I was reading the White-Tailed Deer article in Wikipedia… yeah I know it’s Wikipedia, that’s what I am asking the question. In the article it states “Whitetail deer eat large varieties of food, commonly eating legumes and foraging on other plants, including shoots, leaves, cacti, and grasses. They also eat acorns, fruit, and corn. Their special stomach allows them to eat some things that humans cannot, such as mushrooms that are poisonous to humans and Red Sumac. Their diet varies in the seasons according to availability of food sources. They will also eat hay and other food that they can find in a farm yard. Whitetail deer have been known to opportunistically feed on nestling songbirds, and [sic] well as field mice, and birds trapped in Mist nets.” Emphasis is mine.
I thought it was a joke. I have never heard this claim before and always thought deer were strict vegetarians. So do White-Tailed Deer really eat meat opportunistically? And if they do do other deer species also eat meat?
The Wiki article has a footnote at that sentence, which leads to this link. It certainly looks legitimate, if way outside the normal variation of diet.
You know that old joke about how “vegetarian” is an Indian word for “lousy hunter”? There’s some truth to that. The division isn’t so much between “critters that eat members of kingdom Animalia” and “critters that eat members of kingdom Plantae”, as it is between “critters that eat things that run away or fight back” and “critters that eat things that don’t run away or fight back”.
Using meat (well, whatever animal parts weren’t made into people food, anyway) in livestock feed was a standard practice until mad cow disease broke out.
I’m embarrassed to say that I have a degree is in Zoology. In college we learned about Carnivores, Omnivores and Herbivores. A bear or a raccoon will eat pretty much anything that doesn’t eat them, but a rabbit only eats plant material and a bobcat only eats meat. If the truth is that everything is pretty much an omnivore, that’s news to me. I also learned that the digestive system of a cow, for example, is completely different than that of a mountain lion. It boggles my mind to think I’ve had it wrong for all these years…
It’s especially true if you throw in insects. Cows for instance, have been known to lick ant mounds while they’re grazing. A lot of this “meat eating” isn’t seeking it out so much as it’s already there. In other words the deer aren’t going to hunt the mice or songbirds, but if one is injured or it’s a baby and it’s in the grass they are grazing in, they may eat it or not.
dolphinboy, you should know by now that nothing is ever absolute in biology. Your teachers were also lying to you when they said that mammals give birth to live young, for instance (see the platypus). But there are some creatures that eat almost entirely other animals, and some that eat almost entirely plants, and in both cases have adaptations to make that diet easier and more effective. So it’s still useful to classify animals as “herbivorous” or “carnivorous”, even if it’s not strictly entirely true.
To give just the most common example of cattle engaging in carnivory.. Yes, that is the carcasse of another cow that it’s eating. This sort of behaviour is common in any area where the soil is even slightly mineral deficient, where eating carcasses, especially bones, is normal cattle behaviour.
Yes, the bovine digestive system is very different form the wolf digestive system. Nonetheless they are both omnivorous animals. They are adapted to specialise in different diets, they aren’t restricted to them.
The other point to realise is that humans aren’t the only animals with dietary preferences. While you can eat a diet consisting entirely of fruit, you don;t because you prefer a more energy dense, high protein diet. The same goes for other animals. So while wolves can and regularly do eat fruit and sheep can and regularly do eat birds, they don’t do so by preference. They largely do so because that is the only way to obtain the nutrients they need to survive. Sheep with access to enough high-protein forage won’t hunt birds and wolves with access to enough high fat meat won’t eat fruit. But if you change that then they will rectify the deficiency by altering their diet.
The animals that we commonly refer to as omnivores are just those with less specialised digestive systems and less strongly developed developed preferences. But there is an perfect continuum from almost exclusively carnivorous animals like cheetahs to almost perfectly herbivorous animals like sheep. But as far as we can tell at no point is any mammal exclusively one or the other.
I think it’s not so much the meat that they’re after, but the bones (and eggshells). Plants are deficient in sodium and calcium, which is why herbivores frequent salt licks in order to get the necessary minerals. So from the deer’s point of view, the main benefit is the crunchy bones, not the meat that surround them. (Herbivorous rodents will also gnaw up bones.)
I recall an article I read once in which red deer on an island off Great Britain were biting the heads off baby rabbits they found. Of course, the skull has the greatest concentration of calcium.
Years ago I had a pet rabbit and I would try to feed it stuff it normally would not eat. She did not like beef or chicken would but devour ham. And she liked the white part of hard boiled eggs. Her favorite junk food was Cheetos.
