If a human corpse is left alone in the wilderness( i.e. forest area) would an animal eat the human's heart along with the regular bits? Or, do animals normally forgo organs and favor muscle and bone?
Last edited:
Will wild animals eat your heart?
- Thread starter KittenEV
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2015
- Messages
- 2,699
- Reaction score
- 423
- Location
- Germany, native Israeli
- Website
- annagiladi.wixsite.com
mirandashell
Banned
squishy parts are meal. bone parts are not. I watched the circle of life on safari once--with an eland. The lion ate the big bits, including the heart! The hyenas ate the muscle and viscera lazily left behind. The vultures came in for round three and picked the fleshy bits off the bones. In the end, there was a neat pile of bones sitting in the grass. And several others like it. They would treat a human in the same way.
So, yes! (-;
So, yes! (-;
Last edited:
Animals are opportunistic eaters and will always go for the most easily obtained and largest concentration of calories in what they eat. It's a survival mechanism: calories = energy. It's why grizzly bears with an abundance of salmon to eat will focus on the skin, brains and eggs and ignore the meat of the fish. Wolves generally eat the organ meat of their kills first. So yes, the heart of your theoretical body in the woods would probably be among the first parts consumed.
Depending on your diet, they might avoid the liver. Everything else is fair game. The liver of meat-eaters tends to be toxic.
Internal organs are a delicacy to predators. So as others have mentioned, they're going to be the first to go, then tissue. Bone and hide will hang on longest, but scavengers and weather will scatter what's left of the skeleton. Depending upon the environment (temperature, humidity, fauna, etc), in a matter of days, and rarely more than a couple weeks, nothing recognizable as a corpse will remain.
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2007
- Messages
- 6,577
- Reaction score
- 740
Not really, there is a specific problem with eating polar bear livers because of their diet, but that is not a generalization about meat eaters in general or even other bears' livers. Specifically with them it is due to the seal content of their diet resulting in if someone eats the polar bear's liver potentially getting hypervitaminosis A.
The scavengers that find a body will prefer different parts and there is a pecking order. Here vultures are likely to be first on the scene and they seem to like the liver the best. At night the coyotes will come by and they can digest bones, but not hair. If you are in wolverine country, they can even digest hair and teeth.
It's not going to be alone for long. What's the setting? There are many types of forests and potential weather issues as well as different scavengers depending upon the part of the world.
The other thing that scavengers do is fight over their food and drag parts away. So, many of these cop shows finding an intact skeleton are unrealistic.
Last edited:
I don't know about everyone saying the bones are last pickings. Having watched plenty of farm cats chomp up chicken bones to get at the marrow, which is calorie-rich, wouldn't a predator with big enough jaws think that a human femur was well worth cracking open?
mirandashell
Banned
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2007
- Messages
- 6,577
- Reaction score
- 740
Yes and no. Yes if they can, basically. Some don't have strong enough jaws. However some raptors are known to drop bones from high above onto rocks. In America, the big cats are essentially gone. Wolves are gone from most places. Coyotes will eat bones. It mostly depends on how hungry they are. It takes more energy to gnaw than to chomp. If they are hungry they will gnaw. I leave winter-kill sheep and pig carcasses out for the scavengers. Generally all you find about 2 weeks later is the skull without the jaw.