Bambi Ate Thumper
Why herbivores sometimes eat meat.
I stood in front of a smoking grill at a campground in Florida with a pair of raw T-bone steaks. As I dropped them onto the grill, I had that eerie sense of being stared at. I turned around and saw a whitetail doe staring at me from only a few yards away. Habituated to human presence and living in a place where hunting was forbidden, she seemed very interested in what I was doing. When the steaks came off the grill I sat down to eat and found an aggressive snout that wanted a share. I carved off a bite of rare meat and held it out for her. This supposed herbivore greedily devoured bites of cow flesh. Realizing that nobody would ever believe me, I grabbed a camera and got it on video.
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The more I looked around, the more exceptions I began to find. It turns out that deer of various species have long been observed eating the flesh of the dead. Scientists have recorded deer devouring dead fish that had drifted to shore, gobbling them up at a rate of up to eight per minute. Deer have often been spotted feeding on larger carrion—sometimes even on the guts of other dead deer.
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Other groups of herbivores have also been caught crossing the divide. Hippopotamuses have been filmed eating meat often enough that it can’t be dismissed as a fluke. In fact, they have even been witnessed in the act of cannibalism. Most reports of hippos eating meat involve the scavenging of animals killed by other causes. But sometimes hippos will hunt, kill, and eat prey. In 2002, there were news reports from Ethiopia’s Kaffa Province of hippos killing and eating livestock.
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