Nearly every herbivore will eat meat if it can. They just aren’t evolved to be good at catching live things. But meat is much better nutritionally than plants, so they go for it when they can.
If you spend enough time around farms, you’ll see cows eating young chickens or small birds that get too close, if you leave meat lures for animals, deer are often the first that show up to eat it, etc.
Meat is actually much much easier to break down than plant material. It’s mostly soft-walled structures, where plants have hard cell walls that need to be broken down with special processes to get the goodies out.
As a result, plant material requires multiple processing steps (chewing cud like cows and other ruminant animals, consuming first-pass fecal matter like rabbits, etc.), and then basically ferments using bacteria to break down the cell walls, so they have special adaptations to accommodate all that extra processing, like the multi-chamber stomachs, large cecum, etc.
Meat, on the other hand, is relatively simple to break down, so obligate carnivores actually have much shorter, simpler, intestinal paths. Omnivores are, as you might expect, in between, with digestive systems more complex and longer than carnivores, but shorter and simpler than herbivores.
Thus, nearly every animal is capable of digesting meat (all, afaik, but I’m not certain so I’ll stick with this), but not every animal is capable of digesting plants.
Nearly every herbivore will eat meat if it can. They just aren’t evolved to be good at catching live things. But meat is much better nutritionally than plants, so they go for it when they can.
If you spend enough time around farms, you’ll see cows eating young chickens or small birds that get too close, if you leave meat lures for animals, deer are often the first that show up to eat it, etc.
This is blowing my mind. I didn’t think their stomachs were equipped.
Meat is actually much much easier to break down than plant material. It’s mostly soft-walled structures, where plants have hard cell walls that need to be broken down with special processes to get the goodies out.
As a result, plant material requires multiple processing steps (chewing cud like cows and other ruminant animals, consuming first-pass fecal matter like rabbits, etc.), and then basically ferments using bacteria to break down the cell walls, so they have special adaptations to accommodate all that extra processing, like the multi-chamber stomachs, large cecum, etc.
Meat, on the other hand, is relatively simple to break down, so obligate carnivores actually have much shorter, simpler, intestinal paths. Omnivores are, as you might expect, in between, with digestive systems more complex and longer than carnivores, but shorter and simpler than herbivores.
Thus, nearly every animal is capable of digesting meat (all, afaik, but I’m not certain so I’ll stick with this), but not every animal is capable of digesting plants.
Here’s some fun links with more info :)
https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/deer-eat-meat-herbivores-and-carnivores-are-not-so-clearly-divided.html
https://www.popsci.com/5-disturbing-meat-loving-herbivores/
Edit to fix second link. Whoops.