I'm trying to stay out of this debate but all mammals have the same basic structure for their teeth. Carnivores tend to have a full set while herbivores tend to have a partial set. Cats don't just have fangs. They've got incisors, premolars, and molars as well. Cows don't have canines (which are the fangs) and iirc, they don't have incisors on the top.
In other words, our teeth resemble a cat's teeth more than they resemble a cow's teeth. We have fangs; they're just not very long.
This does not mean we were meant to be carnivores but that we were meant to be omnivores.
This debate as to what we humans are .......omnivore or herbivore.........can become quite telling when you look at some of the anatomic and physiologic details.
The lower jaw of carnivores have a hinge joint (just like the knee or elbow joint) and cannot move forward, and has very limited side-to-side motion. They essentially can only open and close for piercing, shearing, tearing and swallowing whole.
Cows [threw that in just for TexansBlood] and monkeys like humans have modified hinge/condylar jaw joints.......meaning the lower jaw may move up and down, side-to-side and forward and backward, essentially for biting, crushing and grinding before swallowing.
Carnivores have to have wide mouths and strong jaw muscles in order for them to eat some of the things they eat. Herbivores on the other hand are just the opposite, they have a small mouth and a strong tongue so it’s easier for them to move food around in their mouth and grind it on the flat molar teeth in the back of their mouth. In contrast, look how weak and limp a dog’s tongue is. It is protruded and rolled to allow for throwing water back into the throat. Cows, like humans don’t lap water, they actually suck it up like we do.
And what about their respective digestive systems?
Carnivores have very large stomachs, so large that it can hold between 60 and 70 percent of their whole digestive tract. But herbivores have very small stomachs and they process smaller piles of food.
A carnivore's or omnivore's small intestine is three to six times the length of its trunk. This is a tool designed for rapid elimination of food This way meat moves through fast, as meat goes rancid at high temperatures. Man's, as well as other herbivore's small intestines are 10 to 12 times the length of their body, and winds itself back and forth in random directions. This is a tool designed for keeping food in it for long enough periods of time so that all the valuable nutrients and minerals can be extracted from it before it enters the large intestine.
A carnivore's or omnivore's large intestine is relatively short and simple, like a pipe. This passage is also relatively smooth and runs fairly straight so that fatty wastes high in cholesterol can easily slide out before they start to putrefy. Man's, as well as other herbivore's large intestines, or colons, are puckered and pouched, an apparatus that runs in three directions (ascending, traversing and descending), designed to hold wastes that originally were foods high in water content. This is so that the fluids can be extracted from these wastes, now that all the useful nutrients and minerals have been extracted and the long journey through the small intestine is over.
A very interesting fact is that dogs, cats and other natural carnivores do not get colon cancer from high-fat, low-fiber, flesh-based diets. In humans, meat substances that have been putrefying for hours during their long stay in the small intestine tend to linger in the pockets that line the large intestine. This prolonged exposure to toxic substances has been found to explain such a high colon cancer rate amongst meat-eaters in the human colon while a very contrasting reduced colon cancer rate would be associated with humans following a plant-based diet.
