Sentence Examples:
Scent glands are common among rodents, carnivores, and insectivores, but are ordinarily used for purposes of communication with others of their kind, sometimes to attract the opposite sex and sometimes merely to give notice of their presence in a locality.
This information is of interest, inasmuch as the males of most carnivores, although they undoubtedly show signs of increased sexual activity at some times more than at others, are not known to have anything of the nature of a regularly recurrent rutting season.
It, of course, varies greatly in every detail, including time and extent of territory involved, and when the destruction is complete it is an awful thing for the carnivores that have lived on the bunny millions and multiplied in ratio with their abundance.
It is an open question between an aquatic carnivore and an aquatic pachyderm; and although not placing my conclusion on an exact basis, yet, in view of the general outline, the course of the convolutions, and the course of the sutures, I incline to the former view.
It may be remembered though, that, owing to the complete absence of small carnivores, which act with us as a check upon the too rapid increase of this rodent, the speed with which it established itself in the new surroundings is not so very surprising.
The mink and the muskrat, representing the carnivores and rodents, have rivals for their food supply on land and have become amphibious, being as much at home in the water as on shore, one feeding on fish and flesh and the other on aquatic vegetation.
Proximally the shaft contracts suddenly and is produced upward, forward, and inward as a rounded neck, as long as in the femur of any mammalian carnivore, which expands rapidly at the end to form the hemispherical ball, which articulates with the pelvic acetabulum.
The puma, we have seen, violently attacks other large carnivores, not to feed on them, but merely to satisfy its animosity; and, while respecting man, it is, within the tropics, a great hunter and eater of monkeys, which of all animals most resemble men.
Thus, the destruction of certain insectivorous birds, in mere wanton sport, may give rise to the multiplication of insect pests, and this to the destruction of certain kinds of plants, and this to the diminution of certain herbivores, and this in its turn to the disappearance of certain carnivores.
In the mutual struggle of carnivore and herbivore, in adaptation to a hundred different environments (the water, the land, and the air, the tree, the open plain, the underground, the marsh, etc.) and forms of diet, we find the descendants of these patriarchal animals gradually developing their distinctive characters.
The stags retain their antlers at this season, partly as a protection against predatory enemies, such as wolves, and other large carnivores, which would otherwise play havoc in their ranks, and partly because the cold of winter and scanty fodder would inhibit the growth of new antlers or reduce their size.
Many animals that lead a social life in large herds or flocks are not superior, but rather inferior, in mental power to animals that lead a more solitary life; and indeed this seems to be generally true, as we see on comparing generally the herbivorous gregarious animals with the solitary carnivores that prey upon them.
Much of the poisoning caused by bites is supposed to be due to the state of the animal's teeth; and in this way the bite of a herbivorous animal, whose teeth are usually soiled, may cause worse after effects than that of a carnivore, whose wet mouth and wet tongue keep its teeth fairly clean.
The heavy cassowaries dwell in the thinly inhabited, thickly wooded islands of Malaysia, where again there are no large carnivores and where the dense vegetation is some safeguard against man; the emu comes from the Australian plains, where also there are no four-footed enemies and where his ancestors dwelt in peace before the advent of man.
Precisely the contrary has happened with the puma of literature; for, although to those personally acquainted with the habits of this lesser lion of the New World it is known to possess a marvelous courage and daring, it is nevertheless always spoken of in books of natural history as the most pusillanimous of the larger carnivores.
If the idea of a dog has its residence here, the idea of a lion its residence there, where, then, do we find the idea of a carnivore, the idea of another kind of dog, the ideas of the individual dogs known by me, the ideas of other carnivora, the idea of a mammal, of a vertebrate, of an animal in general?
It may also be added that the rarity of associations larger than that of the family among the carnivores and the birds of prey, though mostly being the result of their very modes of feeding, can also be explained to some extent as a consequence of the change produced in the animal world by the rapid increase of mankind.
Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammalian type, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the older marsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the faces of their more successful competitors; the new carnivores devour them wholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodents outwit them in the modernized forests.
It does not seem to make a great deal of difference what the animal is, whether bird or beast, carnivore or herbivore, Jack takes it in hand with the most surprising results, evident in so short a time that it is often difficult to believe that the subject is not merely simulating tameness in order to exercise his powers upon his master or masters in an unguarded moment.
The small carnivore preying on small herbivores, can increase in size only by small increments: its organization unfitting it to digest larger creatures, even if it can kill them, it cannot profit by amounts of nutriment exceeding a narrow limit; and its possible increments of growth being small to set out with, and rapidly decreasing, must come to an end before any considerable size is attained.
In the ceaseless war between herbivore and plant, which is waged every day and all day long the whole world over with far greater persistence than the war between carnivore and prey, only those species of plant can survive in such exposed situations which happen to develop spines, thorns, or prickles as a means of defense against the mouths of hungry and desperate assailants.
The "struggle for existence," which Darwin regarded as taking the place of the human breeder in free nature, is not a direct struggle between carnivores and their prey, but is the assumed competition for survival between individuals of the same species, of which, on an average, only those survive to reproduce which have the greatest power of resistance, while the others, less favorably constituted, perish early.
This powerful stimulus the hunting life applies to carnivores, above all to dogs and wolves; and in the same way it affected our ape: compelling him to combine many activities for a considerable period of time, along with his fellows, and direct them to one end in the actual hunting, and (later) to prosecute still other activities for a longer period in preparing weapons and snares to make the hunting more effective.
The absence of a first premolar above and below, as in the weasel, is to be expected in any carnivore that has the first lower molar and fourth upper premolar highly specialized for shearing, but the loss of these premolars and the small size of the second premolars may be as much the result of a slight shortening of the face as it is a result of a lengthening of the third and especially the fourth premolars.