Felines and canines are the most frequently mentioned carnivores, and they are often compared, and their size, combat ability, explosiveness, personality, hunting skills, living habits, etc., will be compared and competed.
Felines and canines are both carnivorous, but in terms of body size, if you fight alone, no one will be a rival to tigers and lions. The results of this comparison are obvious, and there is one animal that is more suitable for comparison with lions and tigers, and that is another family of carnivores: the bear family.
As excellent cat killers, lions and tigers have superb hunting skills and a large and flexible body size, which allows them to defeat most animals in nature and scare off most dangers.
The polar bear is the largest land animal in the world, and coincidentally, like the lion and tiger, it is a pure carnivore.
Together, this is very comparable. It's just that under natural conditions, lions and tigers and polar bears should never meet for a lifetime. So people can only turn their eyes to the polar bear's close relative: the brown bear.
Brown bears are widely distributed in Eurasia and North America, overlapping with the distribution of Siberian tigers. Therefore, brown bears are often compared with Siberian tigers, wondering which brown bear or Siberian tiger is stronger.
Although brown bears are not the strongest bears, Siberian tigers are the strongest tigers. If the Siberian tiger meets a polar bear, it is really difficult to say whether it will win or lose, but it will encounter a brown bear, a close relative of the polar bear, and the brown bear is still a heterogeneous omnivore.
In general, we all assume that carnivores are stronger than omnivores, and omnivores are stronger than herbivores.
Earlier we said that the bear family is a family of carnivores, and just now we said that brown bears are omnivorous.
Yes, the bear family is indeed a carnivorous family, but the bears under the bear family, only the polar bear still insists on eating meat, is a pure carnivorous. Other bears have become omnivores, and even giant pandas have become almost vegetarian animals.
Among these bears, the more northward the geographical distribution, the higher the proportion of meat in all foods. But despite this, plants account for more than half, and even some bears account for more than 90% vegetarian diet.
But the bear family is still a carnivorous family, because the distinction between whether it is carnivorous or not is not to see whether it eats meat or not, but to see its split teeth. The cleaved teeth of the bear family are very similar to those of cats, and they retain sharp split teeth that can tear apart the skin and flesh of animals. From this point of view, the bear family is indeed still a carnivore, but it does not eat much meat.
The living environment of the bear family is mostly in the woods and bushes, and there is no shortage of animals in the woods, not to mention that the strength of the bear family is comparable to that of the lion and tiger.
They are large, and although they usually move slowly, they run extremely fast when protecting cubs or when they want to take the initiative to attack. Although their claws do not stretch like cats, many bears are very good at climbing trees, such as the American black bear. Like the Malay bear, even directly live in the tree.
The claws of the bear family are very large, the nails are sharp, and the claws are very powerful. There was a documentary in the past, how a father and daughter encountered a black bear in the wild and escaped from death, the black bear broke one of the legs of the person with one claw, and the wound was blurred with blood and flesh.
The strength of the bear family should not be underestimated, although 30% of the recipe of the Siberian tiger is a brown bear, but there are also examples of brown bears killing tigers.
The ancestors of the bear family once lived with saber-toothed tigers, when they still ate meat. During the Ice Age, ferocious mammals and large herbivores were everywhere, and every hunt meant expending a lot of energy and facing a lot of danger.
In that case, the ancestors of the bear family could guarantee that most of their meat eaters were meat, so why are bears now omnivorous?
What's more, polar bears live in the Arctic, and their food can only pass through the cold waters to hunt dangerous seals. Under such harsh conditions, polar bears have not given up their pure carnivorousness, have not migrated, and have not gone to the island to turn themselves into omnivores.
Other bears originally lived on land, in the jungle, the meat resources are still relatively rich, and the environment is much better than the Arctic. Why do other bears mainly eat vegetarians?
Bears, polar bears eat meat, any meat, giant pandas eat bamboo, and occasionally eat a bamboo rat to open the meat. Other bears mainly eat plant leaves, rhizomes, berries, and also eat insects, of course, they will not let go of ready-made meat, so they will also eat carrion.
Brown bears on an island in the Americas used to be most loved salmon and elderberry. Salmon is most delicious in July, and elderberry ripens in August, coinciding in time.
However, due to environmental changes and rising temperatures, the ripening time of elderberry has been advanced, and it is also july.
So the scientists began to observe what the brown bears would choose to make food, and as a result, they found that the brown bears resolutely gave up the delicious salmon and chose the berries on the tree.
When two foods are equally important in an animal's diet, when one is more readily available than the other, and the resources are more extensive, the more accessible one is of course chosen.
Moreover, although brown bears are strong, in the woods, their bulky bodies are not flexible enough to move. And the woods don't have the size of the Herbivores of the African savannah, and the ungulates in the woods are very flexible, and it's not easy for bears to hunt them.
At this time, when they find that leaves, plant roots, and berries are everywhere, they will naturally want to change the recipe to ensure that they are not hungry or in danger.
In fact, even if the bear family changes to omnivorous, no carnivores dare to provoke them. The Bengal tiger is more ferocious, and it tries not to attack when it encounters sloth bears. The Siberian tiger is an exception, the Siberian tiger preys on bears, only because there are too few ungulates in the areas where they are distributed, and the Siberian tiger has to hunt bears.
The bear family turned themselves into omnivores and began to turn to vegetarianism, which is also to adapt to changes in the environment! But don't look at them vegetarian to think they are annoying, encountering bears pretending to be dead is a very deadly behavior, which one who has eaten meat will give up the meat sent to the mouth?