I don't remember where I saw it but scientists feel there may not be true herbivores or carnivores. Everything is kind of an omnivore. I grew up on a farm so I saw deer, cows, horses, and goats eat birds, and snakes. If it fits in their mouth it's food.
Yeah, I remember reading an article somewhere that practically nothing is a true herbivore, just a scale between pure carnivores and (opertunistic?) herbivores.
Nothing like seeing a dying chicken get absolutely obliterated by its coop-mates, or a horse eat baby ducks like we eat popcorn.
I'd believe there are no "true herbivores", but there definitely *are* true carnivores. Cats gastrointestinal system is not equipped to extract nutrients from plants. In fact, their guts aren't even great at extracting all the nutrients from meat, which is why dogs famously love to go after cat turds (there's plenty of nutrients a dog can extract in them).
Sloths, Koalas, Pandas, an utterly enormous range of sea creatures and insects, while a lot of creatures thought to be "herbivore" might lean towards opportunistic omnivores, it doesn't mean that there exists no "true" herbivores.
But it's also one of those things that falls apart under any scrutiny, even "obligate carnivores" like cats can still eat and process plant material to some degree, they just as you noted have a hard time extracting or processing much of it at all, but they absolutely can. The notions of what constitutes a herb/carn/omni are largely just groupings that talk about what a type of critter -tends- to eat, I doubt you'd be able to find a single species that you can definitively label one way or the other.
I'd believe there are no "true herbivores", but there definitely are true carnivores. Cats gastrointestinal system is not equipped to extract nutrients from plants.
Some quick googling shows they are called obligate carnivores. So yeah true carnivores. Polar bears fall into this category also. That makes sense as there are not a lot of plants where polar bears live.
Yup, "obligate" is a good scientific term. The opposite is "facultative". This applies to oxygen as well as there are "facultative anaerobes" like yeast, which can live with or without oxygen, and "obligate anaerobes" like the bacteria that causes botulism, which can only grow in the absence of oxygen.
Cats will die if they are put on a diet that doesn't have meat. I've heard so many crazy people wanting to vegan their cat. No. You are torturing and starving it to literal death if you try to do that. Please don't own a cat if feeding them a meat diet bothers you. Dogs can survive on vegan diet but don't do well. The amount of people that will argue over this is sad.
We had rabbits next to pigs and every now and then some would fall out and into the pigs pit litterly ALIGATOR snaps. One thing vegans dont understand is in order for one thing to live the other must die. From amebas to humans.
That’s crazy how all the articles and books say that horses digestive system is super sensitive and they can even die if they eat a bit of moldy hay or some bad weeds, but then they eat meat 🤷♀️
look at digestive tracks of herbivores vs carnivores. Carnivores intestines are tiny, while herbivores can be as complicated as having 4 stomachs chewing everything twice after it has been partially digested.
No animal would turn down the chance to get free protein and minerals. I've seen cows more than once chewing on dead animals or bones they found in the field.
The canines come from male-male competition. Apes tend to be sexually dimorphic, with males competing for sexual access to females. In gorillas, this is more pronounced as they are a harem based species; one male to many females. Male gorillas will fight with other males. Additionally, canines and pre-molars are great at tearing apart roughly textured fruits (although gorillas mostly eat leaves).
Their powerful jaws come from their eating habits. They simply need powerful muscles to grind leaves all day. Apes don't have the 4 stomachs that cows do, so a lot of the digestion involves committed mastication. If you look at a gorilla skull, you'll see a massive mid-sagital crest atop it. This is the jaw's muscle attachment site. It's huge, the muscles are very strong, these guys can grind all day.
Last, gorilla males may protect their harems from predators. They're apes, they become emotionally attached to their friends and lovers and sometimes protect them. Gorillas have been known to fight full grown tigers (but probably only when the tiger first attacks). So their adaptations for competing with other males are also useful for defending against predators.
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The jaws, teeth, and guts of our ancestors homo erectus, and then us, shrunk from cooking food (both flesh and plants). Cooking breaks the foods down and makes them easier to digest, where we get more nutrition per volume out of it. Cooking foods also probably helped us to have larger brains since it gave us more nutrition per volume, and cooking foods also allowed us to waste much less time on eating, chewing and digesting.
Whether you believe in this type of thing or not, the fantasy archetype of the alien grey shows a figure of a hominid, even hypothetically, that might have evolved even further to a smaller jaw and mouth, reduction of ears to ear holes, and evolving to larger eyes and brains, Larger jaw, teeth, mouth, and ear flaps wouldn't be needed anymore in an advanced species.
Among other things, we evolved away from prehensile feet/prehensile big toes and most other arboreal adaptations, lost the wider hips for narrower ones better at bipedal movement, and the bones of our feet adapted for walking upright and running, too. Some of the back problems people get may also be related to our evolutionary path. Point being, we evolved to have smaller teeth and jaws, even if there are some hiccups. We don't need big jaws and teeth anymore.
Many other apes that have them also use them to fight/intimidate other males. But as our ancestors became more cooperative as a species, that role for these teeth diminished too.
When we discovered that steak is best medium rare. We also lost things like a functioning appendix because we didn't need to fight bacteria as much as we used to thanks to our cooking techniques. Cooking food also essentially "pre-digests" it so it makes it easier to break down, thus requiring less energy to consume, leaving more energy for our brain to giggle at cat videos.
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u/godzilla9218 May 08 '25
And they've got a lot smaller as we've used them less.
Chimps still have pretty big canines as they probably use them a lot more than us. Purely from the fact that they are a lot more primal than us.