, if you're talking about on their own in the wild, it appears that the answer is no. In that narrow sense of cooking, meaning cooking by applying heat, it seems that humans are the only animals that do that in a consistent way. That we can talk about a few interesting wrinkles to that

generalization in a minute. But when it comes to the broader sense of cooking, which is you could imagine anything that people would do in a restaurant kitchen or in a home kitchen, any way that people manipulate food or prepare meals other than by applying heat. It turns out non human animals do all kinds of fascinating things to their food before consuming it along these lines. And so that's what I wanted to talk about in this series.

What do animals do that could be construed as cooking in one way or another, Even accepting that no animals in the wild cook their food with heat, well with the exception of the rat, to a phenomenon by which a rat uh once exposed to culinary traditions in an urban environment, will then begin to cook itself, um to to actually copy various recipes that are around it, improve upon those recipes, and sometimes crawl on top of a man's head and pull his hair to use said human

as a puppet to move around the kitchen and prepare um, you know, fine works of French cuisine or yes I can't recall. Okay, yes, the ratitui itself. Yes, but it begs the question is this is this do we see this only with French cuisine or uh does the ratitui phenomenon um repeat itself in various other cultures? Animals can only be trained to make sauces that are heavy and dairy,

So yeah, it is a French thing. Okay, But no, that's a good point because actually, by raising ratitui, you point out that I think you could quite clearly find plenty of examples of animals that have been trained in

some sense to cook. Now, uh, they're probably never going to be as versatile as a human cook, but I'm sure you can find tons of examples of an animal that somebody trained to go turn on the micro wave or something like that, you know, to to boop at the oven knob with their nose until it comes on or something along those lines. And then of course it's the whole area of animals that are willing to benefit

from cooking without having done it themselves. Like I once saw a seagull grab a hot dog half of off of a grill at the beach. Um. You know, the seagull was not itself barbecuing, but it was it was more than happy to benefit from the barbecuing. Well, that is a great point, and that actually feeds right into

the next thing that I wanted to talk about. So before in this series we get into examples of animals doing some kind of cooking in the broader sense, meaning you know, preparing foods before they eat them in some way that doesn't involve the directed, uh application of heat. I do want to talk about cooked food in the

narrower sense, food that has been heated. And one interesting place I thought to start there would be with the question in general, would non human animals actually prefer cooked food over the raw food stuffs that they would encounter in their natural environment. And it turns out there have been some studies that looked into this and in some

cases there is a clear answer. So I wanted to start by looking at a paper published in the year two thousand and eight in the Journal of Human Evolution by Victoria Warber, Brian Hair, and Richard Wrangham called great Apes Prefer Cooked Food. Now, part of the background of this paper is based in the exploration of an idea that's come up in passing on the show a couple of times before. We've never actually devoted a full episode or series to it. Maybe someday we will. But it's

what is known as the cooking hypothesis. And to summarize it briefly, the cooking hypothesis is the proposition that the advent of cooking was a major contributor to the physiological evolution of the ancestors of Homo sapiens. In other words, that a lot of things about the bodies of modern human beings are the way they are because our primate ancestors figured out how to control fire and how to

cook their food by applying heat to it. Now you might wonder, well, how could our bodies be changed in an evolutionary sense by the invention of cooking. Well, essentially, it would happen by changing the pressures present in our nutritional regimes. So I think proponents of the cooking hypothesis usually argue that because cooked food is more nutritionally efficient, again meaning that if food is cooked, you take a food item you eat it raw versus you eat it cooked.

In the cooked version, you can get more nutrition from it with less chewing, less energy spent on digestion, and so forth. Um, So, if suddenly eating and absorbing nutrition becomes easier and more efficient, we have to spend less time chewing, we have to spend less time gathering large quantities of food, The types of food we can eat safely is expanded, and we have to spend less energy

developing large powerhouse, digestive tracts, and so forth. So perhaps other adaptive pressures fill the void, including bigger brains and so forth. And I think one proposed causal mechanism is that once cooking is invented, we can get more nutrition from the same amount of environmental material. Suddenly the carrying

capacity of the local environment than is larger. There can be more humans per tribe, which requires bigger brains in order to maintain relationships with that larger number of humans. The main figure behind the cooking hypothesis is a British primatologist, and I think he either is now or it was at some recent point. Was it. Harvard Uh named Richard rang Um, and he wrote a book laying out this argument in two thousand nine called Catching Fire, How Cooking

Made is Human. Rang Um is also one of the authors of this paper about whether apes prefer cooked food. And I'm not going to go into all of the pros and cons the arguments for and against the cooking hypothe sis. I would just say that my personal evaluation at a at a cursory reading of it is that it looks like it's kind of in the middle zone.

It's one of those arguments that seems to have a lot of interesting things going for it, but it also doesn't line up all that well with the best existing evidence about the timeline for the control of fire by human ancestors. So I don't know. I'd say it's, uh,

it's interesting but far from conclusive. But regardless of what we think about the the evolutionary effects of cooking on our direct ancestors, pointing out the theoretical background helps us see why the researchers performed the experiments described in this paper.

So the authors of this paper begin raising a relevant question, which is that if you were to walk up to one of our ancestors roughly two million years ago, maybe to a member of the species Homo erectus, and you offered them cooked food, are we sure that they would like it or that they would prefer it to the same food in its uncooked state. You mean, like like a hot pocket. If you brought a hot pocket to one of our our ancestors, what would they make of it?

And I feel quite certain that somebody who showed up with a hot pocket would be regarded as a worker of evil magic. But anyway, I mean, I think this is a worthwhile question to ask because we know that there are lots of types of food that we would probably rather eat cooked than raw. Maybe lots of you know, in this very person to person, but probably most people would rather eat grain, tough vegetables, most meats, and so forth in their cooked state. But it's possible that's just

a cultural preference. So you know, we like cooked food maybe because we're used to it. Is there any way to test this out? And the authors here say, well, obviously not with archaic common ins, but an interesting analog would be to offer both cooked and raw versions of the same food to great apes, our closest living relatives, and see what their preferences are. So that's what this study looked into. So experiment number one, they were like, hey,

let's try some tubers. Let's let's get together some care it's some sweet potatoes and some white potatoes and offer them to chimpanzees in a choice task that exposes them to both and then allows them to pick between the cooked and raw forms. And they found in the case of carrots and sweet potatoes, the chimpanzees definitely liked the cooked version better. On the other hand, it was interesting

the white potato was more of a toss up. The authors noted that many chimps seemed kind of hesitant to take the initial samples of both cooked and raw white potatoes, and it was it was basically there was no difference in their preference between the two, which seems surprising to me because like, I love raw carrots. The cooked carrots are good too, but I cannot imagine wanting to eat a raw potato now. But the author said, well, maybe the chimpanzees are just kind of iffy on on potatoes

in general. Okay, well that would make sense. Now. A second experiment they did had trouble really getting much of an answer. But what they looked into was to the extent that apes prefer cooked food overaw food. Why do they like it better? Is it the taste? Is it something about the texture. And so they experimented with a number of different grade apes they use chimp, spinobos, gorillas, and orangutans, and they offered them choices between carrots in

the following format. So you could have whole pieces of carrot raw or cooked, grated carrot raw or cooked, and mashed carrot raw or cooked. And they found that when carrots were whole, apes definitely preferred the cooked pieces to the raw pieces. Again that they like cooked better, But after that things got more complicated. Apes generally did not seem to like the grated carrot in any format, and they preferred cooked whole carrots to raw, grated or cooked grated.

Preferences were less clear in the mashed condition, though. They explained that some difference in results between the animal test groups for this experiment could have been influenced by neophobia, meaning fear of food in unfamiliar forms of course. You know that's common among humans also, is that we typically we like food. It's that we're familiar with and we're a little uh sometimes we're a little hesitant about foods that are unfamiliar. Yeah, like, for instance, the mashed carrot.

How did it get mashed? But you know, if you were to encounter a mashed carrot in the wild, um, you know, they're the possibilities are not all that appetizing. Yeah, Okay. Experiment three or four, uh, and this one the author is right quote. This experiment provided great apes with choices between raw and cooked meat and raw and cooked apple malice domestica. We controlled for neophobia in this experiment because one of these items was familiar in its raw form

apple and the other was familiar in its cooked form meat. Thus, this juxtaposed preference is determined by taste, slash, texture, and those which would be determined by familiarity with the test items. And in this test, the apes definitely preferred cooked beef over raw beef, but they did not show a significant

preference one way or the other about the apple. Um. Again, it's funny thinking about how much this does or does not overlap with with our own preferences, though again, you know human preferences you always have to wonder about being

a product of cultural familiarity. But they say the shows that neophobia is not the only factor affecting preferences because the apes were previously familiar only with raw apple, not cooked, and in this experiment, while they did not prefer the cooked apple, they basically showed no difference in preference between the two. Now, I mean, in all of this, we have the saying about comparing apples and oranges, in here

we're comparing apples and meat. Uh So, I don't know, it feels I mean not that there's really a way to improve on this. I'm not. I don't mean to criticize the study, but it's like they're there are certain limitations in place with some of these comparisons. I feel, what do you mean that in that they're they're documenting different preferences by types of food like well, like, for for instance, to say, well we control for neophobia because the raw form apple will still looks like an apple,

and the and the cooked meat still looks like the meat. Um, I don't know. I find that kind of a confusing rationale. Oh no, no, I think you're misunderstanding what they were doing. That they the neophobia thing was that they were familiar with cooked meat and with raw apple, but not with cooked apple or raw meat. And so they were trying to see, um, does this make any like does it just conform to in both cases? Do they prefer whatever

they're previously familiar with. In the case of meat, they did. In the case of apple not so much. But they did another test. Uh. The fourth experiment was a test for novelty. Uh. They said, quote, we tested chimpanzees that were not given meat as a regular part of their diet and as far as was known, had never eaten cooked meat. And so they're offered raw and cooked beef, and again they definitely preferred the cooked beef better than

the raw. So in the final discussion they say, yeah, on average, and the foods they tested here apes liked cooked food better than raw food. With some exceptions, they definitely prefer cooked beef, carrots, and sweet potatoes. They don't seem to have much of a preference on average between the cooked and raw forms of apple and white potato. And it seems like in general just didn't really love

white potato. Uh. And then so they said neophobia might be a contributing factor to some of these results, but in experiments that tried to control for it, the ape still on average thought we're pretty cool with the cooked versions of food. But finally that this experiment had difficulty determining which characteristics of cooked foods the apes were responding to, you know, was it taste, was a texture, and so forth.

And I do think that's an interesting question, like if if animals other than humans also prefer cooked food in most cases, why is it, like does it taste better to them? Is it like because it's softer to chew? I don't know. Maybe maybe we can come back to that.

But anyway, the authors, you know, I mean it's difficult too because we have to stop and realize, like when they're talking about the difference between a cooked and a raw white potato, the cooked white potato in this experiment is also not buttered and salted and you know, and and prepared in these other ways. Like we're just stripping it down to um, to the basics of what cooking does to uh, this particular substance. Um. So, yeah, like if I were, you know, trying to set aside as

much a you know human complexity as possible. If I were presented with just a plain white potato and a raw potato, I mean, I'd like to think I would still prefer the piked potato to the to the raw potato, but without anything added to it, it's still not a very attractive offer. Like the potato is is something that is best um consumed when there are other things done to it, other seasonings, other styles of preparation, etcetera. The human mind cannot comprehend the depths of blindness of a

of an unseasoned potato. Yeah, the carrot is really the one that that throws me the most, you know, like because it part of me would guess that there's nothing quite like the raw crispness of the right like the carrot is crisp, we identify that with with freshness. The carrot is sweet. Um, Like what is changed in cooking the carrot that that that would that would make it more preferable, Like is it just it's just softer? Is it therefore seem riper in that sense? And then how

does that affect the sweetness of it? With the sweetness be in any way enhanced by the cooking, I think in general, I can't speak to carrots in particular, but the authors actually address this. They say, um so, they talk about hypothesizing reasons that non human animals would prefer cooked food overall food, and uh so, one of the avenues they talk about is that cooking tends to cause chemical changes that increase the availability of flavor compounds that

animals of all kinds seem to like. And so that the two main examples they offer are available sugars and available glutamates. Now sugars, that's I'm pretty clear to understand, and we can know that from experience. I don't know about carrots. It probab conforms to this and carrots, But I think about like onions, like eating a raw onion versus eating a cooked onion. The cooked onion is so much sweeter, like the you know, the amount of sugar you can taste in it is, I don't know, it

feels like it's exponential above a raw onion. And yeah, and that's that's the case to where by cooking the onion you're kind of blunting it's um it's effects like the chemical weaponry if the onion is diluted. Yeah, the sulfur compounds and stuff, so so that's sugars. Apparently lots of foods have more available sugars when you cook them,

so they taste sweeter. Tons of different animals can differentiate the levels of sugar and a food they're eating, and obviously prefer the thing that tastes like it's got more sugar in it because it is probably going to be more nutritionally dense, it has more calories per amount of the same amount of food. Uh. The other thing is the available glutamates. Glutamates are uh you know, does that ring a bell? Maybe it's in the phrase monose sodium

glutamate MSG flavor, the umami flavor. Glutamates are are largely responsible for savory flavors that we associate with meat and and uh and also things like tomatoes and hard cheeses like parmesan and soy sauce and those those glutamates or that delicious savory umami feeling. And that's not just for humans either. It turns out tons of animals, I think even some invertebrates can detect umami flavor through the presence

of free glutamates, which are increased by cooking. And while I was reading about this, I did get really amused by the idea of like inverted. I don't know which invertebrates exactly, but like do with lobsters really love soy sauce, would like there'll be centipedes who are going nuts for parmesan cheese. Thank anyway, Okay, So cooking often increases the availability of sugars and glutamates. So that's a flavor increasing flavors that broadly lots of an almost seem to like.

And cooking tends to change the texture of food, usually by making it softer and easier to chew, and of course that appeals to the natural laziness present in all

kinds of animals, not just us. So I think you could possibly argue that in a way, cooking, by massively increasing the presence of taste and texture qualities that our bodies and brains are already naturally on the look for, cooking could be viewed as a sort of ancient form of supernormal stimuli, like evolution shaped animal appetites to seek out nutritionally dense things like sugar and glutamates, which we detect by taste. Cooking causes chemical reactions that make more

of those molecules available. Cooking softens food, appealing to our natural laziness. We don't like to spend an hour chewing on some tough bit of something to get it down. Tender food is better than tough food. So it's kind of like it's it's taking all these things we naturally seek out in foods we would find find in our environment, but making them way were dependably present in all kinds

of foods. But anyway, the the authors of this study I was talking about, they say that their their findings conformed other bits of pre existing evidence that many other non human animals on average prefer cooked food overaw food. For instance, they cite a book by Brewer in nineteen seventy eight alleging observations that chimpanzees in the wild would prefer to eat seeds that have been naturally cooked or

at least heated by wildfires. This was in a book by Brewer called The Chimpanzees of Mount Assyrik And uh, well, I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah, like that it's kind of primordial cooking right there. And they cite findings of of preferences in other mammals for example, Bradshaw at All in two thousand found that once cats have been exposed to both raw and cooked meat, they tend to prefer the cooked version. And they point to Ramirez in

which found that rats ford cooked starch overaw starch. But I was looking at another study that actually asked a complementary question. So if the first question is do great apes such as chimpanzees prefer cooked food overaw food, it seems in in the majority of cases they do. Um the second question is do they in fact possess the ability to understand the cooking process? Would they, in theory

at least be able to cook for themselves? And the study that looked into this was by Felix Varnicin and Alexandra g Rosati published in Proceedings of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences, called cognitive capacities for cooking in chimpanzees and this was and so the author's right here quote. The transition to a cook to diet represents an important shift in human ecology and evolution. Cooking requires a set of sophisticated cognitive abilities, including causal reasoning, self control, and

anticipatory planning. Do humans uniquely possessed the cognitive capacity is needed to cook food. And oh man, when I when I was reading that line about about cooking requiring self control and anticipatory planning, I I felt a little bit cheapish because it immediately made me think about the problem of Uh Rob, I don't know if you do you do this too, but you're like cooking something and you

just kind of keep snacking on it. Yeah, I mean you encountered that definitely with your more complicated recipes where um, I don't know, say you've h like a shepherd's pie

comes to mind. I've recently made a vegetarian shepherd's pie for the weekend St. Patty's Day, And uh, yeah, once you've made like one part of it, like maybe you've made the um, the mashed potatoes, or you've made the you know, the the the meat and vegetable filling, Uh, you might be tempted, especially if you're a little bit hungry, you might be tempted to do taste and keep tasting

those portions before everything comes together. Is one. Uh However, we tend if we're making shepherd's pie, were usually not tempted to eat the raw potatoes or right or or something like that before we begin cooking. But yeah, you know, like you've you've gone past the point where you're testing it for seasoning or whatever. Is just like okay, yeah, maybe have a little another bite of this, right, We were like, we're not gonna go hog wild eating a munch of just raw flour right out of the bag.

But of course once the cookie dough is prepared, that is where the temptation may set it. Well, it turns out some chimpanzees have the same problem, but they do better at these kinds of anticipation and delay of gratification tasks then you might expect. So this study addressed these questions by performing some experiments with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees uh. The author has conducted a total of nine studies on chimpanzees living in a nature sanctuary in the

Democratic Republic of Congo with the following results. They found. First of all, they replicated the finding that chimpanzees in general prefer cooked foods over the same foods in their raw form. Second finding is that chimpanzees in some way do under stand that food is changed by the cooking process. They can tell the difference and Uh, they understand something is happening when a raw food is exchanged for a

cooked food. Third, they will delay gratification in order to upgrade a raw piece of food to a cooked version of that same food. Fourth, they will give up possession of a raw piece of food already in hand in order to transform it into a cooked food. And then fifth, they will transport or store raw food in anticipation of later opportunities to exchange it for its cooked form. And an interesting note on the method. I was like, wait a minute, are they going to be giving apes like

an oven or something. They did not do that, actually, uh, because of course they didn't want to run the risk of the animals burning or otherwise injuring themselves. Instead, they used a plastic box with a false bottom that would exchange a piece of raw food for a piece of cooked food when shaken. Okay, I mean there are some limitations there obviously, but that that's essentially what an oven does.

I guess, right, Well, obviously this is not the exact same thing as the cooking process, but they're trying to figure out, well, the chimpanzees at least figure out that there is a process they can put raw food through and get cooked food out, and will they delay gratification to go through that process? And the answer is broadly yes.

The authors of the study right quote Together, our results indicate that several of the fundamental psychological abilities necessary to engage in cooking may have been shared with the last common ancestor of apes and humans, predating the control of fire. Uh and uh. I was reading a write up of this article in The Guardian by Hannah Devlin that had some good supplemental details. Uh. One thing I wanted to read this paragraph definitely made me say all buddy out loud.

It was quote the chimps continue to opt for the cooked option sixt of the time when they had to carry the food some distance in order to place it in the quote oven, although since they often carried it in their mouth, this was a challenge and they sometimes appeared to eat the food on the way quote almost by accident. I sympathize with that, you know, the best of intentions. You know sometimes that that sweet tapos in

your mouth and you're just going to start you in. Uh. The other thing was that, in terms of hoarding raw ingredients in the hopes that they could later be exchanged for cooked foods. Chimps in some cases hoarded up to twenty eight slices of sweet potato. Uh and Varnakin said to The Guardian, quote delayed ratification is a problem for us as well. We also have a tendency to nibble at food before we finished cooking. So that's exactly what

we were talking about. And they don't even have excuses for it, like, you know, they can't rationally use the rationale well, i'm I'm I need to taste it to make sure that the flavor profiles appropriate, the need to make sure I don't need to add more salt or pepper, right. But while I think this is interesting and it's informative to the question of when humans first started cooking their food and what effects that may have had on on

our ancestors one to two million years ago. Of course, the fact remains that there are no widely observed natural instances of animals in their natural habitat cooking foods by applying heat. But as we said earlier, heating is not the only form of cooking. Humans do all kinds of things to food that fall under the umbrella of cooking

or cuisine that are unrelated to heat. So we take raw or cooked food items and we wash them, or we age them, or we ferment them, and we season them, we butcher them in certain ways, we skewer them or cut them up in special ways, we combine them together in interesting ways. And it's frankly surprising how many of these culinary manipulations and modifications that humans do are mirrored at some level throughout the animal world. And so I thought that's what we could explore for the remainder of

this series, all the different ways that animals cook. And you had some really interesting examples. I think that had to do with maybe what could broadly be called some form of butchering or skewering of food as a preparation method. Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple of good examples here, um and uh. And one of them I think is a pretty pretty obvious one. Let's start with an amusing one, but perhaps the less involved one, and that is the case of

the lamber guy or or bearded fulture. So these birds are found in parts of Africa and Eurasia, and these birds are known for their amazing ability to eat and digest bones, and I think that's that's one of the reasons. This is a great example bird to start with, because it already has robust um anatomical features and internal abilities when it comes to the processing of of what is

you know, arguably a very difficult food. They're they're eating bones, but they have you know, they have these wonderful bites. They can bite through brittle bones, they can swallow large chunks of bones, and their digestive system can handle it. Um. And yet there are still going to be challenges that are too great for them to handle without a little ingenuity um and uh. And so basically they have a

butchering challenge ahead of them. You know. Butchering is what we do when we we have a carcass and we don't just want to eat from the carcass. We can't cook the whole carcass. We have to take things apart, remove things that are inedible or are not desired or used for at another time or for another purpose, you know, all the various reasons you have to take a part

of a carcass. Um. Yeah. And in fact, external processing of animal carcasses is hypoth It's not known for sure, but it is hypothesized to be one of the earliest drivers of tool use in humans. That why would a humans start using a flat rock as a cutting surface, maybe to get meat and tough hide parts and stuff off of an animal kill. Yeah. Yeah, that we've talked about that on the show in the past when when talking about early tool use and evidence of how those

tools are being used. You know, we can look for those signs um on the bones of them having been scraped. In some cases, it's also evidence of cannibalism taking place um in a given people versus uh, you know, I'm just merror um you know, murder or warfare because of the signs of tool use on the brains. Yeah. So uh yeah, this is a case where the lamber guy are is gonna occasionally find some chunks of bone that are too big to handle. They need to butcher it,

they need to take it apart. Uh but what what tools are available to them? Well, luckily they can. They can pick up a pretty big bone. I think, I think they can basically take off with something equal to their own weight. Um. So they've developed the practice of taking larger bones up high into the air and then dropping them onto rocks in order to break them open

or shatter them. Sometimes it takes more than one try, and it's a it's also a learned tactic, so generally it takes around seven years for one of these birds to to master it. And you'll find examples of immature birds, uh, just dropping bones incorrectly, like they haven't really figured out exactly where you're supposed to drop them or or when you release them. But they'll get there. They'll eventually learn it, and it will open up new possibilities to them in

terms of what they can eat. Oh that's my second al buddy of the episodes, imagining the vultures dropping the bones wrong, Like, yeah, nice job, Ted. Now they sometimes um prey on I'm live creatures as well. It's not just bones. And probably one of the more um alarming and interesting examples is that of the tortoise. They may fly up with a tortoise that again has to be a tortoise they can physically carry up, but then they can drop that as well, treat it like an oversized bone,

an attempt to bust through those bony defenses. And uh, this may ring a bell for for some of you out there, because this is of course how the Greek father of tragedy, Escalus, was said to have died in four see uh this according to the two accounts by M. Valerius Maximus and our old friend Plenty of the Elder. Now, this may well just be a story. We have to drive him, but it basically goes like this. Yeah, Escalus

goes to an oracle. He receives a prophecy that he will he will one day be killed by a falling object. So he's a smart guy. He says, well, nothing can fall on me if I'm outdoors. So he spends more and more time outdoors because, yeah, there's nothing's going to fall from the roof. There, no shelves. Sounds like a pretty safe that. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, if there's an earthquake, where do you want to be get away from Buildings're gonna be out in the middle of

a field, right. Unfortunately he is in the territory of the lamber guy or it's thought that this may may be referring to Lamber guyers Um. Suddenly a great bird flies over head. That great bird has a tortoise in its clutches, and it mistakes escalus head for a hard rock um. A lot of times he's depicted as being, you know, bald on top, and so the bird drops the tortoise on him, killing him instantly. Um. Again, possibly

just a misunderstanding or an entertaining tale. Um. But you'll find various accounts of deaths like this from the ancient world where you have to stop and ask, did they really die like this or is this just a nice story? This is the story that developed about their death. If true, he died by accidentally running a foul of an avian butchery processes. Some I'm seeing vague connections to the Texas chainsaw masker. But now when it comes to a van butchery.

The best example, of course is the shrike. Now, if you've never seen a shrike, let's look up pictures of them. But they're they're generally, I mean, for me, they're an unimpressive looking bird. Uh. This is gonna be different for you, depending on how into birds you are and if you're or a birdwatcher, etcetera. But you know, they when you when you compare what they look like with what they do, Uh, they don't look quite as impressive in my opinion, because

what they do is very impressive. Uh. They're thirty four species of shrike in four genera in the family lanta day. And if you're yeah, if you're not a bird enthusiast or a bird watcher, uh, you might just look at a shrike and say, well, that looks like a bird, But it's not what they look like. It's what they do. And basically what they do is they engage in kind of a complex butchery situation. That's why we call them butcher birds. Lanta day is derived from the Latin uh lantus,

which means butcher. So they don't wear little aprons or you know, wrap morsels of meat and white butcher's paper. But what they do is they take insects and even small vertebrates that they kill and they impale them onto thorns like little lad draculas. Wow. And by the way, their methods, you know, it's one thing to get the is, you know, various bugs and insects, but their method of killing small rodents is actually quite brutal. Is pointed out by Hannah Waters in a two eighteen article for the

Audubon Society. Quote, they grasp mice by the neck with their pointed beak pinched the spinal cord to induce paralysis, and then vigorously shake their prey with enough force to break its neck. Oh, that's interesting because it's like a bird version of a common predatory tactic I think used

about like some big cats. Right. We talked about this with Mary Roach in her book, talking about various kinds of big predatory cats that will attend to bite along the back of the neck, which is how their characteristic attacks are identified in humans. Yeah. I have noticed this when I watched all the Jurassic Park movies with my

son a year or so ago. Well, I forget which one it was in, but there's one in particular where you see the dinosaurs, the raptors in particular, UM, killing by by clamping onto the back of the neck, which I thought was a nice touch. So anyway, but no it was. No. I but I've got a question. Okay, so this seems gratuitous. The bird just takes its prey, which normal bird would would just capture and then kill and then eat. But this bird impales it on a thorn on a plant. Why do we have any idea

like what the purpose of this is? Uh? Yeah, and there seemed to be three different reasons, um, and I do have to acknowledge that, yes, this is exactly what you mentioned Texas chainsal Masca earlier. This is exactly what happens in one of the kills in tcm Uh. He cracks a victim on the head, uh, you know, and take takes her out, but then he sticks her onto a meat hook. Uh. And that's that's basically what the shrike is doing. So there are three different reasons to

do this that that researchers have identified. One and this is pretty neat and this is this is is that it's about tearing the meat once and let's say an insect is impaled on that thorn. You can then pull on the creature's body and you can rip it, cut it into smaller pieces. So it's leverage. It allows you to get better leverage on the for butchering the insect body. Right. It's it's not something we really do because we you know, we can use farm you know, all these other tools.

But imagine if you didn't have tools, if the thorn was the only tool. Um, because that's particularly i mean, that's exactly the situation that the bird is in. The next reasons for the shrike to put something on the on the on the thorn is just as a means of storing the meat. Uneaten portions of the meat can be left on the thorns and the bird can return later to eat some more m okay, as opposed to like storing it on the ground where something else is

more likely to come along and take it. Right. And then finally, this is I think probably the most interesting of the three and one that um I wasn't really familiar with that I was. I knew about shrikes and about the category one and two here. But the third reason is to potentially detoxify the meat um. And this is where we get more specific with this with some of the prey species that are targeted. Uh. It's a way of processing the meat of a toxic prey animal

UM so that the bird can then eat it. So the bird will leave a body on the spike for like a period of one to two days, allowing the toxins in the body to degrade to the point where it can be safely eaten. Okay. So this might be the case in like an insect that has a poison within its body that has a fairly short chemical half life, and it's if it's not replenished by the live animals body, it's going to eventually degrade over time exactly. Yeah, and

some for some specific examples. The loggerhead shrike does this with luber grasshoppers as well as with the species of beetle and moth, and great gray shrikes have been observed to do this with black cone headed grasshoppers. So so, yeah, the shrike is is fascinating, not only because there's something

kind of grizzly and wonderful about what it does. Uh. But yeah, by doing these three things with its practice, Uh, it's engaging in a in in several different things that that we do with our with our cooking process, you know, the butchery of the meat, the butcher or they just the the taking a part of a given element, uh, the storing of that element and then detoxifying that element. Now, we tend to we do this in a number of different ways. It may be cooking something and the cooking process,

the heating process itself destroys the toxins. It also maybe and we've touched on this before in our Dangerous Food series, it may also be about removing parts of the body or parts of the plant that would otherwise be toxic to us. Uh. But but we have just specific cases of the of the shrike carrying this out just by leaving it on the thorn long enough. Well, I'm impressed. Yes,

they are impressive creatures. All right, Well, we need to wrap up part one here, but we're going to be back next time with more of the uh the quote cooking or otherwise, you know, meal prep cuisine behaviors of non human animals. Definitely want to talk about some interesting behaviors that have been called washing, but maybe more obscure in nature than that. Yeah, in some cases at least it's kind of mysterious. And we'll get into into all

of that, plus plus other examples in the meantime. Certainly, right in, let us know what you think about what we discussed here today, especially if you have any direct experience with us. Have you observed the shrikes in the wild, have lambergeyers dropped tortoises at you? And you've you know, luckily been able to get a less rocky looking hat over your head just in time. Do you prefer raw

potatoes to cook? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I mean he's going to have some insight on all of that, so yeah, right in, let us know, we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Core episodes published on two season Thursdays. On Monday we do a listener mail, on wind Day we do a short form monster fact or Artifact episode, and on Fridays we do

Weird How Cinema. That's our time to satisfied most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production

of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.