Animals like hyenas and vultures can eat meat that would kill or incapacitate a human, but is there any limit to that? At which point on the scale between “still kicking” and “liquid that is 50% various fungi” does the meat become inedible to a carrion eater, whether that is by giving it food poisoning or simply not having any accessible nutrients anymore?
In: Biology
There are two ways microbes can hurt you–they can grow inside you and muck up your innards making a home there (colonization) or they can produce toxic chemicals in the food before you eat it, poisoning you when it’s consumed. Many microbes don’t actually make food dangerous, they just make it taste so nasty that humans don’t want it.
For colonization, your physiology matters. Different bodies are different environments and some are easier to colonize than others. Some toxins are specialized to certain nervous systems or are produced in doses that might kill a shrew but just mildly sicken a lion. Finally, humans have a much different sense of what’s palatable compared to animals (and a much worse sense of smell, generally). What many humans would consider rotten, many animals would consider ‘just ripe’. Smell can indicate different kinds of spoilage, with a better nose animals may be able to avoid parts of the kill that are excessively spoiled and focus on parts that are still fresh enough.
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