SAMA HOOLE: We eat plants the way a dog eats grass. Occasionally, opportunistically, and never as the thing keeping us upright.

A pig is an omnivore. Whenever somebody tells you humans are omnivores, ask them to put the pig on the table next to us and go through it feature by feature, because the pig is what the word actually describes.

The pig has a long gut with a genuine large intestine and caecum… pic.twitter.com/MkI1CDAuV3

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) July 28, 2026

A pig is an omnivore. Whenever somebody tells you humans are omnivores, ask them to put the pig on the table next to us and go through it feature by feature, because the pig is what the word actually describes. The pig has a long gut with a genuine large intestine and caecum where microbes ferment fibrous material into short chain fatty acids it absorbs and uses. Yours does almost none of that. The pig will eat acorns, roots, tubers, grain, windfall fruit, carrion, eggs, insects and the occasional unlucky bird, and it will thrive on any mix of them, because that is what omnivore means. Not tolerates. Thrives. Bears are the same story. Raccoons. They have the plumbing for a genuinely mixed diet and it is not a compromise for them. A wild boar rooting through a beech wood in October is not making do. That is an animal operating exactly to specification. Now run us through it. No fermentation chamber worth the name. No cellulase. A caecum reduced to a decorative worm. Stomach acid at a pH that sits with the scavengers rather than the browsers. A gut around 40 percent smaller than a primate our size ought to be carrying. And a gallbladder for hitting large fatty loads, which the grazers deleted entirely. Omnivore is a description of dietary equipment, not a description of dietary willingness. I can drink diesel. That does not make me a tractor. We eat plants the way a dog eats grass. Occasionally, opportunistically, and never as the thing keeping us upright.

The pig is the omnivore. We are the thing the pig would be terrified of if it could think straight. 

SAMA HOOLE: A gallbladder is a bile tank. It sits under the liver, concentrates bile until it is many times stronger than it arrived, and fires the whole lot in one pulse the second fat hits the small intestine.

The horse has no gallbladder. Neither does the deer, the giraffe, the rhino, the elephant, the camel or the rat.

Animals with no gallbladder:

- Horse
- Deer, every species bar the musk deer
- Giraffe
- Rhinoceros
- Elephant
- Camel
- Rat
- Pigeon

Animals with one:

- Dog
- Cat…

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) July 28, 2026

The horse has no gallbladder. Neither does the deer, the giraffe, the rhino, the elephant, the camel or the rat. Animals with no gallbladder: - Horse - Deer, every species bar the musk deer - Giraffe - Rhinoceros - Elephant - Camel - Rat - Pigeon Animals with one: - Dog - Cat - Lion - Human A gallbladder is a bile tank. It sits under the liver, concentrates bile until it is many times stronger than it arrived, and fires the whole lot in one pulse the second fat hits the small intestine. It is equipment for an animal that eats a large fatty meal and then eats nothing for a while. The dedicated grazers dropped the organ entirely, because a steady trickle of grass never asked for it. Bile just seeps out of the liver all day and that covers it. You kept yours. It has been sitting under your liver for two million years, loaded, waiting for something to arrive that justifies it.

Then a man in a leaflet told you to grill the chicken dry.