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Journalism of Courage
Many people deem animals like deer and giraffes as herbivores. However, recent videos have emerged that contradict this assumption. On Sunday, Indian Forest Services officer Susanta Nanda shared a video that showed a deer eating a snake.
A day later Nanda shared another undated video that showed a giraffe chomping on what appears to be bones. These videos created a buzz online as they raked up thousands of views. This is not the first time that herbivores have been spotted eating meat or the bones of other animals.
In September 2010, science journalist and wildlife enthusiast Jackson Landers shared a video on YouTube that showed a young deer accepting meat right out of his hands when Landers was cooking steak at a campsite. In a following article in Slate about herbivores eating meat, Landers wrote, “Even animals from this highly plant-specialised group will eat meat when given the chance.” He attributed this seemingly odd consumption behaviour to the survival mechanism that many species are adopting due to “upheaval” caused by “habitats disappear, climates change, food sources shift, and old niches in ecosystems disappear as new ones emerge.”
In an article for National Geographic, journalist Sarah Gibbens explained the tendency of giraffes to feed on the bones of dead animals as a sign of osteophagia, a practice in which herbivores eat bones, horns, fallen antlers, and ivory to get nutrients like phosphorous and calcium that they don’t get from plants.
