Vegetarian Carnivore

Everyone knows tigers love tofu.

"I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food."

— Bruce, Finding Nemo

In Real Life, vegetation isn't necessarily the best source of food. It's hard to digest, low in some essential nutrients, and requires a specialized digestive system in order to properly process it into anything useful for the animal eating said vegetation (symbiotic bacteria in the gut may even be necessary to digest some types of plants). Because of this, most carnivorous animals are not well-adapted to eating plant materials (unlike herbivores, naturally).

In the world of fiction, however, this isn't the case. A normally carnivorous character can easily switch to a strictly vegetarian diet whenever they want without worrying about digestive problems. This usually occurs in shows with many Funny Animals as a means to address Carnivore Confusion by establishing a normally carnivorous animal as someone who prefers dining on a carrot to dining on a rabbit. It is often used for My Species Doth Protest Too Much characters to indicate that they have switched their diet to separate themselves from their more "predatory" associates, since Predators Are Mean and Herbivores Are Friendly. Or, though not as often, maybe they decide that hunting for food is too much work and decide to just switch to veggies.

A subtrope of Carnivore Confusion and Artistic Licence – Biology. Contrast Ascended to Carnivorism for when a normally herbivorous animal decides to eat meat, or Man-Eating Plant for when it's the plants that decide to switch around the food chain. Compare with Veganopia. Vampires who refuse to feed on humans are common enough to have their own trope. Being in a Predator-Prey Friendship might mean the predator invoking this.

No direct relation to Extreme Omnivore however, since the latter refers to actual omnivores.

Note: This ONLY applies to carnivorous characters^note including species that are technically omnivorous but typically still need some meat and can't thrive on an all-vegetarian diet, such as dogs that switch to eating just fruits, vegetables, and other plant-based foods.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Animal Land, this is one of Tarouza's goals in order to get meat-eating animals to get along with plant-eating ones. He finds the solution in the form of the Eternity Fruit.
• Beastars takes place in a World of Funny Animals where all animals are sapient and meat is illegal. Carnivores typically eat plant or dairy-based proteins, while chickens and cows can get paid for their unfertilized eggs and milk to be sold for food. The truth that everyone ignores, however, is that most carnivores do actually eat meat obtained from the Black Market that exists specifically to deal in meat.
• In Hyper Police there is an anthropomorphic lion named Mr. Nupu. How is he first introduced into the show? He walks into a bar, huge and bulky and intimidating in an anthropomorphic lion sort of way, and in a deep and serious voice orders.... a vegetarian stir-fry meal. Ba-dum bum!
• Kemono Friends: There are many types of Friends based on herbivores, carnivores, or omnivores. But all of them feed on the park's Japari buns; due to this, Friends don't hunt or fight each other unless they are playing, allowing friendships between herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores.
• Kimba the White Lion: Several of the carnivores including the hero become vegetarians when they are no longer allowed to eat each other under Kimba's new rule.
• Kiteretsu Daihyakka: The anime features living plesiosaurs that eat vegetables and weeds. Real life plesiosaurs are carnivores.
• Pokémon: The Series: Nearly all Pokémon are shown to love eating berries (mostly because of their status-healing effects, admittedly). This even includes what should be strictly carnivorous Pokémon like Mightyena (a hyena), Liepard (a leopard), Arbok (a cobra), and Rowlet (an owl). This is in the series' Bible. Pokémon are forbidden from being depicted eating each other. A few early episodes didn't follow that rule, however later seasons always do. This is, however, only true of the anime. The games have no issue discussing Pokémon dietary habits.
• Japolo from Shamanic Princess is a Weasel Mascot but is depicted as a herbivore.
• Tama & Friends: Pochi the puppy usually eats tofu because his owner runs the local tofu shop.
• You Are Being Summoned, Azazel had an episode where a man had supposedly taught a dog to be a vegetarian. This is subverted by the end, where it turns out he was actually lying.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf features a vegetarian wolf whose Trademark Favorite Food is bananas. His name is even Banana Wolf to drive the point home.
• In the Tik Tak Tail episode "Tak Turns Vegetarian", Tik gives a fake doctor's diagnosis to Tak the tiger that requires him to eat only vegetables such as carrots to cure himself. While Tak does try a carrot and dislikes it, his sentient tail is more than happy with the deal due to carrots being his favorite food.

Comic Books

• Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: All carnivorous characters, with the occasional exception of Peter Porkchops's old nemesis Wolfie. This is portrayed as a serious psychological problem on Wolfie's part and eventually leads to him becoming a terrifying human-like creature called the Wuz-Wolf.
• In the Monica's Gang franchise, Horace is a deep-thinking young tyrannosaur who has lettuce as his Trademark Favorite Food and has several herbivore friends.
• Lucky Luke: Nelson the circus lion who only eats lentil soup, because the lion is just too old to chew on solid food. When he is sent loose in the street he only scares the sheriff so he can eat the grub he was serving to the prisoners.
• Shazam!: In The Power of Shazam, Mr. Tawny is a sapient vegetarian tiger...which makes his shilling a barbecue sauce awkward.
• Sonic the Comic: Sonic's favorite food is bean burgers (unlike the animated series, where it was chili dogs). Hedgehogs are carnivorous and are historically known as insectivores.

Fairy Tales

• Subverted in a fairy tale where a little girl befriends a wolf she saved. The wolf tries to switch to a vegetarian diet (due to the girl not liking that he has to kill other animals to feed), but nearly starves himself in the process and ends up going back to his carnivorous diet.
• In "Goldilocks", the bears are introduced cooking a meal of porridge. Technically bears are omnivorous, but literary scholars have pointed out that the porridge serves the narrative function of helping young readers feel less worried that the bears will eat Goldilocks.

Fan Works

• Heritage of the Wolf: Balto, a wolf, rarely eats meat because he doesn't like eating beings who died of unnatural causes. He only reluctantly eats meat.
• The Rise of Darth Vulcan: Subverted. Thestrals are omnivores, and must eat flesh and drink blood to survive. But since this scared the rest of the pony races, they made up some nonsense about the blood hunger being a mental disorder, made it extremely illegal to drink blood or sell it as a drink, and forced the thestrals to use an alchemical substitute which barely keeps them alive. This gets many thestrals easily swayed to Darth Vulcan's side, and when Princess Luna finds out that her sister Celestia permitted all this to happen, she gets very angry.

Films — Animation

• Alpha and Omega: Reba and Janice are two female omega wolves who are vegetarians. They eat mostly blueberries, which causes their mouths to stain blue.
• An American Tail: Tiger is a cat who is appalled at the very thought of eating mice. He does occasionally eat fish, though, making him a pescetarian, despite calling himself a vegetarian.
  Tiger: ...but what I really like is some nice—shh...—broccoli.
• Socrates the Lion from Animals United is a pacifist and Vegetarian.
• Finding Nemo has a trio of sharks, led by a great white named Bruce, that want to give up their fish-eating ways (with the help of a Monsters Anonymous-style rehab program) and become vegetarians. It's not made clear what they decide to switch their diet to, but it is shown in the film that they are struggling to make the change. When Bruce inadvertently smells a drop of blood from Dory, he goes into a frenzy as his friends try to hold him back, telling him not to fall off the wagon.
  "I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food."
• The 2012 animated movie Gummibär: The Yummy Gummy Search for Santa includes a vampire bat who drinks fruit juice instead of blood.
• Downplayed in Ice Age, where Diego the sabertooth tiger, and later his mate Shira, are shown chasing herbivores (in vain), but the only thing they're ever shown eating is grapes.
  • Parodied in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. When Sid the sloth's three adopted T. rex children are presented with a live Archaeopteryx by their mother, he tries to get them to eat broccoli instead (insisting he wants to raise them vegetarian). Needless to say, it doesn't work.
• According to Word of God, this is the case for every carnivorous animal in the Kung Fu Panda universe. Tigress, Viper, and Mantis are shown to greatly enjoy Po's homemade noodles in vegetable broth, while in the spin-off series Legends of Awesomeness, other characters, like the Croc Bandits, eat apples and other fruits. Wolf Boss in Kung Fu Panda 2 threatens to eat a bunny, but it's unclear whether it's literal or just a figure of speech.
• The Land Before Time:
  • Another subversion would be Chomper. When faced with the dilemma of being friends with sapient dinosaurs that are also potential prey he decides to switch his diet. Not to veggies, but to insects.
  • An interesting variation occurs with the various pterosaurs ("fliers") in the films such as Petrie. Petrie is a Pteranodon. Pteranodon had a diet that consisted mainly of fish. However, Petrie and his family are vegetarians, yet it's never stated why ^note Ironically the fish are the only species never portrayed as sapient.
• Leo the Lion: The protagonist is a vegetarian lion. It's never really explained why this is, but he has a song about being one. That being said, he looks horribly emaciated... which is exactly what one would expect from an obligate carnivore trying to be a vegetarian.
• The Seventh Brother, a film about a group of rabbits adopting a puppy, actually averts this. While Tiny tries eating the same plants the rabbits do for a while, he begins to grow sick and weak because he just can't live on the stuff. In the end, the rabbits return him to his human owners, and his health immediately begins improving once he starts eating dog food.
• The DreamWorks Animation film Shark Tale had Lenny, a shark that decided to go vegetarian (even the very thought of eating meat made him nauseous). He disguised himself as a dolphin in order to prevent other fish from fearing him, even though dolphins are also predators.
• Heart from You Are Umasou falls under this, being a Tyrannosaurus rex raised by a family of Maiasaura. It's later subverted, in that he does switch to a carnivorous diet (though he is horrified at first that he actually likes the taste of meat), but he will still eat berries now and again. It's notably deconstructed in that Heart's biological father Baku later observes that he was slowly starving under his original diet of leaves and berries until he switched to eating meat (which his well-meaning Maiasaura family was likely unaware of, having no frame of reference for what a healthy Tyrannosaurus should look like).
• Zootopia establishes the anthropomorphic mammals don't eat each other anymore, and the creators specified that they intentionally decided to leave insects and fish as non-sapient to allow for a socially accepted source of protein for the carnivores. However, the trope is Played for Laughs with Officer Clawhauser, a cheetah who constantly eats donuts and other sweets.

Films — Live-Action

• Siveth the Ice-dragon from Dragonheart: Vengeance claims to have sworn off meat a long time ago.
• Godzilla Junior from the Heisei (1984-1995) era of Godzilla films is shown to dine on leaves as a baby and toddler, despite the fact that it was established that Godzilla's species is carnivorous. Given that he started eating whales and presumably fish as a teenager, it seems like either he grew out of it or the species is actually omnivorous. Still got a mouth full of fangs though...
• The titular character from Theodore Rex is a Tyrannosaurus and a "recovering carnivore". His diet mainly consists of vegetables and cookies.
• Seven Pounds has Emily, the female Love Interest, claim her Great Dane is a vegetarian, eating only tofu and steamed broccoli. Obviously, the dog disagrees, devouring meat when offered it by Ben.

Literature

• The BFG: The titular giant. While his species is carnivorous, he has decided to eat a nasty-tasting vegetable called a "Snozzcumber" instead since he finds the idea of eating children appalling. In fact, it's the only other option he has besides eating humans since no other plants grow in Giant Land. Once he's out of Giant Land, however, he has no problem eating normal human food, including sausages and bacon.
• Children of Steel had Terease, an anthropomorphic leopard raised by vegetarian humans. She took vitamin supplements at home but couldn't find them on the Astra, by the time Raj practically forced her to eat meat she was severely emaciated.
• Discworld:
  • The Lancre Wowhawk, unlike the other birds of prey kept by Hodgesaargh the Royal Falconer, is a mild-mannered bird "always on the lookout for the vegetarian option".
  • A vegetarian spider is briefly mentioned in the discussion of Discworld genetics; the wizards experimented with breeding fruit flies and peas, but misunderstood the basics, and said spider ate the buzzy green thing that resulted.
  • Werewolf policewoman Angua von Uberwald is a vegetarian in human form. She does steal chickens as a wolf, though.
• Polo in Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria gets into a stash of granola with dried fruit, oats, chocolate, and nuts. Ferrets are obligate carnivores who can't properly digest vegetation. Raisins and chocolate are also deadly to ferrets.
• How Droofus The Dragon Lost His Head: Droofus is a dragon, but after picking an insect out of a spider's web, he finds he doesn't want to eat it and begins eating the grass instead. This makes him useful to a local farmer, who uses him as a plowhorse, letting him pull up and eat the grass while his tail breaks up the soil.
• A Lion in the Meadow: Exaggerated for the lion — not only is he a vegetarian, he only eats one thing, namely apples.
• One Stormy Night has this as a driving conflict of the plot because the wolf Gabu is a carnivore but doesn't want to eat his goat friend, Mei. He tries to avoid eating meat but finds he can't do it.
• The children's book Piranhas Don't Eat Bananas is about Brian, a piranha who likes fruit, much to the annoyance of his friends, who insist that they have to eat meat. Piranhas actually are omnivorous, and some kinds are even specialized fruit-eaters.
• Redwall:
  • The good-guy creatures of the series are mostly vegetarian, save the occasional fish or shrimp. This is plausible for the likes of omnivorous mice and squirrels, but not for shrews or otters which are obligate carnivores.
  • The badger characters are also shown to have a mostly vegetarian diet. Like bears, badgers are actually omnivores and fruits and vegetation do take up a good portion of their diet along with insects, worms, and small mammals.
• Invoked but averted in The Unadulterated Cat. The entry for "the green, organic, whole-earthbox cat" features a vegan couple who worked out "a vegetarian diet with occasional treats of fish" for their Siamese, and were blissfully unaware that it had consequently become one of the most dedicated hunters in the area.
• In the picture book Wolfie the Bunny, the adopted baby wolf Wolfie devours the carrots fed to him by his adoptive rabbit family, despite the repeated insistence of his adoptive sister Dot and her friends that "He's going to eat us all up!"

Live-Action TV

• Eno in Dinosapien is an evolved dinosaur descended from the carnivorous Dromaeosaurus, who enjoys leaves as well as meat.

Music

• Referenced in the song "I Know I'm A Wolf" by Young Heretics:
  Yes, I know I'm a wolf
  And I've been known to bite
  But the rest of my pack—I have left them behind
  And my teeth may be sharp
  And I've been raised to kill
  But the thought of fresh meat, it is making me ill
  So I'm telling you that you'll be safe with me

Myths & Religion

• Korean Mythology: In a famous Korean myth, a tiger and a bear wanted to be human and, in order to do so, they had to eat nothing but garlic and herbs for 40 days. The tiger could not and gave up, while the bear persevered, became a woman, married a semi-divine being named Hwanung, and gave birth to a son named Tangun, the founder of the first organized Korean state. There's actually some truth here: bears are omnivores that can digest vegetable matter while tigers are obligate carnivores. This doesn't mean they can't digest plants at all, just that they need nutrients that aren't found in a strictly vegan diet, the big one for felines being taurine. (Perhaps more to the point, garlic and related plants like onions are actually fairly toxic to cats; their livers can't deal with it.)
• The Bible: In Book of Isaiah, Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes to reign, "the lion shall eat straw like the ox," and animals will live together in peace. As this is mentioned to be a state of paradise similar to Eden, some theologists think this means that the cycle of predation only came about as a result of The Fall and all animals could once subsist on the plentiful fruits and greens in the garden.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh found a flower with rejuvenation properties, but it was eaten by a snake while he took a bath. It's believed that this is a story meant to explain why snakes shed their skin.

Puppet Shows

• In the '90s Canadian kids show Chicken Minute there is a fox named Minute that became vegetarian since start living in the same shack with a hen named Chicken Mama. He switches to eating popcorn, like a friend of theirs, Anatole Bonbon, an alligator.
• In Jim Henson's Dinosaurs, Robbie Sinclair, the son of a megalosaurus and an allosaurus, converts to herbivorism in the episode "I Never Ate For My Father". Earl is initially outraged but learns to accept it. (This is a series where a major character is a carnivorous triceratops, so it seems diet is entirely a matter of choice.)
• On Sesame Street, a character who appeared regularly in the 1990s was Chicago, a vegetarian lion. His favorite veggie was — surprise, surprise — broccoli.
  • Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Indian co-production of Sesame Street, also had a vegetarian lion, named Boombah.

Video Games

• Campfire Cat Cafe & Snack Bar: Downplayed. Bad News Burk, a shark, first orders roasted zucchini. However, like all customers, once you unlock him, Burk will start to order other dishes, some of which have meat.
• Club Penguin: Herbert Percival Bear, Esquire, hates meat and frozen food, unlike your typical polar bear.
• Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped: Baby T. is often shown to eat grass in his Idle Animation, despite being a predator. This is more apparent in the N. Sane Trilogy version.
• Croc: The titular Croc was raised by a group of furry rodent-like creatures known as Gobbos. Instead of eating them, he's stated to eat over 150 buckets of peas for breakfast alone.
• Donkey Kong Country: The crocodilian Kremlings stole the Kongs' Banana Hoard for its nutritional value. This is never brought up in later games, where the Kremlings and other villains take the bananas to distract the Kongs from their bigger schemes (Donkey Kong 64) and/or to exploit the magical powers of the fruits (Donkey Kong Country Returns). In regards to the first game, this was Accidentally-Correct Writing considering crocodilians do occasionally eat fruit, including bananas.
• Dragon City: The Food of the dragons all consist of plants and are represented by red berries. Some dragons are shown to be eating insects, and the Pure Sea Dragon eats fish, but those are meant to be aesthetic animation.
• Flush Force: The favorite food of Twin Grin, a two-headed shark, is apples, despite the fact that fish is an option to feed the Flushies.
• Kittens Game: The kittens feed exclusively on catnip at first. Later upgrades allow you to build pastures to farm unspecified animals, but the Flavor Text implies this is solely for their milk.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Most animals will move towards and eat specific food items if they spot them on the ground, with different species having different diets. Foxes, which in real life are opportunistic omnivores that favor meat, will eat fruit and nothing else. This is especially notable for being averted with other animals — bears and dogs are broad omnivores and wolves will only eat meat items.
• Lonely Wolf Treat: Treat's best friend Trick is a vegetarian wolf who has never eaten meat in their life. Late in the game, Trick befriends an animal rights activist group whose members include two vegetarian jackals.
• Nibblers: Jawnathan, despite being a shark, prefers eating fruit over lizards, as lizards ruin his diet.
• In Parkasaurus: Sea Monsters, Archelon is a herbivore, even though it was an obligate carnivore in real life.
• Downplayed in The Sapling. Due to the fact that the only plankton in the game is algae, all mouths capable of filter feeding are at least partially herbivorous even if their real world inspiration fed on zooplankton. The game otherwise averts this, as animals will only eat food that fits into their specific diet, so you won't see a species that evolved to specifically eat live prey or fresh meat going around munching down on fruit.
• Snake: Many adaptations have the snake eat only fruit, mushrooms, etc. instead of other animals or meatballs, presumably to keep it sympathetic. Examples include Hyper Viper, AxySnake or Super Nibbly. In reality, snakes are exclusively carnivores.
• Snake Pass: Noodle, the snakey protagonist, is stated to be a vegetarian by the loading screen tips.

Web Original

• The Dro discusses this trope and the problems it can cause in this video, as a response to some other animal owners who feed their carnivorous animals vegan diets.
• Serina:
  • Averted with Bridge. The woodcrafter who adopted him knew that he wouldn't be able to subsist on the same tree-based diet as himself. At first, he fed him with fish he caught from nearby rivers, but it didn't take Bridge long to start hunting the small molodonts and smerps infesting the village of his own volition.
  • Played straight with the thalassic gravediggers. When they started living on the ocean, they would sometimes eat small amounts of seaweed to supplement their diets. Their discovery of fire made it easier for them to digest when cooked and they would start regularly consuming more and more until the seaweed made up around a quarter of their natural diet.
  • A variation occurs with some of the daydreamers. They are physically designed to feed on larger prey animals like proplets and other dolfinches but after some of them come to believe that feeding on these intelligent, closely related animals is immoral, they stop eating them altogether and start eating things like fish and other smaller sea creatures exclusively, much like how some humans give up meat like beef and chicken but will still eat fish for protein.

Webcomics

• In Kevin & Kell it's unusual, and generally frowned upon, but happens now and then.
  • Bruno, a wolf, becomes a closet grass-eater^note he has a literal closet full of grass in his room under the influence of his herbivorous girlfriend and then goes openly "trans-diet" and has several stomachs installed surgically.
  • Sheila, Kell's near-identical cousin, went through several alternative lifestyles that included herbivorous diets. However, when she is first introduced, she has already become a "born-again meat-eater".
  • Original description of the strip on CompuServe Funnies Forum stated that at home Kell cooks tofu making it look like meat products for herself and Rudy. This idea was never mentioned in the strips^note One strip had Kevin doing this, but long after it was made clear this isn't Kell and Rudy's usual diet and after a while disappeared from the description.
• In Meadowhawk a modern dragon muses on what his medieval ancestors would think of them eating tofu-and-broccoli stir fry.
• The titular characters of Ozy and Millie appear to be vegetarian foxes, though it's not mentioned much, there's one strip where Millie's mom orders vegetarian soup and the clerk makes a big deal out of it. And Ozy's dragon dad prefers to roast tofu knights.
• In The Perry Bible Fellowship, Scorchy is a dragon who told a little girl they'd stop eating people, and after getting caught one too many times, finally hold themselves to it. Scorchy wastes away, content with her happiness, as she feeds them leaves without noticing Scorchy dying in front of her.
• Raine Dog is vegan, apparently Dana Simpson likes to insert that into her comics.

Western Animation

• Bucky and Pepito: The episode "The Coyote Catcher" had a coyote stealing tomatoes.
• Parodied in an episode of Futurama. An Animal Wrongs Group claims that they have taught a lion to become a strict vegetarian, in response to Leela pointing out that while humans eat meat, so do animals. The lion in question looks very sickly and lets out a single pathetic-sounding cough.
• Gigantosaurus: All the carnivorous dinosaurs are capable of eating plant material, fruits, and nuts, including the titular character who is a normally carnivorous Giganotosaurus.
• Subverted by The Goode Family's dog Che. They think he's a vegetarian but he's actually responsible for a lot of missing neighborhood pets.
• An episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy featured an old lady and her pet spider. Said spider was shown to love eating melons.
• One episode of Johnny Test had a ladybug that loves to eat flowers.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: While this isn't especially prominent in the show as a whole, a few examples have cropped up, especially in the earlier seasons:
  • Generally speaking, ferrets — which, like other weasels, in real life eat meat and nothing else — have a tendency to be shown snacking on bowls of celery, carrots, nuts, and leafy greens alongside the rest of Fluttershy's menagerie of woodland critters.
  • "Griffon the Brush Off": Gilda — who, as a griffon, is a combination of two animals that are both obligate hypercarnivores — is shown casually eating apples and sugary sweets.
  • "She Talks to Angel": Fluttershy makes peace between the herbivores and carnivores in her animal sanctuary by getting the predators to agree to only eat plants while staying there. A few of them (such as the raccoon family and Harry the bear) could reasonably pull this off; others (such as Sandra the wolf and Antoine the python) most certainly couldn't; even in the episode, they don't enjoy their new diets to any degree.
• Parodied in an episode of Sponge Bob Squarepants. In the episode, the Flying Dutchman reveals that he devours people when they are shown to be lousy members of his crew. Spongebob remembers that he still has one wish left and wishes that the Flying Dutchman was a vegetarian and therefore wouldn't eat them. The Flying Dutchman then just turns them all into fruit so he can eat them.
• Ginger, the cat who co-owns the village shop in Peter Rabbit is vegan, although he does like cakes. Presumably the same goes for his canine partner Pickles. (Not the case in the original book, where they simply think eating customers is bad for business.)
• In the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "Rock N' Roar", when Buster gets a pet T. rex, which he names "Rover", he tries raising him to eat vegetables, since he has no meat byproducts. This doesn't work at first, and Buster is willing to sacrifice himself to keep Rover from going hungry, but Rover can't eat his own surrogate parent, so he agrees to let Buster feed him large amounts of vegetables.

Real Life

• In the United Kingdom, a cat named Dante developed a strange and inexplicable aversion to meat, and only eats vegetables and fruit: very unusual indeed for felines, who happen to be obligate carnivores. Dante's owner in fact has to hide pieces of meat into his food to make sure he gets the nutrients he needs, though he's been known to leave them behind if he tastes them in his meals.
• Some individual alligators are known to eat fruit. No one is quite sure why, and the alligators do still mostly eat meat when given the chance, but scientists think it may be an adaptation for when food supplies are low (and might help explain how crocs have survived as long as they have). Captive alligators seem to enjoy eating watermelon as part of enrichment. Some prehistoric crocodilians were, in fact, herbivorous.
• There's at least one known example of a vegetarian lion that lived 9 years. Note that this could never have happened in the wild. Cats—including lions—are obligate carnivores (which means they need nutrients that are simply not found in plants) and hypercarnivores (meaning that more than 70% of their diet is meat). The diet of the "vegetarian lion" therefore contained many artificial supplements. (Certainly taurine, for a start; cats that don't get taurine in their diet go blind.)
• Bagheera kiplingi, the only known mostly herbivorous spider. It feeds on protein-rich pods growing on certain kinds of Acacia tree, which are meant to be eaten by symbiotic ants.
• Web-weaving spiders will usually eat the pollen that gets stuck in their webs. Either when they clean the web or they ingest when they are done. Some species can seasonally get more than 50% of their diet this way.
• The aardvark cucumber is a species of plant that has evolved a mutual relationship with the aardvark, which eats the fruit for the water, defecates the seeds, and buries it. This is interesting because the aardvark otherwise is an exclusive insect eater. Carnivores can actually be preferred seed dispersers over herbivores because they can't chew up or fully digest the seeds, and it's possible that avocados evolved their fatty flesh and durians evolved their intense odor to trick carnivores into eating them.
• The giant panda belongs to the order Carnivora and has the digestive system of a carnivore, but despite this, it's almost entirely herbivorous, with bamboo shoots and leaves making up more than 99% of its diet.
• The striped hyena has been observed eating fruit and will sometimes raid farms for the fruit, ignoring the animals.
• Some transhumanists and animal rights philosophers such as David Pearce, Peter Singer, and Oscar Horta believe that, in the future, biotechnology should be used to turn all predators into herbivores to prevent the suffering they cause to the animals they prey on. The question of whether this will ever be feasible or even desirable is a subject of considerably more debate, however.

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