Daily Devotional – August 27

Biology

Does this sound like the plot from a poor horror movie? A parrot attacks and kills a sheep - even burrowing into the sheep’s body to devour its kidneys while the sheep is still alive! That is what was happening in New Zealand’s high country during the late 1800s. Naturalists were stunned as they discovered that local birds (called keas) were killing and eating thousands of sheep. These parrots normally ate seeds and fruit. Why was this taking place? As sheep were introduced into New Zealand’s highland country, the habitat changed drastically, and the parrot’s old food source was greatly diminished. How they learned to eat meat is not known. The New Zealand kea became so hated that in the hundred year period between 1870 -1970, an estimated 150,000 were killed. Today’s keas are not showing this type of behavior.

In 2002, a British researcher reported that he saw a sheep eating a bird; the sheep had snatched and eaten a grouse in the scrublands. This was not normal behavior for a sheep, for they are herbivores, not carnivores. But that was not the only such report, CNN in 1999 reported that Hussein al-Marqouqi’s sheep ate nine chickens. Also, out of China’s Sichuan province comes a report of a panda killing and eating 26 goats. These types of accounts of plant-eating animals devouring meat are not as uncommon as one might think. After the Fall, certain animals started eating meat; prior to the Fall, all were plant eaters. These reports can give us insights into how animals became carnivores.

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

~ Genesis 1:30

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.