Rabbit starvation

Rabbit starvation, also called protein poisoning or mal de caribou in parts of Canada, is a form of acute malnutrition caused by excess consumption of any lean meat such as, but not limited to, rabbit. Take a diet like this, add in a lack of other sources of nutrients and other sources of stress (like severe cold or dry environment), and you can end up with symptoms that include diarrhea, headache, fatigue, low blood pressure and heart rate, and a vague discomfort and hunger that can only be satisfied by eating fat or carbs.

Possible mechanisms

• Calorie deficit: A 19-30 year-old male doing an hour of moderate exercise (like a brisk walk while hunting), burns off 3000 kcal/day. At 114kcal/100g that would require eating 2.6kg (5.7lbs) of rabbit meat. At typical carcass yields, you would need to catch and eat about 6.9kg (15.3lbs) of live rabbit. This can end up being anywhere from 4 to 17 (yes, 17!) rabbits, depending on where you are, the time of year, and your luck.
• Nutritional deficiency: A strict diet of rabbit muscle would give you virtually nothing of Vitamins A and C.
• Vitamin A poisoning: In the event that overall calorie deficit prompted consumption of the livers of captured animals, the 10 000 IU/day Upper Limit on Vitamin A can easily be exceeded (e.g. Caribou liver 28 804 IU/100g, Moose liver 96 015 IU/100g), with similar symptoms to those described for rabbit starvation. (See this article over at Wikipedia for some more information on that)

Observations

Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote as follows:

The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source--beaver, moose, fish--will develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken.

In the introduction to Alden Todd's book Abandoned: the story of the Greely Arctic Expedition 1881-1884, which recounts the harrowing experiences of the 25 expedition members, of whom 19 died, Stefansson refers to "'rabbit starvation' which is now to me the key to the Greely problem," which was why "only six came back." He concludes that one of the reasons for the many deaths was cannibalism of the lean flesh of members who had already died. Stefansson likens this to rabbit starvation, which he explains somewhat as in the above quoted observation.

Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, wrote:

We were here able to buy some biscuit. I had now been several days without tasting any thing besides meat: I did not at all dislike this new regimen; but I felt as if it would only have agreed with me with hard exercise. I have heard that patients in England, when desired to confine themselves exclusively to an animal diet, even with the hope of life before their eyes, have hardly been able to endure it. Yet the Gaucho in the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry meat, such as that of the Agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, “that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea:” this appears to me a curious physiological fact. It is, perhaps, from their meat regimen that the Gauchos, like other carnivorous animals, can abstain long from food. I was told that at Tandeel, some troops voluntarily pursued a party of Indians for three days, without eating or drinking.

Further reading

• The Outdoor Survival Guide, an ongoing GOROLE eBook project
• Bilsborough S, Mann N (2006). "A review of issues of dietary protein intake in humans.". Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab 16 (2): 129–52. PMID 16779921
• "Rabbit Starvation"