This is something that always baffled me and seeing a video of a bear eating a salmon, it reminded me of this: The bear ate the salmon with it’s intestines, raw, no questions or care. Just bearing his own way through the salmon, barely a care in the world. And, like, I’ve seen videos of lions eating antelopes and zebra’s intestines also, and no issue there. Why? Would that work for all kinds of animals?
In: Biology
a lot of animals also have different degrees of strength to their stomach acid. vultures for example can eat more rotten/diseased corpses than a lot of other wild animals because of how strong their stomach acid is.
different predators have different “defenses” for diseases. many large cats have lots of bacteria in their mouth to kill many more times bacteria than humans do (which is why you should always, always clean out a bite from a house cat or dog)
freshness is an issue too; eating a raw animal that was killed 20 seconds ago has a lot lower risk than eating an animal that died 20 hours ago, decomposition begins rapidly.
wild predators are also likely to have different parasites themselves.
I think it probably depends on the animal, but humans can also eat certain animal intestines (after being cooked, like how we eat the rest of the animal.)
[Here, let this Japanese gangster gunned down in the streets in 1985 explain it with his dying words. ](https://youtu.be/OBXJYgvNgrE?si=YdU6vq2o85qY2ZOG&t=6021)
A lot of good info about the differences of predators’ digestive tracts, but I’d also like to add…
You could also eat all that nasty stuff and survive. Sure, there’s a chance you’d get sick, but there’s also a chance that any of these animals will get sick.
Those bears you’re talking about are absolutely riddled with tapeworms and all kinds of other parasites. They’re not just fine after eating all that random crap. Life in the wild just kind of sucks and you get sick a lot.
While the other answers are correct I want to add that a lot of them aren’t eating feces. You don’t have feces in your intestines at large, only in your large intestine. Other parts of your digestive tract are much more devoid of bacteria. Not only that, a big misconception about things like this is that all bacteria in that are inherently bad. This isn’t true. You’re gut microbiome is a result of the gut microbiomes you’ve been exposed to, and it’s getting the wrong stuff in there that causes issues. Not only that but adding to the other answers your microbiomes protects you from other microbes. The e. coli in your gut helps fight off other strains of e. coli.
And finally. You do eat feces. A lot of stuff you eat will contain the intestinal contents of the animal you’re eating, and not just from a “of we ground up the intestines and some feces happened to get there” sort of way. Mostly this is limited to things like insects and smaller arthropods, but larger things are occasionally eaten while. When you do that you’re eating their guts, fecal matter and all. Some are cleaned first, shrimp you usually don’t eat it, you clean them to remove the vein, which is actually their gut. But some fish are preserved and eaten while. Guts intact.
One safari special I caught (early morning after party) featured two male rogue lions hunting down anything that moved and just ate the ass. Like, they’d capture, mawg everything under the tail, then move on. The behavior wasnt abnormal from what I recall, but I could not grasp eating that much ass and being healthy even with specialized abilities.
To add to the other responses already posted, humans do it too actually. We also eat small organisms whole, with no cooking, intestinal tract and all. Oysters are probably the most common example of this, but there are others as well.
There is the distinct possibility that while we evolved to cook food to get much more nutrition out of the things we eat (cooking is somewhat like pre chewing and pre digesting). As this tended to sterilize the food as well, our natural defences against other bacteria present in dead animals also decreased.
Leaving is in the position we are in now. After all, you only find poop and intestines disgusting because we evolved to the point physically and culturally where we stopped eating it. If we never did, I don’t even think the smell of shit would be as bothersome. (Ever noticed how none of your pets usually react to a stinky fart or shit?)
why would nature let an animal kill another animal and then not eat valuable resources like the intestines full of protein and other vitamins. Just seems natural that it would come up with some kind of defense against disease
[removed]
Latest Answers