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There is a thing called rabbit starvation. The French-Canadian trappers called it mal de caribou. The Hudson Bay Company kept records of men dying of it while their bellies were technically full.
Here is how it works.
A man is stuck in the bush in late winter. The only game he can find is rabbit, or caribou at the end of the migration after they've burned off their summer fat. The lean meat is there. The fat is gone.
He eats. He cannot stop eating. He grows lethargic. He gets watery diarrhoea within a week. He keeps eating. He keeps weakening. Within two or three weeks, in the cold, doing hard work, he is dead. Of starvation. With meat in his stomach.
The liver can only process protein up to around thirty-five per cent of total calories. Past that, the body has no way to clear the nitrogen waste, and starts dismantling its own tissues to try and balance the books.
The Cree and the Dene hunters knew this in their bones. They would field-dress a lean rabbit and throw the muscle meat to the dogs, keeping only the small kidney fat to mix with stored fat from richer kills. European observers were baffled by what looked like waste. The hunters were baffled by Europeans being baffled.
Pemmican was designed around this knowledge. Equal parts lean meat and rendered fat, by weight. Half tallow. Not a quarter. Not a tenth. Half.
If you're going to follow the ancestral pattern, follow it properly. Eat the ribeye over the round. The shoulder over the loin. The marrow, the suet, the rendered tallow, the broth that solidifies on the windowsill.
Lean meat alone built no civilisations. Fatty meat built every single one of them.
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