National Post (National Edition)
Snowshoe hares feast on own dead, new study finds
‘Opportunistic’ carnivores in winter
Despite a long-standing belief that hares keep a strictly vegan diet, a surprising new Canadian study has found that they will actually eat whatever meat they can find, even if it comes from a fellow hare.
The study, published in the journal Northwestern Naturalist, saw researchers spend more than two years putting out road-killed animal carcasses in a region of the Yukon Territory populated by snowshoe hares. Then, using motion-capture cameras, they watched what the hares were eating and how often.
“It was almost 15 per cent of the carcasses we had put out (that) had a snowshoe hare scavenging at them … so it seems like something that is pretty regular in their winter diet,” University of Alberta researcher Michael Peers, the study’s lead author, told the Edmonton Journal.
The Yukon hares ate lynx, birds such as snow buntings and spruce grouse — and their own brethren. A hare carcass left in a stand of trees in late 2015 was scavenged 24 times by fellow hares over the course of a week.
“This carcass deployment was particularly unique, as multiple hares were seen at the carcass simultaneously, and based on posture and subsequent chases, it appeared that individuals defended the carcass from other hares,” the study says.
The research adds to a growing body of evidence showing that herbivores will frequently choose to eat meat when it’s available but are simply bad at finding it.
A viral video from 2010 shows a deer eating a baby bird that had fallen on the ground. Canadian, U.S. and Scottish bird researchers have since confirmed the same phenomenon of deer eating fallen baby birds or mowing through the contents of a low-lying nest.
In a 2008 study in the journal Southern Naturalist, researchers placed cameras at northern bobwhite nests to track the bird’s natural predators and were surprised to see two deer casually showing up to eat eggs.
Four years ago, Texas researchers even documented the first-ever evidence of a deer scavenging human bones. It occurred at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, a place where donated human bodies are left outside to study the effects of decomposition.
In early 2015, two whitetailed deer were photographed visiting a badly decomposed human body in order to gnaw on its rib bones. In describing images of the carnivorous deer, researchers noted the amusing detail that the ribs hung from the deers’ mouths “like a cigar.”
Deer are lousy hunters and they lack the sharp teeth needed to tear into a fresh carcass, so most of their meat-eating is “opportunistic”: an already dead carcass or something small and easily overpowered.
Beavers, another alleged natural vegan, were only recently documented as eating the occasional salmon during spawning season. “We suggest this behaviour may be a fairly common strategy,” reads a 2014 paper in Canadian Field-naturalist.
Unlike deer, snowshoe hares seem only to eat meat if they have to. The University of Alberta study found that hares did all their meateating in the winter, when protein is hard to come by, and would ignore carcasses in the green months of summer.
However, Youtube videos do exist of pet rabbits mowing through burgers or other meat offered to them by their owners.
A particularly illuminating 2016 study out of Switzerland found that if given the opportunity, domestic rabbits would eat flesh every day. A team of zoologists reported on a Swiss bird sanctuary where domestic rabbits shared an enclosure with a population of small birds-of-prey.
Almost immediately, the rabbits began regularly tearing into the dishes of dead chicks and mice left out for the birds, and soon seemed to count the meat as their favourite food.
“When the caretaker brought the daily prey ration for the raptors, the rabbits immediately ran towards the person and followed him even when the dish was placed on an upper perch,” wrote the paper.