6 Misconceptions About What Animals Eat

When we’re babies, many of our parents teach us what sounds animals make, then give us plush animal toys, then show us cartoons starring animals who talk. Many of us, therefore, grow up convinced we know all about animals, even if our knowledge consists entirely of nonsensical stereotypes. We therefore might be quite shocked to learn that, in reality...

1. MICE DON'T LOVE CHEESE
2. CATS CAN’T DIGEST MILK 
3. PEANUTS AREN'T GOOD FOR ELEPHANTS
4. RABBITS AREN’T MADE FOR CARROTS 
5. DON’T FEED DUCKS BREAD 
6. PIRANHAS DON’T EAT HUMANS 

MICE DON'T LOVE CHEESE

We all picture mice nibbling at cheese, and if you buy a mousetrap, it might feature a little drawing of a wedge of cheese on it. The mousetrap’s instructions will not, however, encourage you to bait the mouse by putting cheese in the trap. You’d have a lot more success with peanut butter, which smells good to mice and also has lots of the carbs they enjoy.

In fact, mice will choose most foods in your kitchen over cheese. Mice will even nibble at electrical cables in your home before they attack cheese that you’ve left out. This indicates that cheese not only fails to attract mice but may even somewhat repel them. Cheese does not exist in the wild, after all, and the cheesy smell of bacterial waste products might attract some animals, but not mice. 

Mice may turn to cheese in desperation, though, and cheese was often more accessible to mice than other foods in pantries in the Middle Ages. People may have found mouse-eaten cheese wheels in their larders, and this may have been enough to create the idea that mice love to eat cheese. The idea may have also spread because artists began to commonly draw mice next to big wedges of Swiss cheese full of holes, perhaps since mice are so associated with holes. 

CATS CAN’T DIGEST MILK 

As for the mouse’s enemy, the cat, we all think we know what food to give it: a saucer of milk. Or, in practice, we know enough to give cats actual cat food, but we still have the image in our minds of kindly giving a cat a saucer of milk. Don’t ever do that. Adult cats are generally lactose intolerant. The cat will enjoy the milk just fine, since milk tastes good, but it’ll bloat up afterward and might let loose vomit or diarrhea. 

The idea that milk is for cats probably comes from watching kittens nurse. Like most mammals (including a fair number of humans), cats are able to digest milk when they’re first born but lose this ability as they age. Also, cats' milk has less lactose than cow’s milk, so you shouldn’t serve milk from your fridge to even a kitten.

The idea may also have sprung up from dairy farms. These farms kept cats around to kill mice, and milk was a convenient treat. Cats also don’t have quite as much trouble digesting milk straight from a cow as they do with commercial cow’s milk, which has less cream and proportionally more lactose. 

PEANUTS AREN'T GOOD FOR ELEPHANTS

If you've ever imagined yourself feeding an elephant a handful of peanuts, consider that this is one snack they are not terribly likely to encounter in the scrublands and savannas. No, they eat grasses and branches, of course, so that’s what zoos feed them today. Nuts are too protein-dense to suit elephants. Peanut shells actually suit their needs better than peanuts do. 

The association between elephants and peanuts comes from circuses. Circuses sold peanuts (an extremely cheap snack for the seller, much like popcorn) and circuses had elephants, so patrons fed peanuts to the elephants. Later, some zoos would give people peanuts to feed to elephants because they were playing to people’s expectations. 

As it happens, zoo elephants do enjoy peanut butter as a treat, as many other animals do. But it takes a whole lot of the stuff to satisfy the beasts because elephants are huge. Each one eats some 250 pounds of food a day. 

RABBITS AREN’T MADE FOR CARROTS 

Rabbits are one more animal that would be better off eating leafy greens than eating anything else humans eat, but people still associate them with one specific food. Rabbits are commonly linked to carrots, but this is only because Bugs Bunny nibbles on carrots in cartoons. 

Carrots have been Bugs Bunny’s trademark for 85 years. The first time he nibbled on a carrot, he was doing it as a reference to a then-recent movie, It Happened One Night. Clark Gable’s character in that movie munches on a carrot, and most people in 1940 knew the scene well. When Bugs debuted, they had him reenact the pose that most viewers would recognize.

It’s the equivalent of, today, Judy Hopps in a Zootopia sequel reenacting the scene from KPop Demon Hunters where the group scarf down on food in a plane—but imagine now that people forget the original scene and go on to believe that real-life rabbits enjoy eating kimbap. 

DON’T FEED DUCKS BREAD 

It’s unclear where the idea that you should feed bread to ducks originated. Maybe it came from the fact that people often picnicked next to water, had bread with them for sandwiches, and found bread to be the most convenient food to tear apart and throw to the ducks. Maybe it’s because chickens peck at grain, and bread is the most similar thing to grain we generally have handy when we see ducks in the wild. 

Whatever the reason, people now think sitting on a bench and tossing bits of bread at ducks is the most wholesome thing you can do. But ducks don't get any nutritional value out of bread, so it just fills them up, preventing them from going and eating anything better. 

If you’re wondering what you should feed ducks instead, the answer appears to be: Don’t feed them at all. They can forage just fine on their own, and feeding them just makes them leave even more bird droppings all over the grass. 

PIRANHAS DON’T EAT HUMANS 

Piranhas are one of those crazy dangers we often fear as kids, right up there with falling into a volcano or a vat of acid. Perhaps you might have guessed that these fish don’t kill as many people as many of us pictured, much like how great white sharks don’t kill as many people as Jaws made people think. In reality, most piranhas aren’t nearly as dangerous as we've been led to believe. Most piranhas are not carnivores, and some species feed exclusively on plants. As for the very few carnivorous species, locals in the Amazon swim alongside them, knowing the fish normally pose no risk. 

The myth of the savage piranha goes back to one trip that President Theodore Roosevelt made to Brazil in 1913. He witnessed a school of piranha eat the flesh off a cow, and then went on to write an account of his trip that introduced many Americans to piranhas.

“They are the most ferocious fish in the world,” he wrote. “Even the most formidable fish, the sharks or the barracudas, usually attack things smaller than themselves. But the piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves... The jaw muscles possess great power. The rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone.”

You might notice that his account describes a bit more than what he actually saw with his own eyes. Moreover, the scene he’d witnessed had been staged. Those piranhas he saw had been one of the very few species that are carnivorous. His guides had deliberately starved the fish so they’d go at the meat with unusual fury. And the fish did not hunt the cow. Instead, the guides fed the cow to them—and the cow was either diseased or possibly was already dead. 

So, don’t worry too much about getting eaten by piranhas. Worry about something more realistic, like getting impaled by a swordfish.