I’m not counting animals that really do have a specialized diet (pandas eat bamboo, ant lions eat ants, etc.). This is about stereotypes, not basic biology. Add in the comments any I’ve missed.
- Rabbits like carrots
- Mice like cheese
- Monkeys like bananas
- Bears like honey
- Birds like worms
- Elephants like peanuts
- Horses like oats
- Cows like clover
- Cats like fish
- Parrots like crackers
No reptiles on this list. Reptiles as a tribe tend to be pretty blasé about food. (Snakes like milk? Not a solid enough stereotype to make the cut, I think.)
I’m a bit surprised at how international some of these are, especially the more arbitrary ones. The other day, I was telling some Taiwanese children a story about an elephant that stole a banana from a fruit stand in India, and several immediately objected: “But elephants don’t like bananas, monkeys do! Elephants like peanuts!” And even though cheese is a relatively recent cultural import here, everyone knows that it’s got what mice crave.
7 comments:
I'm familiar with most of these - except for parrots liking crackers, I haven't heard of any parrot preferences; and elephants liking peanuts... I would have said that elephants like buns. That's what I seem to remember from children's stories about zoos, circuses etc. - although it may perhaps come *entirely* from AA Milne's poem At The Zoo (given my lifelong love of Milne's verse - I re-read the whole of When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six just a few weeks ago):
There are lions and roaring tigers,
and enormous camels and things,
There are biffalo-buffalo-bisons,
and a great big bear with wings.
There's a sort of a tiny potamus,
and a tiny nosserus too -
But I gave buns to the elephant
when I went down to the Zoo!
There are badgers and bidgers and bodgers,
and a Super-in-tendent's House,
There are masses of goats, and a Polar,
and different kinds of mouse,
And I think there's a sort of a something
which is called a wallaboo -
But I gave buns to the elephant
when I went down to the Zoo!
If you try to talk to the bison,
he never quite understands;
You can't shake hands with a mingo -
he doesn't like shaking hands.
And lions and roaring tigers
hate saying, "How do you do?" -
But I give buns to the elephant
when I go down to the Zoo!
Buns? Never heard of that!
It’s a standard kids’ joke in America: How do you know peanuts are fattening? Because you never see a skinny elephant.
Crows love crackers. And pork rinds. And light bread (what non-Southerners call white bread or sandwich bread).
All Steeple Tea readers are familiar with the concept of "crackers for the crows"! I don't think it's a common stereotype, though, like mice and cheese.
I'd have said that horses like apples and/or carrots, and that cats like mice.
@Bruce Charlton Parrots and crackers presumably comes from the sterotypical "Polly wanna cracker!" that all parrots supposedly say. And speaking of Milne, donkeys and thistles?
Rats like garbage.
Buzzards and vultures like dead stuff.
Lions like gazelles.
Foxes and weasels like chickens.
Bats like blood.
Sharks like people.
Frogs like flies.
Fish like worms.
There is great controversy surrounding whether or not ducks like bread.
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