Lets say a human has fallen down a hole, or has been locked in an area that has no means of escape for five days. Let’s also say that there is an ample supply of fresh water. Now, I know there is a time span where a human will die without drink and food, and I’m thinking that most humans would be alive after five days without food. During this time, as the human becomes increasingly hungry, he will start to salivate, in his mind, over his favorite foods. On the day of rescue, I think said human would eat any food given to him, no matter what it was. If he detested liver all his life, I think he would accept the liver offered by his rescuers, and eat it ravenously.
My question, then. In the animal world, lets take an animal that is strictly into vegetation, deer perhaps, at the point of starving to death, would said animal turn carnivorous if offered meat on the day of his rescue? Or would a carnivorous animal gulp down handfuls of oats? Would the threat of death cause an animal to eat anything offered? Or would said animal just refuse the offering and die?
Animals refuse food not on principle, but on instinct and habit.
Faced with starvation, I can’t see any animal refusing any intake that “feels” edible.
I don’t know if an herbivorous animal would be able to eat meat or see it as food. Most herbivores tend to freak out at the smell of meat, because to them it’s dead flesh, a sign of danger. Cows and horses have been known to do that, especially if what they smell is blood.
Some carnivores do turn to eating plants when food is short-- wolves will eat berries, for example.
I think the carnivore might be able to try eating plants if some were offered, but the herbivore would refuse meat offered as food simply because it wouldn’t recognise it as food. You might as well have thrown rocks in there.
I seem to recall reading something about horses eating meat under exceptional circumstances.
The problem, though, is that most animals are not as omnivorous as humans and wouldn’t be able to digest what they don’t usually consider food.
Would you eat grass?
Cows are strictly vegetarian by nature, but if fed meat they’ll eat it. This was a big controversy during the mad cow outbreak a few years back; farmers were feeding their cattle some kind of beef and grain mush essentially making them cannibals.
Also, my friends dog once ate, digested, and shat a pair of yellow ladies undergarments, so I don’t think animals in general are terribly particular about their diets when they’re hungry.
Warning!
Horrible non-Disneyesque tale of herviborous carnivorous cannibalism follows…
I had a pair of pet rabbits when I was in elementary school. Mama rabbit produced five baby bunnies, and Papa rabbit ate two of them before we’d noticed and separated him from the litter.
Not only was that herbivore able, but, obviously even willing to eat flesh.
No, he was not starving. There was plenty of fresh Purina Rabbit Chow in his dish in the hutch.
So, as to the OP’s question…
I don’t know about Bambi, but Thumper’ll eat meat if it’s his own offspring.
Chicken that are kept in cages on egg farms will eat a chicken if it dies in the same cage they are in. This is obviously an extreme situation with the animals in a very stressful environment.
Okay, yes. There are examples of herbivores eating their young. I’m not sure what that’s about. Among some animals, males will eat or kill babies that were fathered by other males, but in the case of the rabbits that obviously wasn’t the case. Even mothers who are under stress (like a lot of small caged pets) will eat their young sometimes.
So, Indefatigable, does that mean you’ve learned something new, or does that mean you recant your previous post?
Or, BOTH?!
Well, actually, we do.
Major human food crops (rice, wheat, corn, for example) are all descendents of wild grasses, just selected and cultivated over the years by humans.
I’ve had some very tasty brownies made with grass…oh wait you mean grass.
I think there are sheep in the more remote sections of Scotland or Patagonia or somewhere where food is scarce, that will eat dead seagulls if they are available.
…does that mean you’ve learned something new, or does that mean you recant your previous post?
Gluteus Maximus: you know, I’m not sure. 
Is the desperation in an animal’s mind that leads it to eat its own young more or less intense than it would feel when starving? I don’t think the eating of offspring is about hunger, there’s some other odd mechanism going on there.
As for the cows eating meat-based feed, this stuff is so heavily processed that the cow wouldn’t have been able to tell it was meat. It doesn’t smell or look like meat. It’s a sort of kibble, I seem to recall.
I still maintain that most herbivores would probably be frightened by a chunk of dead meat, rather than seeing it as food. (And in the rabbit situation, the father was not eating killed flesh, he was doing the killing himself.)
So… I’m not sure. I don’t take back my original opinion entirely, but I acknowledge that there was stuff I didn’t take into account.
I meant the stuff that grows in your lawn. Or tree leaves, or any kind of vegetation that is not digestible for humans.
This is common in some other species, too. Especially those which reproduce in litters, rather than singlely. For example, cats & even dogs.
But it has to do with sex, not hunger.
In these species, mama generally won’t come into heat again while nursing a litter of youngsters. So if papa kills off the babies, he gets sex sooner. But don’t blame papa; it’s instincts acting here; he didn’t think this up 'cause he’s horny.
From the evolutionary ‘survival of the species’ point of view, having sex more often would be a good thing. But this seems to be a rather self-defeating way of doing that.
Wolves and other carnivores don’t ‘turn’ to eating plants, and they don’t do it only when food is short. Although carnivorous for preference, wolves and most other carnivores will eat fruit if it’s available and they are even slightly hungry. It’s just a way of keeping their food reserves up., not desperation. They won’t normally go hunting for fruit, but if they find it, they eat it. In some places vegetation makes up over 1/3 of wolf diets. Foxes are even more omnivorous, and fruit will make up the vast majority of their diet when available. They virtually cease being active predators and only eat the animals they stumble across, mostly insects. A lot of people are surprised when their dogs eat fruits and veges, but most dogs, along with most wolves, enjoy fruit from time to time.
In these species, mama generally won’t come into heat again while nursing a litter of youngsters. So if papa kills off the babies, he gets sex sooner. But don’t blame papa; it’s instincts acting here; he didn’t think this up 'cause he’s horny.
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Two problems with that theory:
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Mother animals eat their young more often than males, related or otherwise. That includes rabbits.
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If the young were being killed solely to provoke the mother into mating again there would be no need to consume the corpses, but they do.
There are lots of reasons and even more theories about why animals eat their own young. Usually it’s just caused by stress. These animals invest large amounts of energy and protein in their young. If the nest is discovered by a predator it will need to be abandoned and the young will die. Rather than wasting all that energy and protein animals recycle it. As a result animals that become stressed in the nest often eat their own young. In captivity people constantly looking in causes stress and provokes the response.
On to the OP.
I’ve already addressed the issue of carnivores. Basically you would be very hard pressed to find a carnivore that wouldn’t eat edible vegetation at any time, much less while on the point of starvation. Cats are about the only land mammal I can think of that doesn’t naturally eat
vegetable matter routinely.
Strangely enough the same is pretty much true of herbivores. Almost none of them are vegetarian. Sheep and cattle both actively seek out and eat snails and slugs. Cattle are notorious for cannibalising the bones of dead animals, including other cattle, to cope with mineral deficiencies. There is a well researched (and filmed) phenomenon of sheep eating nestling sea-birds on one of the islands in the UK. Deer have also been observed eating ground nesting birds. Rabbits are moderately insectivorous in the wild.
In essence it seems that most animals will eat whatever is available. Most herbivores can’t catch prey, and the ruminants can’t risk eating dead flesh routinely because of the risk of botulism. As a result you don’t often see them eating flesh, but they all presumably do it when the can. Based on that there is no reason to believe that a herbivore wouldn’t eat meat provided it recognised it and it was fresh/live.
Wolves and other carnivores don’t ‘turn’ to eating plants, and they don’t do it only when food is short. Although carnivorous for preference, wolves and most other carnivores will eat fruit if it’s available and they are even slightly hungry. It’s just a way of keeping their food reserves up., not desperation. They won’t normally go hunting for fruit, but if they find it, they eat it. Foxes are even more omnivorous, and fruit will make up the vast majority of their diet when available. They virtually cease being active predators and only eat the animals they stumble across, mostly insects. A lot of people are surprised when their dogs eat fruits and veges, but most dogs, along with most wolves, enjoy fruit from time to time.
Two problems with that theory:
-
Mother animals eat their young more often than males, related or otherwise. That includes rabbits.
-
If the young were being killed solely to provoke the mother into mating again there would be no need to consume the corpses, but they do.
There are lots of reasons and even more theories about why animals eat their own young. Usually it’s just caused by stress. These animals invest large amounts of energy and protein in their young. If the nest is discovered by a predator it will need to be abandoned and the young will die. Rather than wasting all that energy and protein animals recycle it. As a result animals that become stressed in the nest often eat their own young. In captivity people constantly looking in causes stress and provokes the response.
On to the OP.
I’ve already addressed the issue of carnivores. Basically you would be very hard pressed to find a carnivore that wouldn’t eat edible vegetation at any time, much less while on the point of starvation. Cats are about the only land mammal I can think of that doesn’t naturally eat vegetable matter routinely.
Strangely enough the same is pretty much true of herbivores. Almost none of them are vegan. Sheep and cattle both actively seek out and eat snails and slugs. Cattle are notorious for cannibalising the bones of other cattle to cope with mineral deficiencies. There is a well researched (and filmed) phenomenon of sheep eating nestling sea-birds on one of the islands in the UK. Deer have also been observed eating ground nesting birds. Rabbits are moderately insectivorous in the wild.
In essence it seems that most animals will eat whatever is available. Most herbivores can’t catch prey, and the ruminants can’t risk eating dead flesh routinely because of the risk of botulism. As a result you don’t often see them eating flesh, but they all presumably do it when the can. Based on that there is no reason to believe that a herbivore wouldn’t eat meat provided it recognised it and it was fresh/live.
Sorry, but I wonder, so I ask.
Do animals that eat their young “kill” them first, or (as I suspect) just start eating. I think that this would be an important difference.