Would starvation cause a wild animal that was an herbivore to kill and eat meat?”
Herbivores are quite specialized to eat plants. That’s fantastic, because eating nothing but plants takes a lot of specialization. Plants are tough to digest, and lack a lot of amino acids, so an animal has to be built to deal with eating a lot, digesting for a long time, and not worrying about dietary deficiencies. That also means that being good at one thing necessarily means that they’re bad at other things. A starving cow isn’t going to go looking for meat, it’s just going to keep looking for grass until it dies. It can’t run fast enough to catch anything. It doesn’t have a good way to kill prey. It doesn’t have sharp incisors and cuspids to cut into the meat even if it had some available. Further, it just doesn’t think meat is food. Even if it were somehow able to hunt – say very slow, very squishy, blind animals lived near it – the cow would still be better off looking for plants to eat. It’s so good at eating plants, and so bad at eating meat, that even a relatively easy to catc
