ELi5: How do some animals get enough nutrients out of eating hay or grass or a single variety of leaf for their entire lives?
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In addition to the answers already given, many herbivores can also be opportunistic omnivores. For example, I once saw a video of a horse eating a baby chick, and apparently that is pretty common. Similarly, there are probably a lot of bugs in pastures that get eaten along with the plants. So yeah, these animals eat like 99.5% plants, and the microbes in their extensive guts help turn those plants into usable nutrients, but they also sometimes ingest small animals/bugs.
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