What is a carnivore?
The word carnivore literally means 'meat eater' and comes from the Latin carne meaning 'flesh' and vorare meaning 'to devour'. Therefore a carnivore is an animal with a meat based diet. This meat may be the result of either hunting or scavenging.
However, the word "carnivore" also refers to the order (group) of mammals known as the Carnivora. This order includes the cats, the dogs, the hyenas, the bears, the weasels, the otters and the civets etc. It may seem strange that, despite being called carnivores, not all the members of the Carnivora are exclusively meat-eaters, some, for example the brown bear, also eats a lot of fruits, berries and roots.
In general, however, members of the Carnivora are well adapted to catching and eating live prey even though some also eat large amounts of vegetable food. Many carnivores are specialized in catching rodents while others, such as the badger, have other specializations.
In the first year of our European Carnivore Campaign, we confined our efforts to those members of the order (group) Carnivora which live in Europe. The campaign highlighted twelve flagship species: 'The Dirty Dozen'.
As we noted last year, not only are some members of the Carnivora not exclusive meat-eaters but also there are many flesh eaters which do not belong to Carnivora.
In our renewed European Carnivore Campaign 2009-2010 we taking the word carnivore in its more literal sense as “Flesh Eater” and including other European species which survive on a flesh based diet such as birds of prey, vultures and marine mammals. We have chosen four new flagship species to highlight our efforts for the 2009/10 campaign. These are known as “The Fantastic Four”.
