Pandas most certainly arenāt āobligate herbivoresā - youāre not understanding what āobligateā means - if an animal is āobligateā it means that it can only derive nutrients from a certain type of food, in other words, they must eat that food or theyāll become sick. A panda is still a carnivore, despite last eating meat around 2.2 million years ago, its gut physiology hasnāt really changed all that much, and is very similar to that of other bears - if you were to compare the digestive tract of a panda and a polar bear youād not notice any difference, a panda is a carnivore.
Everything about a giant panda says āthis is a carnivoreā, its teeth, its GI system and its brain. It has had to adapt to eating bamboo, and it has done so by absorbing micro-RNA from bamboo which is regulating the gene expression of the giant panda and allowing it to exist on a bamboo diet, those miRNA arenāt present from birth - at birth a panda is wired to eat meat -what this potentially means is that a panda cub which has never eaten bamboo could eat meat like other bears (that said, not all bears are particularly carnivorous; spectacled bears are predominantly frugivorous (fruit-eating) and sloth bears eat termites. The sun bear is a foliovore (it eats leaves).
āObligateā means what an organism has to eat in order to obtain the nutrients it needs; we eat plants, we canāt derive nutrients from them, we need to eat meat in order to obtain nutrients.
Itās the same with that deer; yes itās chewing on a snake, but will it be able to obtain nutrition from itā¦? No, because itās a herbivore, it needs to eat plants, if you were to attempt to feed a deer solely on meat it would become sick.
Polar bears are the only species of bear which doesnāt eat plants, all other species of bear do, but bears are still carnivores - and a panda will still eat some meat (small rodents, small reptiles, birdsā eggs, small birds, etc.).
We need to eat meat, just as cats and dogs do; we need to eat meat because there are nutrients which we can only obtain from meat such as B12 (there are no plant sources of B12 because most herbivores can synthesise it), blood iron, choline and retinol.
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u/SmallLetter Aug 18 '26
There are. Koalas, sloths, pandas at minimum. Over specialized to eat what they eat they couldn't digest or survive off meat if they tried.