Deer, after all, eat plants, forbs and grasses. They are herbivores in scientific vernacular.

White-tailed deer are considered herbivores and subsist on a diet of readily available plants, including twigs, fruits, nuts, alfalfa, and the occasional fungi.

Herbivores are those animals, such as deer and koalas, that only eat plant material. Omnivores are those animals, such as bears and humans, that can eat a variety of food sources, but tend to prefer one type to another.

Deer are so omnivorous that trail-cam studies show they’ll readily eat from gut piles and deer carcasses. Nature is full of surprises. Deer are not vegetarians.

Giraffes mostly eat fresh leaves and twigs from the tops of trees (particularly spiky acacia trees) where other browsing species can’t reach them. Giraffes aren’t predators, so they don’t kill other animals, but their huge skeletons require more calcium and phosphorous than they can get from a strictly vegetarian diet.

Giraffes are herbivores, which means they eat only plants. Giraffes aren’t known for eating meat, although Tony, a pure Rothschild’s giraffe at Werribee Open Plains Zoo in Australia was notorious for eating dead rabbits in front of visitors.

calf

It’s legal both to kill and eat lion in the United States, though it’s not legal to hunt them and then sell the meat. Practically speaking, it’s not easy to get, given that most lion is acquired from game preserve stock or retired circus animals or exotic animal businesses.

Turkey vultures can smell very diluted gases from decomposing bodies from hundreds of feet up. The researcher said that it was not clear which specific chemical was sensed because the smell of death is complex. Others point to a broader source, ethyl mercaptan, which is produced at the start of decay.

If you like the sultry aroma of vultures I’m sure you’ll love the taste of vulture meat. Locally caught shrimp tastes like the local ocean smells because they feed off of it, so it’s possible that buzzard meat is going to have a similar flavor to the carcasses they munch on as well.

The only feathered beast I would recommend that you avoid is the vulture. Its diet (rotten meat) leaves it tasting like its meals and keeps it pumped full of the worst bacteria. It’s a bad sign that nothing eats a dead buzzard–not even other buzzards.