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
One aspect is that it takes a certain amount of time for pathogens/infections to ‘set in'(incubate), and before that time you could well be infected and have no symptoms.
With that in mind, different species have different lengths of digestive tracts depending on their evolutionary strategy/dietary needs. Herbivores tend to have longer tracts to allow maximum time to extract as much nutrients as possible (since plants are pretty low in energy density), right? Scavengers/carnivores often go the opposite route, very short digestive tracts that basically don’t give most pathogens enough time to incubate before being sent out the other end.
Dogs, for example, can eat raw chicken safely because salmonella physically doesn’t stay in their short digestive tract long enough to be dangerous.
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