Fun fact: Why don’t herbivores eat meat?

I recently saw an interesting question. A netizen asked why, except for humans, the eating habits of other animals are quite obvious. For example, although they are all insects, grasshoppers do not eat meat, but mantises do not eat grass. Although they are all mammals, humans are omnivorous animals, while cattle and sheep only eat grass and not meat, and dogs do not eat grass either. Why is this?

As we all know, sheep and cows are herbivores, but being herbivores does not mean they do not eat meat. That is, sheep will eat meat if there is meat, but why don’t they eat meat most of the time?

01. If you want to eat meat, hooves (claws) are very important

Why don't cows and sheep eat meat? The reason is very simple. If they can't catch it, they will eat the fur. (Of course , if they catch it, they will eat the fur as well .) Look at the claws of carnivorous mammals and see what they look like.

For example, the claws of dogs

The same goes for cats

Watch them as they hunt, jump up, grab the zebra,

Then just chew it...

Voice-over: Sorry, I'm not molesting the zebra. I'm just catching food. Can't you see I'm a female? I'm not even wearing a headband.

On the other hand, look at the sheep

You ask it to hunt, but it can't do it.

It is simply impossible to catch an animal with this hoof. Before it can catch the animal, it will run away.

Another example is a cow eating grass. Look at its hooves.

So there is a classification in zoology called Artiodactyla (Do you remember the phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species?)

02. Knowledge about Artiodactyls

Artiodactyla is an order of mammals, mostly large and medium-sized herbivorous terrestrial ungulate mammals. It is divided into two suborders: non-ruminant suborder (such as pigs, hippopotamus, etc.) and ruminant suborder (such as camels, sheep, deer, giraffes, cattle, antelopes, llamas, etc.)

Of course, since there are even-toed ungulates, there must be odd-toed ungulates, such as the horse that everyone likes.

Of course, there are also the black donkey hooves that are often seen in novels

So you can see that the fact that they couldn't eat meat had a lot to do with their feet.

Mammals that can eat meat basically have claws, and those that cannot eat meat basically have hooves. Naturally, these hooves cannot taste fishy.

Of course there are exceptions. For example, the arrogant Second Brother can eat meat, so the Second Brother is still relatively happy.

However, if you give ungulates meat, they will still eat it. For example, I have seen cows eat meat.

Sheep will eat the meat when it is offered to them. There are pictures of sheep eating chicken on the Internet. Well, it is not the kind of eating chicken in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, it is the real eating chicken.

So, the reason why even-toed ungulates don't eat meat is because they can't catch meat on their own, but if you give them meat, well, they will still eat it.