Stock Animal Diet

L — R, top to bottom: Pluto, Diddy Kong, Andie, and Bugs Bunny

This is one of the most prevalent Animal Stereotypes. Animal characters, whether Talking Animals or Funny Animals, love a certain kind of food to the point of obsession (they go crazy for it) or exclusivity (they eat nothing else).

Which food the animal character loves is determined mostly by the character's species and is usually universal across series, companies, and even media. Sometimes these diets are true. For example, cats really do go nuts for fish. Others are so ridiculously false that it's amazing they ever got started, but have been presented to us as true so often, that it's weird to think that they can't be true. Can you imagine a mouse not liking cheese? It isn't good for them.

Compare Trademark Favorite Food for human characters. Occasionally constitutes Artistic License – Animal Care if the stereotypical diet is actually dangerous.

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The most commonly encountered are:

Ants

Anything in a picnic basket. (Exaggerated compared to real life; ants prefer sweets, though it depends on the species.) Egg yolk, sugar and honey also show up in some works. In real life, ants are one of those clades that're so diverse that you can name pretty much anything digestible and there'll probably be a species of ant that eats it.

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• American Girl: One self-help book about dealing with disasters (Yikes! A Smart Girl's Guide to Surviving Tricky, Sticky, Icky Situations) has an illustration of a girl reading an enormous book titled "How to Survive an Ant Attack" while an army of ants is approaching her picnic.
• In the Atomic Betty episode "Betty Vs. The Giant Killer Ants" has 135 giant ants attack because Minimus spilled growth nectar on them. Sparky says "There goes my picnic lunch!"
• Cyanide and Happiness: One web short features a morbidly humorous twist on the egg-yolk version.
• Donald Duck: On one occasion, Donald has to contend with a literal tribe of feather-wearing, hollering native American ant natives intent on carrying away his food.
• Discworld II: In the adventure game, you have to catch an ant colony by luring them with a picnic basket full of food.
• Garfield and Friends features ants who not only take food, but sing about it.
  Oh, we're the ants who ruin your dinner!
  We're always here to mess up every day!
  When we're around, every camper gets thinner!
  'Cause when we get the chance, we will taaaaaake, your food away!
• Picnic Panic: The objective of the game is to stop ants from carrying away food in your picnic basket.
• Tom and Jerry: A few cartoons have this, such as when Spike the bulldog is having a picnic with his son and ants begin carrying sandwiches and apples away with them.
• The Far Side: One comic shows a line of ants making their way towards a broken Humpty Dumpty.
• Before the days of serum glucose tests, one way to see if a person had diabetes would be to spill some of his/her urine on the ground (or have him/her urinate on the ground), and see if ants came towards the puddle. If they did, then the patient was diabetic; the disease causes the presence of glucose in urine. In fact, this is how the disease got its name: Diabetes Mellitus means "honey passing through."
• The Price of Sugar: A poor artist, tired of ants stealing her sugar, leaves a bowl of sugar out every day for them so they'll stop raiding her kitchen. When her racist Cranky Neighbor threatens to report her for feeding ants, the ants kill him and turn his remains into bone carvings for the artist to sell as jewelry.
• In the Rugrats episode "Grandpa's Bad Bug" the babies try to get the "bad bug" out of Lou. Lil's suggestion is to have a picnic because she remembers their picnic being invaded by ants.

Anteaters/Aardvarks

Ants. Truth in Television for the most part. In real life, anteaters and aardvarks prefer to prey on termites, though of course they won't turn down the opportunity to raid an anthill should they come across one (the issue is more opportunity than preference—termites tend to be easier to get than ants where these animals live—and frankly, there isn't much difference between ants and termites if you're eating them).

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• The Ant and the Aardvark: The main premise of the cartoon. The titular aardvark won't eat anything but ants, and he has his eyes set on the titular insect.
• Arthur: The title character is an obvious exception. Lampshaded in "Draw" when Francine tells Arthur to go eat an ant sandwich.
• B.C.: The anteater is usually hunting the ants.
• Happy Tree Friends: Sniffles, although his attempts usually backfire and end up in him being tortured by the ants he attempts to eat.
• Muppet Babies (1984): In one episode, Gonzo imagines himself as an anteater going to an anteater restaurant. At the restaurant, his anteater siblings order ant burgers and red ant milkshakes. Gonzo doesn't want to eat ants, but his anteater mother said that he won't get termite tapioca for dessert if he doesn't eat his ants. That's when Gonzo finally admits that he's not an anteater as his imagination fades out.
• Pokémon: Heatmor (fiery anteaters) are described as natural predators of Durant (metal ants). This even extends to their typing — Heatmor is a Fire-type, to which Durant's Bug/Steel dual typing has a 4x weakness.
• Shirokuma Cafe: Played with. Even though Anteater the tamandua (an arboreal species of anteater) enjoys eating ants, he sometimes wants to eat something else like ramen.

Bats

Because bats are creepy, expect bats in fiction to be of the bloodsucking type (and, if they speak, speaking with an eastern European accent, complete with Vampire Vords), despite those being a minority in the bat order (3 species out of 1,240) and mostly exclusive to Latin America. Rarely a bat will be depicted as preferring small fruits or insects, with those being more common in Real Life. The sole exception is in documentaries and educational series, in which case you can likely expect real facts and sometimes even An Aesop about bats being important to nature — The Magic School Bus, Bear in the Big Blue House and Blue's Clues have all done this.

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• The Batman: When Kirk Langstrom first transforms himself into Manbat, one of the first things he does is raid the zoo and drains several animals completely of blood. When Batman hears a report about this he grumbles to himself "Langstrom couldn't have used fruits bats?" Granted, Langstrom's motivation was to be feared as the "ultimate" bat, so he likely chose vampire bats on purpose.
• The Butterfly Ball: The Brown Bat is accurately portrayed as an insectovore ... which still comes under "bats are creepy", given that many of the characters are insects.
• An episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers had Fat Cat using a trio of Jamaican bats to rob transport helicopters. He paid them in fruit, which they left at the scene of the crimes.
• In Eureeka's Castle, Batly loves bugs of all kinds.
• Yooka-Laylee: Subverted. Laylee is claimed by the creators to be a fruit bat, although the game suggests she also likes to eat insects.

Bears (brown and black)

Honey. This one is actually true. Bears go mad over honey and will raid hives when they find them. The crunchy bee larvae are a protein-packed bonus. In fact, some languages' word for "bear" actually translates to "honey-eater"; see, e.g., the Russian медведь medvédʹ. Bears go absolutely gaga over any sweet food; it's genetic. Condensed milk is a perennial favorite of polar bears, who hardly ever have anything sweet in their normal diet. Aside from honey, fish, berries, and contents of pick-a-nic baskets are the only things bears will typically eat in fiction. However, if Bears Are Bad News is in play, you can expect them to also eat humans, which real life bears hardly ever do, and when they do it's normally because they're sick or starving. Bears are omnivores, after all, and campers in bear territory have to store their food where hungry and curious ursines can't get at them (usually, this means a tree branch high and strong enough to carry the pack, but inaccessible to even the most determined bear).^note Really, bears are remarkably humanlike, what with the omnivory, relative intelligence, somewhat similar walking, and even occasional bipedalism; it's no wonder people are so fascinated by them. Anthropomorphic bears might also be seen eating porridge as a reference to The Three Bears.

Polar bears and pandas have their own folders.

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• In Ace Ventura: The Animated Series, Ace had to find the missing salmon after bears start attacking the fishermen.
• Banjo-Kazooie: One half of the title duo is a bear, and indeed the Life Meter in this game is made of honeycombs.
• Bear in the Big Blue House: The titular Bear loves honey and berries, as does Ojo.
• Given a dystopian twist in Beastars, bears are required to take medication that limits their strength to avoid accidentally hurting people, and honey counteracts the side effects.
• Beowulf. No bears appear, but the hero's name means "bear". Or rather, it's a kenning for it, because what it literally means is "bee-wolf" — the animal that acts like a wolf toward bees.
• In The Berenstain Bears, the bears are basically humans in the books' world, so they pretty much eat anything else that's edible. It's pretty fitting since, as noted above, bears are omnivores (like humans). Still, they especially love honey, berries and fish. For example, in ...No Girls Allowed, Mama and Papa lure the boys to the girls' clubhouse with a lunch of barbecued honeycomb and salmon, and in the Thanksgiving Episode ...Give Thanks, after Sister becomes attached to the live turkey who was supposed to be their dinner, they end up having a honey-baked salmon instead.
• In Boonie Bears, the titular bears are shown on several occasions to have a fondness for honey, especially Bramble. The series' second end credits theme, "My Honey", is about a bear describing their affinity for the food and how they prefer it over anything else the forest has to offer.
• Brave: Merida and her mother-turned-bear Elinor enjoy a daughter-mother moment by catching fish at a nearby river. Unfortunately, this becomes one of the first instances of her mother succumbing to the bear's instincts. In the previous scene, Merida wakes up to find that Elinor has gathered a meal of berries — though this probably isn't too linked to her bear instincts, as Merida has to inform her the berries are poisonous.
• Brother Bear: Fish is depicted as the main diet of the movie's bears. The sequel also has berries, which is another thing that bears eat.
• The Ed Sullivan Show: Bears' love for anything sweet includes ice cream, as Ed Sullivan found out when he was holding an ice cream cone for a dancing bear doing his act. When it started melting, Sullivan took a lick and the bear saw that, roared in outrage and charged him for mooching on his ice cream.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: If you raid the bodies of dead werebears, you may find a jar of honey.
• In "The Fox and the Crow", a bear tries to bribe the crow with honey in exchange for his slice of cheese. But it backfires, as the crow does not like honey.
• The Great Muppet Caper: Subverted. When the airplane crew member walks into the 9th class section where Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo are^note Their boss Mr. Tarkanian didn't like them so he got them the cheapest area of the plane he could, Fozzie says, "Oh, maybe they're bringing hamburgers." Played straight in The Muppet Movie, where he buys a honey ice cream cone (and a dragonfly ripple for Kermit). In the first episode of The Muppets (2015), when Fozzie has dinner with his human girlfriend and her parents, he compliments the salmon, and the father sarcastically comments "Oh, what a surprise, he likes the salmon."
• Grizzy and the Lemmings: Grizzy loves salmon (and other kinds of fish), which he always puts chocolate spread on.
• Jan Brett's picture book of Goldilocks and the Three Bears describes the bears' porridge as being served with honey, nuts and berries.
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: An in-universe commercial has Michelle Monaghan's character interacting with a poorly CG animated talking grizzly for a fictional drink called "Genaros". Bear: "I'm for Genaros, but what do I know! I'm a bear! I suck the heads off fish!".
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
  • Honeyvore bears, as their name implies, are fond of honey, something their Compendium entry points out. One location in the Crenel Hills includes a pair of honeyvore bears hanging around an alcove holding a beehive.
  • The stronger and rarer grizzlemaw bears don't have this association, but drop hearty salmons when they're killed.
• Little Bear: While Little Bear and his family eat most anything humans would eat, they do especially love berries, honey and fish – in fact Father Bear is a professional fisherman.
• Monster Hunter Portable 3rd: The bear-like Fanged Beast Arzuros can be seen eating honey or Sushifish. It usually goes for the former if it's hungry, but sometimes it can toss up one of the latter offscreen in freshwater areas. The introduction video for the more powerful Zinogre monster, which shows a number of other creatures fleeing from its approach, includes an Arzuros caught in the middle of a honey meal, who gives the beehive it was eating from one last hesitant look before running away.
• Nursery Crime: In The Third Bear, honey is a controlled substance for bears, along with marmalade and porridge.
• Subverted in Open Season While Boog does try out human junk foods (his favorite being Woo-Hoo chocolate bars) he does try (and fails) to catch some fish in a river.
• Paddington Bear subverts this, his Trademark Favourite Food being marmalade. Although there's a bit of correlation, in that it's sticky, sweet stuff that comes in a jar.
• Pokémon:
  • Ursaring are large grizzly bear-like Pokémon that snap trees with their forelegs to get berries. Its pre-evolution, Teddiursa, is always licking its paws because they’re soaked in honey. It’s also able to make its own.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield's Isle of Armor DLC introduces Urshifu, a legendary Pokémon based on a bear. It can gigantamax, but it will refuse to eat Max Soup (which enables it to do so) unless the player gathers Max Honey from a Vespiquen’s tree first.
• Seeker Bears: Subverted. The grizzly bears don't mind honey, but they're much more fond of meat.
• Survivor Dogs: In the third book, the dogs come across a "giantfur" looking for honey. Judging by how it's described, it's a black bear.
• In The Three Stooges short "Idiot's Deluxe" a bear steals the stooges food as they're camping in the woods, and we get a long shot of the bear licking the honey out of a jar with its extremely long tongue.
• We Bare Bears: The main bear trio are Big Eaters at most (though Panda's a vegetarian), but they are shown to love honey. Namely honey-flavored wasabi candies given to them by Chloe. The Bears' love for honey becomes a major problem in "Beehive", in which a colony of honeybees use this to make the Bears do their bidding. Deconstructed in "Bear Cleanse" where Grizzly has been given a diet of berries and fish by the request of their doctor who suggested that for 21 days the bears should eat what their respective species normally eat in the wild. Grizzly loves his new diet at first, but when he realizes that he must stick to the new diet without eating human foods during the requested time he starts losing his cool.
• Winnie the Pooh is notorious within his own stories for his love of honey. He’s also occasionally mentioned to be fond of condensed milk.
• Yogi Bear: Yogi seems to prefer the delicacies of the pic-a-nic basket; he raids them exclusively. The association with honey is present in his Brazilian Dub Name Change, Zé Colmeia, which translates as "Beehive Joe".

Bears (polar)

Seals, fish and the Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut peoples. Real polar bears also supplement their diet with carrion, particularly beached whales. Some works also have them dining on the stereotypical denizens of Earth's other pole, the penguins.

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• In Minecraft, when a polar bear is killed, there's a high chance it will drop raw codfish and somewhat smaller chance it will drop raw salmon (although they do not attack live fish).
• Seeker Bears: Being a polar bear, Kallik is especially fond of seals and fish.
• We Bare Bears: Ice Bear is shown as an overall Supreme Chef, with fish as his Trademark Favorite Food. In "Bear Cleanse", he was rather surprised upon learning that his species eat seals, and when he manages to find a live one he couldn't bear himself to eat it and instead befriended it before releasing it into the wild.
• In The Whiteboard, Doc once ate an entire fried walrus, though he couldn’t move afterwards, and has been seen eating “Harp Seal O’s” and seal tacos. He also threatens to eat cheaters at the paintball field, as does grizzly bear Bruno.

Beavers

Wood. This is sort of true, as beavers will eat the leaves, small twigs, and inner bark but not the entire log itself other than wearing it down. In terms of what they actually forage for when hungry, they're generalist herbivores.

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• In The Angry Beavers, the beavers not only ate wood (for example, they use wood shavings in their cereal), but chewed on it to keep their teeth from growing too long, which is true for beavers in Real Life.^note It's actually true of all rodents, but only beavers consistently gnaw wood; other rodents gnaw other things. In one episode, Norbert's refusal to chew on wood because his long teeth made him popular with the other animals caused his teeth to grow out of control and trap him (along with his brother Daggett, who also stopped chewing out of jealousy) in a cage made of their elongated front teeth.
• Franklin: Beaver is occasionally seen chewing on wood. Especially notable is one episode where she fells a small tree with her teeth to demonstrate her skills to her friends.
• PB&J Otter: Munchy is a beaver who will eat anything made out of wood. This has both put him into and helped him out of jams, such as the episode where he accidentally ate Pinch's dollhouse, but later rebuilt it.

Bees and Wasps

Flower nectar, which they also use to make honey (that they might consume as well). Pollen is rarer and usually treated more as an item for pollination than actual food, though real bees actually do eat it directly. Also royal jelly (consumed exclusively by queen bees) is probably even rarer. For wasps, they like picnic foods (especially if it is sweet-tasting) and other insects (including bees). Both are Truth in Television.

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• Maya the Bee is usually seen collecting pollen and flower nectar in media she appears in, which tend to veer toward a semi-realistic portrayal of bees.
• Minecraft: Bees are bred by giving them any sort of flower, and they spend most of the day pollinating flowers to produce honey and beeswax (which can be harvested). Their devotion to the act even extends to wither roses, which damage on contact and can kill them.
• Pathfinder: Melixies are a type of fey who strongly resemble insect, and most often specifically resemble bees. They are also inveterate sweet teeth whose favorite foods are sugary liquids such as honey and nectar.
• SMITE: The Mayan bee god Ah Muzen Cab has a liking for sweet things such as honey, as well as an ability that sprays honey onto the ground. If the honey is placed near a beehive (planted by another of his abilities), bees will swarm over the honey and attack any enemies that step in it.

Beetles

In Japanese works, watermelon is seen as stereotypical stag and rhino beetle food. Not really truth in television. While beetles will happily eat watermelon, the high water content may give them diarrhea (insects don't sweat or urinate, so that's the only way to get rid of extra water). Apples (that have excess juices squeezed out), bananas, and specially made beetle jelly are a better choice to feed captive beetles. Tree sap is another common preference shown in fiction, which is truth in television, as that's part of their diet in the wild. Ladybugs (called ladybirds in the UK), which are a kind of beetle, will always be shown eating aphids. Real ladybugs/ladybirds are mostly carnivourous, but feed on a wide range of insects, though they're also known to feed on pollen and other plant materials. As a whole however, beetles are, as with ants above, one of those clades that's so diverse that, you can name pretty much anything digestible and there'll probably be a species that eats it.

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• Medabots: Metabee is based on a rhino beetle and loves watermelon. In one scene, Metabee is lured into a trap with watermelon as bait. He also sleeps with a watermelon patterned blanket.
• Monster Rancher: In Monster Rancher 4, the Melloncho, a hybrid of Beaklon and Pancho, is a tiny beetle inside a giant watermelon. Also in 4, the rhino beetle monster Beaklon and any monster with Beaklon as a sub-breed will usually have watermelon as their favorite food.
• Pokémon: The Japanese Beetle Brothers Pinsir and Heracross both tend to be depicted as having a strong taste for tree sap.
• In Show by Rock!!, Kabutomoaki loves watermelon.
• Tokumei Sentai Go Busters: The beetle-themed robot ranger Beet J. Stag is obsessed with tree sap, despite not actually being able to drink it.

Birds

Worms or seeds. "The early bird catches the worm" is an old proverb. Common rejoinders are "Big incentive", and "The second mouse gets the cheese". Budgies, chickens, crows, ducks/pigeons/sparrows, eagles, owls, parrots, penguins, and vultures have their own sections.

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• In Adventures of the Gummi Bears, the Carpies eat worms, despite resembling vultures.
• Walter and Clay Pigeon from Between the Lions love to eat seeds. They were also seen eating oats in one episode.
• The Bird Feeder: Lampshaded in #27, "Worms." Terry complains about birds being known to only eat worms, as he finds them disgusting.
• In The Fox and the Hound, the two bird characters (a finch and a woodpecker) are constantly trying to catch the 'fuzzy worm', who turns out to be a caterpillar.
• Looney Tunes
  • "Fair and Worm-er" has a complete cartoon food chain, part of which is a crow trying to hunt a worm.
  • "A Fractured Leghorn" is an unusual example of a chicken eating worms. The cartoon has Foghorn Leghorn hunting a worm, though he has to compete with a cat who plans to use it as fish bait.
• Neopets: One type of Neopet available for adoption is called a Pteri, which is more or less a bird in all but name. Feeding it any "worm" food (even the Hot Worm Hot Dog, which is normally classified as a Gross Food) will make it full ("bloated"), cure it of any disease it is carrying, and restore all of its hit points.
• The song "The Bird and the Worm" by Owl City opens with this:
  If you're the bird,
  Whenever we pretend it's summer,
  Then I'm the worm,
  I know the part, it's such a bummer,
  But fair is fair,
  If my segments get separated,
  I'll scream
  And you'll be there
• In Ox Tales, Audrey is an ostrich who likes to bury her head in the ground to look for worms to eat.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon: The Original Series: In the third episode, Ash meets his Pidgeotto when it's eating a worm. It later tries to eat his Caterpie, a caterpillar-like creature.
  • In the games, the Pokédex entry for Wurmple mentions it being prey to various bird Pokémon, such as the swallow-like Taillow and Swellow.
  • The Pokédex entry for Grubbin (a worm-like beetle larva) mentions that Rookidee (a chickadee) is its natural enemy, although its large jaws are sometimes enough to deter the latter.
• Sesame Street: Big Bird knows how to make a birdseed cake and birdseed cookies, eats birdseed toast for breakfast, orders birdseed milkshakes at the local soda shop...
• Stuart Little: In the book, Mrs. Little rewards Margalo for saving Stuart's life by making her a tiny cake with seeds sprinkled on top.
• Tex Avery: The worm variant shows up in The Early Bird Dood It.
• U.S. Acres: A running gag has Booker the chick trying and failing to catch a worm.
• In Wile E Coyote And The Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote often tried to lure the Roadrunner into a trap by tempting it with bird seed. This is somewhat accurate in that roadrunners really do eat seeds some of the time, though going by the cartoon alone, you'd probably never guess that rodents, smaller birds and lizards and snakes take up a larger part of their diet.

Budgies

Millet. Budgies are typically very fond of millet, but it's unhealthy to give it to them often due to its high fat content and low nutrition.

Cats

Fish, meat, mice/rats, and/or birds. Cats, ambush predators who go after pretty much any animal smaller than them, were originally domesticated to hunt mice and other animals that infest grain stores. Of course, with fictional cats, actually catching mice or birds is very rare. They can have better luck with fish though, at least sometimes; for many pet owners, tuna fish is like cocaine to their cats. Unfortunate too, as due to the mercury content in an unfortunate amount of tuna, it's not good for them in large amounts. Milk is also a popular treat for fictional cats, despite the fact that many cats can end up being lactose intolerant in real life. ^note  As with humans, though, feline lactose intolerance doesn't mean that it can't still be a highly desired foodstuff. One just does not want to be a bystander when it hits the other end (if it has a chance to). In the dairy vein, cats generally love cheese, especially ones that have been aged a bit (as those have more of the lactose fermented away). Despite media sensationalism of cats eating dead owners, this behavior is actually much more common amongst dogs than it is cats. Cats are very picky about eating already dead meat (ever wonder why your cat would prefer to catch a mangy bird off your balcony than eat the expensive food you buy for him? This is why) and so generally only eat carrion as a last resort, while dogs are scavengers who will eat just about anything they can find, carrion or no. Catnip is sometimes portrayed, but it's treated like a narcotic. In reality, catnip is not addictive despite the cats who are affected by it seeming "high". They do, however, appear to feel very good under its influence.

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• 30 Rock: One of Liz Lemon's greatest fears is dying alone in her apartment and being eaten by her cats, which is one reason she didn't want to own pets.
• Axe Cop: Apparently supreme happiness for cats (even if they're evil Siberian witch doctor mummy cats) is a mouse planet, entirely covered in mice, where they can just go on eating mice forever.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Alice's cat Dinah is allegedly "a capital one for catching mice" and loves to eat birds too — as Alice tactlessly mentions while talking to a mouse and a crowd of birds. She also gets a saucer of milk every day at teatime.
• In the Alice-inspired TV series Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat loves to drink cream and his favorite pizza toppings are anchovies and catnip. Alice also sometimes mentions Dinah's fondness for tuna.
• Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes loves salmon and tuna fish.
• Caravan Palace: In the music video to "Lone Digger", a trio of Funny Animal cats go to a strip club and drink shots of milk.
• CatDog: Along with bones for Dog, fish was Cat's main motif throughout the series (in fact, half his house is made of a giant fish fused to a giant bone). Cat loved fish so much he once worked in the fire department simply because they had fish chili at the time.
• Cat Pack: The cats are fond of seafood. They're also fond of mice, but they have a pact not to eat a mouse character or his family so they're not shown actually hunting mice.
• The Cat Piano: Alluded to. In the narrator's home city inhabited entirely by anthropomorphic cats, a neon sign can be briefly seen outside a building that reads "The Milk Bar".
• CSI: Used in at least one episode where a Crazy Cat Lady is killed and her starving cats eat into her corpse.
• Dominic Deegan: Dominic's pet cat, Spark, is obsessed with fish.
• In Fairy Tail, there exists a race of flying, talking cats that frequently have unusual fur colors, known as Exceed. Most of them prefer fish over other foods, especially Happy. Carla, however, defies this trope by spurning Happy's attempts to woo her with gifts of fish most of the time, and Pantherlily averts the trope by display seeing a strong liking for kiwi fruit and its juice.
• In Feed the Cat, the cats eat fish.
• Futurama: The talking cats of Thuban 9 recall their lost homeward as an idyllic place home to, among other things, great herds of "chicken-salmon".
• In the Game & Watch game Tropical Fish, any fish that fall on the floor will be eaten by a cat.
• Garfield: Much to Jon's frustration, Garfield is disgusted by the idea of eating mice, and often treats them as friends. He once had to cover his eyes while Arlene caught a mouse and ate it. Birds and fish are not as lucky however, since he will gladly eat those (and not just cooked ones either, living ones too). He also likes to eat Jon's houseplants sometimes. Of course, his all-time favourite food is lasagna. Sometimes he talks with whatever he is about to eat.
• In Get Fuzzy tuna is Bucky's favorite. Averted for the mice part though, he's actually AFRAID of mice. He instead prefers to try and eat monkeys instead.
• Happy Heroes: In Season 7, the Miaolings, an alien race of Funny Animal cats, like to eat fish.
• Heathcliff: A Running Gag is Heathcliff robbing the fish market, and ambushing the milkman so he drops the milk.
• In the Inai Inai Baa! song "Neko Neko Shanshan", which is about cats, there is a line that goes "What is today's meal? Fish!" when describing hungry cats.
• The kittens in Kittens Game feed exclusively on catnip at the start of the game. An early upgrade allows you to build pastures to reduce catnip demand by farming unspecified animals, implied by the Flavor Text ("Take a pint o' milk, Sir!") to be solely for dairy.
• Krypto The Super Dog: One episode has Krypto hit by a beam that causes him to engage in cat-like behavior, including having a large hankering for tuna fish.
• In Lady and the Tramp, the two Siamese cats try to eat a goldfish, then try to sneak into the baby's room to steal his milk.
• LOLCats depicts cats as hankering for cheeseburgers and anything else on the table.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Sylvester the Cat usually engages in quixotic pursuits of Tweety the canary or Speedy Gonzales the mouse that far outweigh any benefits of catching them.
  • Claude the Cat is so thoroughly Squicked by Hubie and Bertie trying to get him to eat them, that he couldn't eat mice, and so tried to get a dog to kill him. Similarly, in an earlier Sylvester cartoon, "Life with Feathers" a heartbroken lovebird tried to get Sylvester to eat him, but Sylvester wouldn't, thinking he was poisoned.
    Sylvester: (caving in after being tempted): I'll do it! I'd rather die than starve to death!
• In Madeline and the Easter Bonnet, when the girls imagine people all over Paris crying because they have no milk, they also imagine a milk-craving cat crying over his empty bowl.
• Minecraft: Cats are tamed and bred by feeding them raw fish. In line with the "cats eat birds" rule, ocelots will also go after chickens.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Plagg, a black cat-like kwami, loves Camembert cheese and can be found snacking on it at any given opportunity.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: The proprietor of the cheese shop claims to have some "very runny" Camembert in stock, but checks again and says the cat ate it.
• Mouse Math: Played with — the non-anthropomorphic cat is sometimes given milk to drink, though the main character, Albert, a Funny Animal mouse, notes that he read it makes cats' stomachs hurt.
• Oggy and the Cockroaches: Oggy, despite eating tons of food cats shouldn't be eating, is a big fan of milk (he often heats it on the stove) and fish. He's actually too afraid of mice to even attempt to eat them.
• Our Miss Brooks: Minerva, Mrs. Davis' pet cat, shows an affinity to several stock cat foods.
  • Minerva likes milk, but prefers cream. One episode has Miss Brooks telling Minerva there's no cream left, so she'll have to take milk. Minerva meows angrily in protest.
  • In "Taxidermists", Minerva gobbles up a large fish Mr. Conklin intends to enter in a fishing contest.
  • Minerva shows excitement anytime someone mentions mice in her presence.
• Persona 5: The Phantom Thieves' resident sentient kind-of cat Morgana is nuts about sushi, specifically fatty tuna.
• RWBY: When Blake Belladonna is revealed to be a Cat Girl Faunus, Ruby seems to think it explains why she eats so much fish. At the tournament in Volume 3, she has an extra portion of fish cooked specially for her noodles, and is the most enthusiastic of the team over the meal. The spinoff series, RWBY Chibi, also shows her wanting to eat all the fish when she and the other characters crash Weiss' beach vacation, and Weiss later attempts to buy her silence for a Noodle Incident with a lifetime supply of tuna.
• RWBY: Scars: The cat Faunus Blake is a pescetarian who is especially fond of seafood.
• Shrek: Puss in Boots is fond of milk. The spinoff film starring him and its sequel have it shows it as being the feline equivalent of alcohol, with the former having it being served at the cat tavern where he first meets Kitty, and the latter showing that it contributed to one of Puss' deaths when he jumped off a tower while under its influence after "drunkenly" claiming he'd land on his feet.
• In Supergirl story "Supergirl's Super Pet", Streaky the Supercat -and every alley-cat in Midvale- crave for milk, to the point that Streaky bumps a milk truck, tipping over a bunch of milk-cans, just so all cats can have a free drink.
• Tailchaser's Song: Cats are especially fond of "squeakers", a catch-all term for rodents and rodent-like animals.
• Tom and Jerry:
  • Tom often has a bowl of milk. Almost as often, Jerry tries to steal it from him. Just as often, however, he eats more human fare.
  • Tom also often tries to eat birds, and the occasional fish, that Jerry befriends. He rarely tries to eat Jerry himself except in the shorts made by Chuck Jones.
• Luxor from Tutenstein loves his fish. In one episode where he and Cleo switch bodies, he requests a fish-flavored pizza while in her body, much to the disgust of her friends. And in the episode "Tut Jr." he requests tuna and liver as a snack to make Cleo's little cousin.
• Varjak Paw: The city cats wish they could catch pigeons, but none are fast enough to so they're forced to eat human rubbish. Varjak is the first cat who figures out how to hunt birds.
• What Can I Say Except You're Welcome: Princess Rhaenys' kitten Balerion accidentally kills her grandfather, the mad King Aerys II, by tripping him and making him fall down the steps of the Iron Throne. Her mother Princess Elia declares that Balerion is an agent of the Stranger who has been sent to punish them for holding a deadly mockery of a trial by combat. Somehow, this leads to a better future for all of Westeros, and the very last line declares:
  Most of all, the salmon trade with Braavos explodes, as Balerion loves salmon. And the will of the gods is not to be ignored.
• In Warrior Cats, all four Clans have territory-specific prey that they catch regularly, generally zig-zagging this trope in each individual case.
  • ThunderClan, who live in a forest, eat squirrels, rabbits, voles, mice and various sorts of birds.
  • RiverClan specializes in catching fish, which the other Clans — unusually enough — find gross and off-putting.
  • WindClan tends to focus on the birds and rabbits available in their moorland home.
  • SkyClan, whose own forest had little underbrush but a very thick canopy, ate tremendous amounts of birds. In the modern day, however, they have a fairly generalized feline diet.
  • The Tribe of Rushing Water eats a lot of birds, up to and including raptors such as hawks and eagles, as well as fish, as that's what's available in their mountains.
  • ShadowClan mostly averts this, eating lizards, frogs, snakes and rats (although that last one caused trouble for them when some cat dropped a contaminated rat on the fresh-kill pile and made the entire Clan sick).

Chickens

Corn, which is Truth in Television. Real-life chickens are omnivorous, though, and will happily eat both plant and animal matter. Corn, being mostly empty calories, should be given as a treat rather than a mainstay of a chicken's diet.

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• Futurama: The hyperchicken attorney nearly attacks a witness on the stand because he thought she was corn.
• In George's Marvellous Medicine, George gets a chicken to try his medicine because the chicken thinks the medicine is corn.
• Hay Day: Chicken feed is made from 2 stalks of wheat and 1 ear of corn.
• Here Comes Peter Cottontail: The hero has a rooster who is supposed to crow when the alarm clock goes off (I know, kid's movie, just go with it). The villain gives the rooster corn-flavored bubblegum to prevent the morning's wake-up call. The gum is of the overly-sticky variety and prevents the rooster from crowing properly.
• Silly Symphonies: In "The Wise Little Hen", the eponymous hen tries throughout the short to get a pig and the debuting Donald Duck to help her plant her corn, but they fake a stomach ache, leading her and her chicks to do it themselves. The cartoon ends with the hen and her chicks enjoying a Food Porn feast of corn muffins, bread, soup, and butter-slathered corn on the cob, while Donald and the pig get only a bottle of castor oil to "cure" their stomachs.

Cockroaches

Like flies, they will be often seen eating rotten food, meal leftovers or any other disgusting shit they are able to find, including actual fecal matter. Some may even eat trash like used toilet paper or pizza cardboard boxes.

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• Oggy and the Cockroaches: The roach trio of Dee Dee, Marky and Joey will often raid Oggy's home of whatever food they come across, while also messing with him in general.

Cows

Grass or hay. Truth in television, though real cattle farms often add grain and soy to fatten their animals up faster.

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• In Minecraft, you feed cows sheaves of wheat to get them to breed.
• Rocko's Modern Life: While Heffer is an Extreme Omnivore, his Trademark Favourite Food (aside from chicken) is a snack food product called Pasture Puffies, clearly a reference to cattle's diet of grass.
• Satellite Girl and Milk Cow: After turning into a cow, Kyung-chun switches over to a diet of grass, flowers, and carrots.
• Steamboat Willie: Mickey solves the problem of the cow being too thin to fit in the transport harness by stuffing it full of hay.

Coyotes

Roadrunners and rabbits, and any kind of livestock. In darker works, cats and small dogs (sadly Truth in Television).

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• Barnyard: The Big Bad of the film is Dag, the leader of a pack of coyotes terrorizing the farm, intending to devour the animals therein. Fully exemplifying the Predators Are Mean trope, he not only threatens to eat a baby chick in front of its mother, but also has his pack fatally wound the cow protagonist's father.
  Dag: I love chicken. My favorite part is the skin.
• Wile E Coyote And The Roadrunner: The titular coyote is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the roadrunner part, even if he obviously never manages to catch said Road Runner. It isn't limited to him, either, since one short ends with him donning a Road Runner costume to try and attract the bird... only to be chased away by other coyotes.

Crocodiles/Alligators

Humans, or just anything that moves. Truth in Television for a few large species crocodiles (mostly the Nile and Saltwater Crocodiles), which cause more human fatalities than any other predator and actually view humans as a food source; in fact, they will take on any sort of prey of suitable size. On the other hand, when on land, most crocodilians including alligators are more likely to run away from a human thanks to their low-set eyes (all they see are the feet of some giant, who may be a danger to them). In the water, though, you're on their turf. In some states with a high wild gator population, it's illegal to feed them, as this makes them more likely to approach a human than run away.

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• Alligators tend to have a taste for waterfowl and frogs.
  • Count Duckula: In one episode, the Count attempts to get away from a gold-smuggling captain by jumping into the bayou and swimming back. The captain then proceeds to show him the alligators lurking in the bayou and asks him what their favorite dinner is. As the Count nervously tries to answer the captain explains it's duck. Upon hearing the word, the gators become excited, holding forks and knives.
  • The Princess and the Frog: In their frog forms, Tiana and Prince Naveen are in danger of being eaten by a pack of alligators. This gets subverted by Louie, who shows no intention of eating anyone.
  • Sitting Ducks: The alligators enjoy eating ducks, which in turn makes Bill and Aldo's friendship a forbidden one.
• Nile crocodiles usually go after zebras and wildebeests, especially when they migrate across rivers.
  • Pearls Before Swine: The crocodiles seek only to catch and eat zebras, and named their fraternity Zeeba Zeeba Eata. They never have any luck in catching the strip's resident stripy equine Zebra, however, due to their amazing stupidity.
• Batman: Killer Croc (though he's technically a human with a genetic disorder that makes him look like an anthropomorphic crocodile) has been depicted as consuming human flesh in recent years.
• Kissyfur: The alligators Floyd and Jolene are always trying to eat everything made of meat, especially the cubs of the series.
• Peter Pan: The reason why Captain Hook hates Peter Pan is because Peter cut off his hand and threw it to a crocodile, and the crocodile liked the taste of Hook's hand so much that now he's always chasing him, and except in adaptations that spare him, finally gets him in the end. In some adaptations, including the the live action film and Fox' animated series, the crocodile is still a danger for everyone, not just Hook.

Crows

Corn, or sometimes other farm crops. Also carrion, especially eyes. Crows are opportunistic omnivores and scavengers and will eat just about anything they can get a hold of. This includes working in teams to steal food from other animals and even humans.

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• Barney Bear: The short "Cobs and Robbers" where Barney is a corn farmer and two crows dress in a scarecrow suit and try to steal his corn.
• Discworld: Quoth the Raven makes a running gag out of his love for eating eyeballs.
• The Far Side: One strip has crows about to enjoy an unusually generous portion of roadkill.
• A Family Guy cutaway gag shows a group of crows sitting on a power line, tricking a particularly annoying crow into dying a High-Voltage Death by telling him the telephone pole is full of corn.
• Little Bear: One episode has a group of mischievous yet goodhearted crows eating from Little Bear's corn field.
• The Looney Tunes short Corn Plastered revolves around a farmer in pursuit of a Clever Crow that keeps stealing his corn.
• Magic Adventures of Mumfie has the same thing as the Wizard Of Oz example occur to the Scarecrow in that show, which could lead to funny moments.
• One The Pink Panther short has the titular cat run a corn stall only to be set upon by two hungry crows who repeatedly eat his wares. Eventually, he allows them to have some corn... only for them to invite the rest of their friends to feast on the rest.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Early in, crows are shown to eat eyes of living people locked in suspended cages.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Lord Commander Mormont's raven regularly begs for corn by name. Also, one of the books is called A Feast for Crows — in reference to carrion, not corn.
• Warrior Cats: The cat term for rotten meat no longer fit to eat is "crow-food".
• Winnie the Pooh: Many segments involving Rabbit involve him being driven nuts by crows invading his garden.
• In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, crows come from miles around to eat the corn in the Scarecrow's field and mock him.
• A German children's song about horse riding has a verse which can be roughly translated as: "Does [the rider] fall into the trench, the ravens will eat him."

Deer

In Japanese works, deer are often shown to have a fondness for senbei rice crackers. This likely stems from the practice of vendors in the famous Nara Deer Park selling specially-made "shika senbei" to feed the deer. Because these deer have no fear of humans, they will line up to be fed them and some have even learned to "bow" for them. The shika senbei are only sold in Nara and not made for human consumption, but media will sometimes show any deer in any place eating regular rice crackers made for humans. Obviously, rice crackers aren't a part of a deer's natural diet.

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• Katamari Damacy: We Love Katamari features deer humorously placed near rice crackers, and Flavor Text for deer in the collection notes that they love rice crackers, just like old men.
• Lucky Star: One episode features the girls visiting Nara. In one scene, Tsukasa feeds the deer rice crackers and gets swarmed by them.
• Nara's official mascot character is a deer named Shikamaro-kun, and quite a few of The Merch depicts him munching on shika senbei.
• Nichijou: The principal attempts to distract an aggressive deer by feeding it rice crackers. It doesn't work.

Dogs

Bones, most commonly Stock Femur Bones. This is only partly true because dogs love chewing on bones, since the act of chewing relieves stress and boredom. Actually eating bones isn't the point, and can lead to throwing them back up if their stomach gets irritated from the bone shards. Many dog-owning tropers can attest to the fact that dogs will chew almost anything they're given. Or just happen to find.^note If you do not want your dog to end up on the operating table with intestines full of holes, do not let your dog chew on a bone unless you are dead sure it will not shatter. Please. Sharp bone shards are a recipe for sky-high vet bills and/or a dead dog. They may be after the marrow inside the bones as well, or the connective-tissue coating (periosteum) that fresh bones have on their surfaces. Also sausages, and a common gag in cartoons is a dog running along with a sausage link, possibly being chased. In British comics, back in the days when butcher's shops were more common, dogs loving meat products, longingly looking at a butcher's shop window with their tongues hanging out and trying to steal strings of sausages from butchers making deliveries was almost as frequent as depicting dogs eating bones. Other commonly depicted, safer doggy delicacies include steak, bacon, cheese, and peanut butter; in darker works they also enjoy corpses, which is Truth in Television as almost all carnivores will scavenge opportunistically. In Real Life, dogs will go crazy for certain veggies like squash, sweet potatoes, and green beans, and those with a sweet tooth also tend to like fruits like bananas, though some can be oddly picky about it (refusing fresh banana but loving dried banana chips or vice versa, for example). Some dogs also like to chew on ice cubes, which can make an inexpensive and less fattening training treat if your dog likes them.

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• Some cartoons go as far as showing dogs hankering after fossilized bones, despite the fact they're made of stone.
  • Bringing Up Baby: A key plot point is that Katherine Hepburn's dog has buried an important dinosaur bone that Cary Grant needs for his museum.
  • Jackie Chan Adventures: In one episode, Jade's pet dog, Scruffy, is possessed by a demonic Japanese oni mask that mutates it into a gigantic beast. Before becoming completely taken over, Scruffy engages in typical dog antics, including stealing a dinosaur bone from the local museum and trying to bury it.
  • Subverted in the Looney Tunes short Bone Sweet Bone. It had a dog whose owner, a paleontologist, accused him of burying one of his dinosaur’s bones. As it turns out, the paleontologist had the bone with him the entire time.
  • Mega Babies: A robotic dog is constructed to keep the trio of super babies company. Of course, the robot malfunctions, culminating in it causing trouble around the city, including stealing a generic dino bone.
  • Tintin: In one book, Snowy steals a dinosaur bone from a museum.
  • Up: One of Muntz's cleaning dogs is shown cautiously nibbling on his fossil displays when Muntz isn't looking.
• Adventure Time subverts this with Jake, whose Trademark Favourite Food is sandwiches. He does love bacon, though.
• Aesop's Fables tell a fable about a dog who was carrying a bone and saw his reflection in a river. The dog, desiring the bone in his reflection's mouth, barked at it, dropping and losing his own bone, in order to tell a moral about the dangers of envy. Some versions of the story replace the bone with a piece of meat instead.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: One of the riddles revolves around a dog getting angry because Alice took its bone.
• The Beggin' Strips commercials feature the bacon variant.
• The Bible: Dogs are (more accurately) portrayed as carrion eaters. Queen Jezebel in particular is depicted as meeting a messy end and not even getting the dignity of a proper burial because her corpse is eaten by dogs (as prophesied earlier).
• CatDog: Bones are Dog's main motif (in fact, half of his house is made of a giant bone fused to a giant fish, which is Cat's motif). He even once stole the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex from a nearby museum and when arrested, was eating the bones of dead prisoners, whose cannibalistic behavior horrified cat (although in the end it was All Just a Dream by Cat).
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: One episode has a magical giant bone so irresistible to dogs they licked it until they died of starvation. Courage managed to escape this fate through sheer Heroic Willpower.
• Dennis the Menace (UK): Dennis's dog Gnasher is sometimes shown eating bones. Occasionally it's suggested that this isn't entirely normal canine behaviour, and is only possible due to the incredible gnashing ability of the Abysinnian Wire-Haired Tripehound.
• A Dog's Way Home: Bella loves cheese, but not for the actual food itself. Her owner plays a game where he holds up a tiny bit of cheese in front of her nose so cheese has become Bella's Comfort Food.
• Donkey Hodie: Although Bob Dog has been seen eating other foods, he is sometimes seen with bones. One episode, "Stop and Think", focuses on him trying to find a special bone he burried.
• Family Skeleton Mysteries: Dogs and their love of bones, including Sid's, are mentioned a few times. Sid himself is terrified of dogs who feel they and Sid should have the traditional dog-bone relationship.
• Happy Heroes: In Season 7, the Woofians, an alien race of Funny Animal dogs, like to eat bones.
• In Hitman: Blood Money, one of the targets has a loud lap dog that can easily alert him and the only way to subdue it is to drop a sausage injected with sedatives (or poison) on the ground. The dog will immediatly eat it.
• Homestuck: Bequerel, Jade's canine guardian, loves eating steak above all else. Since he's also a godlike being powered by the energy of a sun, he also happens to prefer his steaks irradiated.
• Krypto The Super Dog: Bones are often a favorite food of choice for Krypto and his super canine allies.
• Lomax, the Hound of Music: At the start of one episode, Lomax himself can be seen with a bone in his mouth before he tells the viewers what will happen in the episode later.
• Mickey Mouse: One episode has Pluto try to steal a large bone from a sleeping lion in the zoo because his bone was too small.
• Minecraft: Dogs are tamed by feeding them bones, although, after that, they can eat any type of meat. Tamed or not, they'll also gleefully chase after skeletons without waiting for an excuse.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • In A Night of Fright is no Delight, it's shown that Scooby-Doo is not afraid of haunted bones.
  • Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost: Subverted. A restaurant owner offers to give Scooby a bone, only for Scooby to turn it down in favor of the restaurant's food.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: One episode has the Satellite of Love being attacked by a horde of demon dogs just because it's bone-shaped.
• Mythbusters: The Mythbusters attempted to recreate the trope that an Angry Guard Dog could be placated with a steak. It wasn't quite as successful as is often shown in fiction: Kari was able to walk in an enclosure, open a safe, take what was inside, and probably would have made it out if Tory didn't throw the steak inside (or if Tory had had another steak ready when the dog came back to him), but the team also advised against viewers repeating the stunt as dogs can be trained to ignore this sort of thing.
• One Piece: The Straw Hats end up in a remote country populated by humanoid mammals called Minks. Dog Minks take a special liking to Brook (a living skeleton), for the expected reason, although Brook is much less happy to be constantly hounded by canine people eager to get a taste of him.
• Queen Zixi of Ix: Subverted. When Ruffles the dog gains the power of speech, he complains that he doesn't like bones, and can't understand why humans keep giving their dogs bones instead of meat.
• RWBY Chibi: In one skit, Yang and her father Taiyang debate over how to get Zwei to take his medicine. Zwei becomes very enthusiastic when Tai suggests covering it with peanut butter, and is visibly disappointed when Yang shoots down that idea in favor of having Ruby snipe the pill directly into his mouth.
• Son of the Mask had the cartoon baby trick the mask-wearing dog with an exploding bone, Looney Tunes style.
• In The Sooty Show, Sweep loves bones to the point where he can't understand why everyone else doesn't like them as much as he does. For example in one of the spin-off books he genuinely thinks an ideal birthday present for someone else would be an oil painting of a bone. Sweep also loved sausages just as much, with other characters often referring to him as "sausage brain".
• Superman story "The Super Dog from Krypton": Shortly after arriving on Earth, Krypto the Super-dog uses his X-Ray vision to find and dig up old buried bones.
• Tailchaser's Song: The "Just So" Story for why dogs and cats don't get along involves a dog city with a monument made of bones. A sly cat knocked down the monument. Dogs will never let the cat species live that moment down.
• Tintin: Tintin's dog Snowy, as well as sharing Captain Haddock's love of Loch Lomond Whisky, is a little too fond of bones. He not only steals a femur from a dinosaur skeleton in a museum, he can be distracted by a bone in the middle of a life or death mission for his master.
• Tom and Jerry: Spike the bulldog loves bones so much that he's almost always shown sleeping with a bone resting under his paw.
• Undertale: The Annoying Dog likes to steal bones from Papyrus the skeleton (not from Papyrus himself, but rather his bone collection, Undyne's collection of bones he gave her, and even his bone-related special attack), much to his chagrin.
• Wallace & Gromit:
  • Gromit's bedroom is wallpapered with a Stock Femur Bone pattern. In The Wrong Trousers, when the new tenant takes a shine to his room and he's stuck moving into the shabby spare room, he and Wallace start fixing it up by applying that same wallpaper to it.
  • One of the comics has Gromit briefly bedridden after appearing to come down with rabies (actually soapsuds in his drink), with Wallace serving him his favorite meal: bones on toast.
• Yo-kai Watch: Manjimutt is a dog Yo-kai whose fondness for bones proved to be an obstacle when trying to escape prison. When he tries to dig his way out in episode 12, he follows the bones and he somehow ends up back in his cell.

Dolphins

Fish. This is, of course, Truth in Television; fish is the main food for dolphins as well as mollusks and crustaceans.

Orcas (yes, orcas are a type of dolphin) have their own folder.

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• Minecraft: Dolphins drop cod when they die, and can be made friendlier by feeding them fish.
• In the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, dolphins' final message message to human-kind before leaving Earth, misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the "Star Spangled Banner," was "So long and thanks for all the fish." This was turned in a complete song number for the film adaptation.

Dromaeosaurs/"Raptors" (Velociraptor, Deinonychus, etc.)

Most works of fiction (and documentaries) tend to depict dromaeosaurs hunting down animals much larger than themselves. While they certainly were capable of taking down large animals, it wasn't nearly as common in Real Life. It's now believed that "raptors" prefered to hunt down smaller to medium-sized prey while only taking down larger prey during opportune moments (IE: very old, sick, or injured individuals that would be easier to take down). Likewise, there was a limit to the size of prey they could take down. Expect fiction to forget this and feature Velociraptor taking down a dinosaur that would've been much too big for it in reality. Let's also not forget that Velociraptor was the size of a turkey at best; the person-sized species that matched the profile of the traditional raptor was Deinonychus. There were also a few larger (grizzly-sized) species such as Utahraptor, Dakotaraptor, or Achillobator.

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• Deinonychus will almost always be depicted taking down a Tenontosaurus. While there is some debate over whether they could take down a full-grown Tenontosaurus, they were certainly capable of hunting juveniles.
• Velociraptor:
  • Many works of fiction and documentaries depict Velociraptor hunting Protoceratops, inspired by the discovery of a fossil of a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops locked in combat before they were presumably being buried in a landslide.
  • If humans are featured, expect Velociraptor to immediately put them on the menu. While it probably would take more than one Velociraptor to take down an adult human, the situation would likely be more of an inversion in reality since humans would be quite capable of hunting dromaeosaurs (especially Velociraptor, which, again, were poultry-sized) as a food source, and (given that dromaeosaurs are maniraptors and very close cousins to modern birds) probably think they taste like chicken. Larger dromaeosaurs such as Utahraptor, Dakotaraptor, and even Deinonychus, however, would likely be able to prey on humans.
• Monster Hunter: Various Bird Wyverns, which are notable raptor-like in appearance, are shown hunting a variety of other monsters as nourishment. Most notable are the Jaggi, which attack anything around them; given their propensity for fighting monsters larger and more powerful than they are (like the Lagiacrus in Tri and 3 Ultimate), it's a miracle their entire species hasn't been exterminated.

Ducks/Pigeons/Sparrows

Breadcrumbs, fed to them by a Homeless Pigeon Person most often. In Real Life, breadcrumbs are the equivalent of junk food to birds. Sure, it's got easily accessible carbohydrates... But that's all it's got. City-living tropers are advised to find better ways of getting rid of excess bread, because it's unhealthy to the birds and their environment in the long run. If you're looking for something to feed the ducks in the park with, try grapes, rolled oats, peas, or frozen corn. Or for that matter, just don't — wildlife officials generally urge not to feed at all, as it causes the wildlife to lose its healthy fear of humans, turning them into pest animals. Ducks in media will also eat fish, which they rarely eat in real life. Real ducks mainly feed on plants and invertebrates.

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• Breadwinners: The title characters are ducks whose job is to deliver bread to all the other ducks on their planet.
• In Princess Tutu, Duck's favorite food (both in human and duck forms) is any kind of bread.
• In Sarah & Duck, bread is the Trademark Favorite Food of the latter titular character.
• The Summer of the Swans: One scene shows Sara taking her mute brother Charlie out to the pond to feed bits of rolls to the swans.
• Viva Piñata: In order to make the Quackberry a resident of your garden, you'll need to feed it bread.

Eagles and Hawks

Fish, birds, rabbits, rodents, house pets, and sufficiently small children. In the case of harpy eagles, monkeys and sloths. Bald eagles are almost always depicted as fish-eaters; while fish do seem to be their preferred prey in Real Life, they also often go after waterfowl or carrion.

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• In the Angry Birds game series, the Mighty Eagle can be summoned by launching a can of sardines which he will follow, unleashing total destruction upon the pigs.
• In the Between the Lions episode "Something Fishy", Cliffhanger disguises himself as a big fish so an eagle can get him off the cliff. Leona later dresses up as one so she can be carried by the eagle.
• Pokémon:
  • The eagle-like Pidgeot is stated in the Pokédex to prey on the fish-like Magikarp. A random event in the mobile spinoff game Pokémon: Magikarp Jump will actually show a Pidgeotto (the pre-evolved form of Pidgeot) snatching up your Magikarp if it jumps at the wrong time.
  • The Pokédex entry for Rufflet (a bald eaglet) in Pokemon Ultra Sun mentions that its claws are strong enough to break the shells of Shellder (a clam) and allow it to eat their insides.
• The Secret Life of Pets: Tiberius the hawk attempts to snatch up several of the housepet characters a few times, though this often leaves him embarrassed that his instincts are showing. An Imagine Spot on his part also has him dive-bombing a hapless squirrel.
• Warrior Cats: Hawks and eagles are some of the few predators even adult cats have.
• There's a viral video hoax that allegedly shows a golden eagle attempting to carry off a baby, though it (thankfully) isn't successful.

Elephants

Peanuts and buns (UK). The peanut concept is a result of gullible circus audiences being persuaded to buy overpriced peanuts to eat for themselves or to feed to the animals. After the show, the elephants go back to their pens and eat hay. In real life, elephants can only digest about 40% of what they eat, so in one day they need approximately 400 to 600 pounds of food. Needless to say, if they go for peanuts exclusively, they're dead. The real "nut" that elephants are crazy about is coconuts, which they love so much they'll eat it with its shell. They also eat coconut palm tree leaves on a regular basis. Elephants also have a love for chocolate more than peanuts and also a hankering for sugarcane, even robbing sugar cane trucks in Thailand. Elephants apparently also love watermelon; an Animal Planet show shows them eating it enthusiastically. Probably justified, since it's sweet (which often means a high-energy food) and extremely juicy (it's not called a watermelon for nothing). They also like bananas. Buns are partially Truth in Television; elephants in captivity do enjoy eating bread, and the buns would also have been sugary, and partially British zoos' equivalent of the peanuts (in the days before there were signs saying "Do not feed the animals" — the erratic behaviour that led to London Zoo selling Jumbo is now believed to be due to tooth problems caused by this diet).

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• Babar:
  • One episode shows that the elephants of Celesteville have a peanut patch for making peanut butter.
  • In The Movie, during the introductory Victory Parade sequence, Babar's kids throw peanuts as treats for the townsfolk.
• The Beano:
  • The Bash Street Kids are told that elephants have a good diet. Fatty is pleased with learning this as he thinks an elephant's favourite food is buns, so takes it to mean he can eat lots of buns.
  • In the comic itself, one issue sees Minnie the Minx saying elephants are her favorite animal and decide she wants one as a pet. She can't get a real one, so she gets Fatty Fudge as a substitute by dressing him up as an elephant and feeding him buns in a Motivation on a Stick way.
• In Benjamin Blümchen, the Trademark Favorite Food of the title pachyderm is sugar cubes.
• Cats Don't Dance: Woolie the Elephant makes peanut tea for Danny when they first meet, and rambles on random factoids about peanuts.
• CB Bears: In his segments, Undercover Elephant's love of peanuts caused him to blow his cover.
• Disney:
  • Classic Disney Shorts: "Working for Peanuts" has Chip 'n Dale trying to steal peanuts from an elephant at the zoo while trying to avoid the wrath of zookeeper Donald Duck. A similar peanut-loving elephant appears in the Goofy short The Big Wash.
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: "An Elephant Never Suspects" has the rangers accused of peanut thievery by most of the animals at the zoo, including a group of elephants. The peanuts were actually being used by a pair of panda siblings in a machine made entirely out of bamboo, with the peanuts made into peanut butter as fuel for the machine.
  • Dumbo: Timothy wins the trust of the titular character by offering him a peanut.
  • Tarzan: Peanuts seem to be the Trademark Favorite Food of Tantor the elephant. In fact, he claims that the titular character might be a subspecies of elephant because he loves peanuts as well.
• Donkey Hodie: In "A Big Favor For Grampy", Duck Duck suggests that peanuts will help Gregory, Grampy's pet elephant, walk. Donkey Hodie tries to use a giant peanut to help Gregory walk, but it fails. Earlier in the episode, we see a pet dish with peanuts that is decorated with an image of a peanut, and this same dish also appears towards the end of the episode.
• The Heroes of Olympus: Subverted in The Son of Neptune. A passing mention is made of Frank accidentally giving Hannibal the elephant indigestion by feeding him peanuts.
• Horton Hears a Who!: The film adaptation has a scene where the titular elephant says that his breath smells like peanuts, and then complains about peanut bits getting stuck in his teeth.
• Krypto the Superdog: One episode has Streaky assisting the Dog Star Patrol in their mission to catch the thief responsible for stealing the world's supply of peanuts. The perpetrators turned out to be a group of space elephants that were stealing all of the peanuts, because as we all know, elephants love peanuts.
• Little Einsteins: The episode "Little Elephant's Big Parade" involves Leo, Annie, June, and Quincy helping an elephant grow taller for the parade by feeding her magic peanuts.
• Madeline: In "Madeline's Birthday at the Zoo", Madeline and Pepito lure the escaped elephant back to its cage with hot roasted peanuts.
• Magic Adventures of Mumfie: In one story, Mumfie gives the other Fox Cubhouse characters peanuts to give to Rimba. This example is odd, seeing as this trope is averted by the actual show itself, where Mumfie's favorite foods are sweets, mashed banana pancakes, sandwiches and mashed potatoes.
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show: In "Chuckles Bites the Dust", the kids' show host Chuckles the Clown dresses as one of his characters, Peter Peanut, as Grand Marshal of a local parade. Unfortunately he's marching in front of a group of circus elephants, which according to the observers, "shells" him to death.
• Mr. Bogus: In the second act of "Hipster Tripster", Bogus finds himself facing against an elephant at the zoo when trying to acquire some of the elephant's peanut cache.
• A couple of Pay Day candy bar ads involved an elephant going after a hapless man's Pay Day bar, because it had peanuts in it.
• The Penguins of Madagascar: The elephant goes crazy from hunger after the zoo lost power and tried to eat lemur Julian because he looked like a peanut.
• The Simpsons: Lampshaded in "Bart Gets an Elephant", where Bart gets a pet elephant and names it Stampy. To solve the food problem, Homer follows this trope by giving Stampy a whole bag of peanuts to eat, which causes it to become sick and weak. Lisa then says that "he can't just eat peanuts, dad, he needs plants to live." Learning from his mistake, Homer has Stampy strip all the leaves from a nearby park.
• Too Many Buns For Rosie, by Eva Haddon, lampshaded this. It was about an elephant who loved buns, but ate too many of them which made her unhealthy until she switched to eating fruit and vegetables.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film producer who has been working on a film starring the cartoon elephant Dumbo remarks that the best part about it is that the star is literally paid peanuts.
• Some of the recent advertisements for Wonderful Pistachios feature a talking elephant named Ernie (voiced by John Cena) shilling their trademark product, who states that he's doing so because he's tired of peanuts.
• Zoo Tycoon: Peanut dispensers are among the enrichment items available for elephants in Zoo Tycoon 2. If given an easel as another form of enrichment, elephants will occasionally paint a picture of a peanut.

Fish

Worms, usually hanging in a fishing hook; Cartoon Cheese is an uncommon but not unheard of bait alternative. Aquarium pet fish get those flakes that come in shakers. Always a Bigger Fish is also popularly depicted with fish (hence the name), with smaller ones getting eaten by bigger ones and so on. Of course, real fish are, again, a clade so varied that there's a species for any aquatic diet you can think of.

Sharks and piranhas have their own sections.

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• MAD: Parodied in a comic featuring Ariel from The Little Mermaid grossing out an amorous sailor by chowing down on a can of live worms.
• Finding Nemo: The DK Essential Guide mentions that Bubbles the yellow tang's favorite food is dried mealworms, a common aquarium staple.
• The YouTube series The Shark Puppet stars a shark whose Trademark Favorite Food is cheese, probably referencing the "cheese as bait" trend associated with fish.
• Spongebob Squarepants: Fish are typically shown eating human food and leading human lives, but the episode Hooky has one of the fishermen use cheese as bait on a fishing hook.

Flies

Anything rotten or smelly will usually have a bunch of flies circling around it (including poop and very dirty or dead animals), with some disgusting maggots being present as well in extreme cases. They're also shown to be attracted to anything sugary, such as honey, sugar cubes, or fruit. Also, soup (which is apparently so good that they can't help but literally dive in). Real flies are, usually, generalist omnivores with very varied diets. They do indeed frequently eat gross stuff and are important decomposers, but their diet is by no means limited to this. There are even bloodsucking flies (though the experience isn't quite the same as getting bitten by a mosquito).^note And yes, for the sake of completion, mosquitos are technically flies, but they're not regarded as such in comman parlance and thus they have their own folder here.

Foxes

Chicken or rabbits. Real Life Foxes are omnivorous scavengers; as such they'll take any food they can get but they especially love chicken. There's a reason "Fox in the henhouse" is an old saying. Real foxes seem to like rabbits; Time magazine, citing the Virgina Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, claimed that 44% of the red fox's diet is rabbits. In Japanese works, Kitsune are said to love fried tofu.^note The fried tofu has no basis in reality and no one's sure how the association started, but is still ingrained in Japanese culture and mythology regardless.

Part of the reason that Foxes and Chicken became so deeply ingrained in pop culture ties into the fact that Foxes are smart enough to learn that chickens are caged and can't migrate after one of them gets nabbed, so if they have one successful hunt they know they can come back and the chickens will still be there ready to be picked off. This combined with enough determination to chew through wire and wood, dig into the floor, or just full-on open the doors have made foxes a perennial headache for chicken owners since the birth of animal husbandry.

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• The standard Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle (i.e. if the fox is left alone with the chicken, or whatever prey animal is present in the puzzle, it will eat it).
• Fantastic Mr. Fox: Chickens are among the prey Mr. Fox steals for his family.
• Felicia, Sorceress of Katara is a vixen sorceress and has a thing for chicken.
• The Foxbusters: The title characters are chickens who defend their flock against a family of foxes.
• The Game of the Gods references this when one character threatens to use a Forced Transformation. "I will turn you into a rabbit and put you among foxes."
• Happy Harmonies: "The Hound and The Rabbit" features a villainous fox that tries to devour the rabbits a hound has recently befriended.
• Looney Tunes:
  • A Fox in a Fix revolves around a fox disguising himself as a guard dog so that he can eat all the chickens he wants.
  • Fox Terror has a fox constantly tricking Foghorn Leghorn into leaving the farm (and taking the Barnyard Dawg with him) to get at the chickens.
  • Rabbit Stew and Rabbits, Too! is all about a vulpine Expy of Wile E. Coyote trying to hunt down a rabbit, who in turn is an Expy of the Road Runner.
• In Minecraft, foxes will try to hunt and kill rabbits and chickens on sight.
• Rabbit's PhD thesis inverts this. The thesis claims that rabbits eat foxes, so the rabbit lures a fox into her rabbit-hole to see the thesis and the fox disappeared. The rabbit's thesis advisor is a lion who eats foxes.
• Shaun the Sheep: A fox trying to steal chickens and other animals like Timmy the lamb is a recurring villain.
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit: A fox threatened the rabbits in The Tale of Mr Tod, while in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, the main villain is a fox who wants to eat the titular duck. Mr Tod is a recurring villain in the Animated Adaptation Peter Rabbit.
• U.S. Acres features a fox constantly trying to steal the chickens.
• Zootopia: When the creative team was developing the story, they knew it would involve a World of Funny Animals that focused on mammals. They wanted their protagonists to be smaller animals and "natural enemies" in the real world. A fox and rabbit was their first choice and never changed despite many significant story changes that occurred during development.

Frogs and Toads

Flies, which they catch with their long, sticky tongues. In Real Life, of course, they are not picky eaters and will go after pretty much any insect they can get their tongues (which are actually short in real life) on, with larger species eating vertebrates as well.

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• In Battletoads, the 'Toads restore their health by eating flies.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: Among the strange phenomena plaguing Courage and his owners were a group of bullfrogs led by their king who invaded their house and tried to build a pond in their living room. They force the Bagges to act like frogs, including catching flies with their tongue, and use Courage as a fly catcher by covering him in honey. Courage rids the house of the frogs by catching flies with fly paper, stapling the fly-covered paper on the walls above where the frogs were preparing to feast on Eustace and Muriel, catching their attention where they all get their tongues stuck together on the sticky fly-paper trying to get the flies, and then grabbing all their tongues and flinging them off into the far distance.
• Disney:
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: One episode has a frog force a tribe of beetles to find him a fly because he's tired of eating beetles, and naturally they capture the fly member of the Rescue Rangers, Zipper.
  • Disney Channel: In one game available on the The Emperor's New School section of the website, "Red-Eyed Tree Frog Man", frog!Kuzco can eat flies with the player's aid to gain extra time.
  • The Princess and the Frog: After being turned into frogs by a magic spell, Tiana and Prince Naveen fall prey to their animal instincts and try to eat the Plucky Comic Relief firefly, Ray. Tiana was even embarrassed that her instincts are showing.
• In Flushed Away, one way to distract the Toad and Le Frog is to show them a fly, at which point they'll try like mad to get at it with their ridiculously long tongues, occasionally engaging in fencing matches with one another.
• The Muppets: Kermit the Frog has been quoted as saying that time's fun when you're having flies. Subverted in a famous Sesame Street skit. Bob assists Kermit on a lecture on frogs by bring a real (non-Muppet) frog, and Kermit is shocked and nauseated to find out that they eat flies and other invertebrates.
• Rocko's Modern Life: Mr. and Mrs. Bighead (and any other toad) tend to catch any fly that flies around their vicinity with their tongues. Mr. Bighead also enjoyed it. Like real toads, Mr. Bighead also enjoyed eating other insects, including the ones that tried to eat his precious garden, and even kept a bug jail for future consumption (before Rocko saved them).
• In The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher, while Jeremy plans to catch minnows to eat, he takes butterfly sandwiches on his fishing trip. In the end, after he fails to catch any minnows, he and his friends have a roasted grasshopper with ladybug sauce for dinner instead.
• Froggy and his family (from the book series of the same name) are Funny Animals who act and live like humans, but still eat flies at every meal.
• Kaeloo: The titular character, a frog, eats flies. The other characters are disgusted by this.

Goats

Tin cans or other junk and metal. Paper, too. In case you were wondering, this started from people misinterpreting goats trying to eat the labels (and glue) off cans. Now you know, And Knowing Is Half the Battle. Goats' genuine taste for paper sometimes turns up in variants of the homework-eating-dog scenario. Now and then this is also applied to sheep, implying that sheep and goats are being used interchangeably (see also mice, rats and cheese).

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• Daffy Duck: One Wartime Cartoon, "Scrap Happy Daffy", has Nazis sending a goat to eat piles of scrap metal that Daffy was guarding for the war effort.
• Disney:
  • In Beauty and the Beast, when Belle shows off her book to a group of sheep, one of them partakes of a bite of one the pages.
  • In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Djali the goat is seen munching on Quasimodo's wooden sheep figurines when he isn't looking.
• In Eternal Sonata, there's a brief quest in which there are three goats on a walkway blocking a narrow path and Allegretto, the character you control in the field, has to feed them scraps of paper in order to get them to move. Later, if you talk with a random NPC mailman, you discover that those paper scraps were letters that he was supposed to deliver to Viola, who just joined your party.
• The Garfield Show:
  • In one episode, Garfield gets turned into a goat and says that he got a craving for tin cans.
  • Subverted and lampshaded in a later episode, where a goat becomes offended when Garfield gives it a tin can instead of food. However, Garfield only meant for it to lick the glue off the can.
• Kung Fu Panda 2: A Running Gag has the goat Soothsayer repeatedly taking a bite out of Lord Shen's robes.
• M*A*S*H: In one episode, a goat that Klinger has purchased eats the unit's payroll. The investigating major from I-Corps doesn't believe that the money was eaten by a goat and decides that Hawkeye — who was paymaster — is responsible for the missing money and decides to have Hawkeye's wages garnished until the amount is paid back in full. Hawkeye, Klinger and Potter conspire to get the major out of the VIP tent, then turn the goat loose in the VIP tent where it eats an important report that the major had been working on for his superior officer. They then make a deal with him — if the major will confirm that a goat ate their payroll and absolve Hawkeye of the blame, then they'll verify that the same goat ate his report.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians Grover, the half-goat satyr would like to eat tin cans, apples, and such.
• Popeye: One cartoon randomly featured a Funny Animal goat who eats steel, and eventually eats an entire navy ship.
• Shaun the Sheep: The goat eats anything he can find in the garbage dump that he's often found at.
• The Simpsons: Lampshaded in "Lisa the Vegetarian". The family visits an amusement park that has a petting zoo, and Homer tries to get a goat to eat a tin can, but the goat isn't interested. Marge tells Homer that they're supposed to feed them from the animal feed stored in a machine.
• Steamboat Willie again — a goat being transported on the boat eats Minnie's ukulele and sheet music. (So what do they do? Bend its tail at right angles and use it as a hand-cranked phonograph!)
• U.S. Acres: In "Temp Trouble", Aloysius Pig's pet goat licks the glue off a tin can, and Aloysius gives him 10 demerits.

Hamsters

Seem to enjoy sunflower seeds a little too much. As usual, this is an exaggeration—real-life hamsters should be fed a larger diversity of seeds.

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• All of the hamsters in Hamtaro adore eating sunflower seeds, to the point where they're used as currency in the games. Both the original and the English theme song mention the hamsters' love of sunflower seeds.
• Hibiki's pet hamster Hamuzou in The Idolmaster loves sunflower seeds (as well as peanuts), and often gets into mischief if Hibiki eats his seeds.

Horses

Sugar (usually sugar cubes), carrots, apples or hay. Real horses will eat all of these things, but hay and/or grass makes up the bulk of their diet, supplemented with grain; the rest, especially the sugar lumps, are treats that should be given sparingly.

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• Disney:
  • Sleeping Beauty: Prince Phillip bribes his horse with the promise of "an extra bucket of oats. And a few... carrots?", only to irritably retract the carrots after the horse inadvertently clotheslines him on a tree branch. Sharp-eared viewers will note that an extra "bucket" of oats (holding 1-2 gallons for your average hand-carried "bucket") can weigh ten or twenty pounds of grain, which horses do eat... after insane exertion of Epic Race levels. Such horses would be: 1) racehorses who sprint for several miles, 2) war-horses after a battle, or 3) endurance horses who can truck along for a whole day of eight to ten hours. Given that they do end up fighting Maleficent at the climax, this was most likely a case of Accidentally-Correct Writing.
  • Tangled: Apples are the Trademark Favorite Food of Maximus the cavalry horse. When Rapunzel brings both Maximus and Flynn Rider to the kingdom where she was born, expecting them to get along, one of the ways Flynn tries to prove that he's turned away from thievery is by offering the horse a bag of apples.
    Flynn: What? I bought them.
    Maximus ponders this for a moment, then happily starts eating an apple
    Flynn: Most of them.
    Maximus pauses, then gives a nicker of concern
• Doug: One episode has the eponymous protagonist, after buying his own tall tales about his horse-riding prowess, forced to ride a vicious and nigh-unrideable horse named Sugar. He was only able to temporarily appease it by offering it sugar cubes.
• Fanfic Is Crapsack: Thanks to bad fanfic shenanigans, Rarity is under the impression that she can't get enough to eat (despite two of her friends being a baker and a farmer, respectively.) Twilight is not amused when she hears about this, lampshading this trope.
  "You've got to be kidding me! You're a HORSE! You eat GRASS! You eat HAY! You could just walk out in the nearest open field and eaten your fill!"
  Rarity gaped at her. "Eating grass like a..."
  "Pony?" Twilight deadpanned. "I repeat—- college student. I know about being short on food. Plenty of times when it was a choice between grazing in the courtyard and eating Ramen noodles. Trust me, pick the grass."
• The Garfield Show: Subverted in an episode where Garfield tries to feed a horse a bale of hay only for the equine to react in disgust and complain that hay is dry and tasteless.
• Gulliver's Travels: The intelligent Houyhnhnms try to feed Gulliver hay to see whether or not he's one of them or a barbaric Yahoo. When he turns it down they bring him raw meat (which Yahoos eat), but he turns this down as well.
• In the HouseBroken episode "Who's A Party Pony?" sugar cubes are treated like cocaine for the eponymous pony (and Honey joins him in getting high on them)
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the amount of times Link can make his horse Epona boost her speed is measured in carrots.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Horses can be fed either apples or carrots to restore their health and make them friendlier to Link. Endura Carrots in particular will give them three additional, temporary spurs of running speed, and can also be traded to the horse god Malanya — who claims them to be a delicacy he has only eaten once before — in exchange for his resurrecting deceased horses.
• Madeline: At the end of Madeline and the Easter Bonnet, the new Easter bonnet the girls make for Bonbon the milk-wagon horse has real carrots hanging all around the rim, which Bonbon can snack on as she walks along.
• Miitopia: In the Nintendo Switch re-release, the player is able to recruit a horse to their team that the Miis will commonly give apples and carrots to.
• Minecraft: Horses can eat a large variety of foods both to recover lost health and to enter love mode (a status where an animal fed a certain food will become capable of breeding), more than any other animal save for wolves and dogs (which can eat any type of meat). All the foods they can eat fall within this trope: sugar, wheat sheaves and apples will restore a small amount of a horse's health, while golden carrots, golden apples and hay bales will restore larger amounts of health and make the horse enter breeding mode.
• Mister Ed: Mister Ed greatly enjoys all stereotypical horse foods, and he says so often.
• Monster Musume: Carrots are Centorea the centaur's Trademark Favorite Food.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Pony foods are typically based on hay, flowers, carrots and similar things. They also greatly enjoy apples, which are generally the only thing that Applejack's farm is shown growing — although some later-season episodes show it having carrot fields as well.
  • When prepared foods show up, they're typically horsey versions of real-life foodstuffs, such as "hayburgers", "carrot dogs"^note hot dogs with a carrot instead of a Vienna sausage and flower sandwiches. One episode features a food stall serving oat burgers, which are basically hamburgers except with mashed oats instead of meat.
  • One of the lines in Pinkie's song meant to soothe tensions between ponies and buffalo by pointing out their similarities mentions them both eating hay and oats, and everyone enjoys Applejack's... well, apples.
  • Ponies also seem to have a huge Sweet Tooth for things like cake and candies, which is probably an extension of the "horses like sugar cubes" concept, given that the local sweet shop/bakery is called Sugarcube Corner. (Real Life horses will quite happily eat all manner of sweet foods, from fruit — including but not by any means limited to apples — to baked goods to hard candies and the classic sugar lumps).
  • Rainbow Dash loves broccoli and pigs out on them at a buffet. This is another food that horses should only be given as a special treat; too much can cause colic.
• NetHack: Knights start the game with apples and carrots to feed their pet pony. Horses in this game can also eat other vegetarian food, such as lichen corpses.
• Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Marigold the Unicorn likes to eat anything horses eat, like hay and apples.
• Pokémon Sword and Shield: The Royal Horse Pokémon Glastrier and Spectrier are known to drop everything they're doing if they catch the scent of their favorite carrots. In The Crown Tundra, part of Calyrex's storyline involves growing the carrots in question as bait for them; they were once Calyrex's mount, and he would love to have them back.
• Uma Musume Pretty Derby: The horse girls are frequently shown eating food made with carrots, you use carrot jelly to recover stamina, and even the game's Premium Currency is carrot-shaped.

Hyenas

Dead things, especially a lion's leftovers (despite the fact that lions scavenge off of hyena kills more often). This is a common misconception when it comes to spotted hyenas, which actually prefer to hunt prey than search for carcasses, though they have digestive systems that are still well adapted to scavenging, so they're more likely to eat decaying carcasses than other predators (which has made them very successful). Striped hyenas and brown hyenas, on the other hand, are indeed primarily scavengers. In some works, hyenas can be seen eating bones, which is accurate in real-life. Though real-life hyenas are Extreme Omnivores that also eat fruits and inanimate objects, fictional hyenas are rarely portrayed this way. Aardwolves, the fourth living species of hyena, are insectivores. They do not even eat from corpses or look for red meat, contrary to some sources.

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• Carry On: The hyena protagonist's dad is a mortician who frequently puts his work on the dinner table.
• The Lion King:
  • The Lion King (1994): The hyenas are shown living in a bone-littered Elephant Graveyard and gleefully tearing into a piece of carrion that Scar brings them. But they also avert the stereotype by actively hunting in important scenes, as they try to eat the lion cubs alive, cause the stampede of wildebeests in which Mufasa dies, and eventually take down Scar.
  • In The Lion King 1 1/2, hyenas are depicted as the main predators of meerkats. Hyenas rarely go after such small prey; the main predators of meerkats are jackals and birds of prey.
  • In The Lion Guard, Jaziri recognizes hyenas being nature’s clean up crew, though Janja, Chungu and Cheezi are always trying to hunt in the Pride Lands. Aardwolves show up too. Kion mistakes them for the regular type of hyena and uses the Roar on them, which causes the termite population to explode and drive everyone except the zebras nuts. Kion had to go apologize to the aardwolves and ask them to come back.
• Pearls Before Swine: Zebra's hyena neighbors run a funeral home just so they can eat the dead corpses. They also frequently ask Zebra if they can have a dead relative of his or stalk him in case if he dies.

Koalas

Gum (eucalyptus) leaves. Truth in Television, as koalas can only ingest gum leaves, and that's only particular kinds of gum leaves.

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• This is a major plot device in an episode of Ace Ventura: The Animated Series in which eucalyptus cough drops are used to pacify a group of angry koalas.
• Spellsinger: In The Paths of the Perambulator, Colin the Koala has a supply of dried eucalyptus cubes to keep him going away from his native habitat (and when that runs out, is forced to eat whatever greenery he can find, which upsets his stomach). When the characters get trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine, his fantasy is a huge forest of gum trees. When they return to reality, but still have psychosomatic effects of the dreamworld, he's slightly out of it from the narcotic.
• We Bare Bears: In "Nom Nom", the titular koala was shown drowning his sorrows with a eucalyptus-flavored drink. Another episode "Kyle" showed he has a eucalyptus tree in his mansion.

Mice (and sometimes rats)

Cheese, even though in real life most don't like it. Ironically, the mouse's mortal enemy, the cat, adores it. Rats, which are more prone to eating animal protein than mice are, enjoy cheese more than their smaller cousins do. Peanut butter, which mice DO love, would be a better choice. In Real Life, a lot of vermin mouse and rat poisons are made to have the smell and taste of chocolate, as the little rodents are actually quite fond of anything sweet. This particular Stock Animal Diet concept probably arose because, while hungry mice will nibble on any food that's left out in a pre-refrigerator-era pantry, cheese was the only thing that actually showed clear tooth impressions to prove they'd been doing so.

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• In Adventures in Wonderland, the Dormouse loves cheese... even though dormice aren't really mice.
• In An American Tail, immigrant mice come to America believing the streets are paved with cheese.
• Anatole, a French mouse in a series of picture books by Eve Titus, gets a job as a taster in a (human) cheese factory, leaving notes with suggestions for improvement.
• Angelina Ballerina:
  • In the original books, Angelina's favorite food is her mother's cheddar cheese pies, and most of the foods mentioned are cheese based such as cheese crumpets and cheddarburgers.
  • In The Next Steps series, Angelina and her friends have a fondness for cheese. In the "Dancing in the Moonlight" song, they sing about having "some Camembert to share."
• In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the Spectre turns a Mad Scientist into cheese and releases his trained rats to eat him.
• Bear in the Big Blue House: Tutter is a connoisseur of everything cheese and enjoys trying any type of cheese he can, including gouda and feta.
• Beast Wars: Rattrap loves cheese; he even has a picture of one in his Heads-Up Display. Then again, he's not really a rat...
• BoJack Horseman: Mia McKibben, an anthropomorphic mouse, wears a cheese-themed pendant.
• In The Butterfly Ball, Sir Maximus Mouse is a "cheese tycoon" based in the Cheddar Bank.
• In Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, the recipe for mouse mutagen (not to be confused with rat mutagen) includes cheese. You can also use candy, which is more thematically appropriate (one of the "main attractions" of mouse mutations is the ability to eat as much junk food as you want with no health penalties), but looking at the game files reveals a comment referencing this particular trope:
  fun fact: mice don't like cheese as much as sugar! we include it in the recipe because most people correlate the two, and as a fun poke at it
• Conker's Bad Fur Day has a segment where you must load a mouse/rat with cheese, in order to kill it, and get a massive, female voiced brick off a gangster-talking smaller block, so you can reach a window... into a barn...
• Corner Gas: Oscar shows an extremely rare moment of knowledge by baiting mouse traps with candy, claiming cheese doesn't work. Of course, due to "mice like cheese" being so widely believed in real life, it's possible that the writers were trying to portray Oscar as being Entertainingly Wrong like usual, but ended up with a case of Accidentally-Correct Writing.
• Critter Coven: Florence, is an anthropomorphic rat who practices "Lunar cheese" witchcraft. Also, all the snacks she set out for the first meeting were cheese-based.
• Referenced with Crush Crush, Brie is an explorer from Rodentia, wanting to sample the solar-system's cheeses.
• Chapter 2 of Deltarune has the enemy Maus (plural Maice), living computer mice who love cheese. The very first Maus the player is likely to fight in combat appears when they try to touch its cheese, and the Swatchlings dealing with a Maice infestation in the mansion kitchen lament that they haven't finished throwing out all the cheese beforehand.
• Disney:
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Monterey Jack has a psychotic reaction to just the smell of cheese, or even hearing anyone say the word. There's even an episode where his cheese addiction is treated like a G-Rated Drug and his friends have to confront him about it.
  • Mickey Mouse deliberately averts this. In every cartoon, Mickey is rarely seen eating any cheese at all. This is due to Disney's rule that Mickey is to never, ever be shown with cheese, as it makes him seem like a mouse and he's more of a human that just happens to look like a giant mouse. This seems to have been a later rule for Mickey. Early comics (1930s) show Mickey and Minnie eagerly eating cheese, and from the mid-1990s onward new Mickey cartoons often reference cheese. In one House of Mouse episode, Mickey spent the rent money on cheese. Specifically, a huge wheel of it that he swallowed in one bite. Also, at the "Mickey's House" attraction in Disney World, Mickey's refrigerator (at least at one time) sported a copy of his shopping list — which consisted entirely of different types of cheese.
• In Dragon Quest VIII, the hero's pet mouse, Munchie who actually turns out to be the hero's grandfather, Chen-Mui, in disguise to help him out can be fed various types of cheese to perform special attacks in-battle.
• Geronimo Stilton: Most of the mouse characters have names and surnames that reference types of cheese. The mice in the books and the cartoon really love cheese, to the point where the theft of all the cheese in New Mouse City is treated like a famine, and their entire island is shaped like a gigantic slice of Swiss cheese.
• hololive: The favorite food of the rat-based chaos deity, Hakos Baelz, is fried cheese, and the loading animation for her stream also features a pixel-art version of her jumping over cheese blocks.
• House of Tribes: Cheese is revered by mice as the Food of the Gods.
• Housepets!: Zig-zagged. In Spo's first appearance, Fido gets him some oats, because mice actually like oats, and Spo comments he can't stand cheese. The Alt Text of the very same strip, however, has him claiming "Mom fed us cheese like ALL THE TIME".
• Imagination Movers:
  • Warehouse Mouse loves cheese.
  • In "Shall We Dance?", the Movers get some bananas from one of their rooms and are seen running out of the room, accompanied by the sounds of chattering angry monkeys.
• In Kevin Henkes' picture books, all of his characters are anthropomorphic mice who are often shown eating cheese in some form.
  • Chrysanthemum: Chrysanthemum's favorite dinner is macaroni and cheese with ketchup. Her parents make it to cheer her up after a bad first day of school where everyone laughs at her long name.
  • Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse: Mr. Slinger's students love his cheesy snacks. One of the illustrations also shows him giving a lesson about different types of cheese.
  • Wemberly Worried: Two young mice dress up as blocks of Cartoon Cheese in the Halloween parade.
• In Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts the mutant rats running Ratland take mouthfuls of spray cheese as admission fees.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Chuck Jones' Cheese Chasers featured Hubie and Bertie, two mice who, after gorging all night on cheese, realized that even looking at it made them feel sick, so feeling they now had nothing to live for, they tried to get Claude the Cat to eat them.
  • Played with in Kitty Kornered. Porky Pig puts a bunch of housecats (led by Sylvester) out for the night. Sylvester attempts to rouse the others to fight for their "cat-stitutional" rights with a speech, rhetorically asking, "Are we men, or are we mice?" To which the smallest cat replies, "I like cheese." (*smack!*)
  • The archetypal Speedy Gonzalez short has Speedy stealing cheese guarded by Sylvester to feed the starving mice of Mexico.
• Krazy Kat: Ignatz is quite partial to cheese. In fact, cheese is to mice what catnip is to cats, and even Krazy Kat succumbs to its effects after getting invited to a "Fromage Festival" held by the mice.
• Madeline: In "Madeline and the Big Cheese", the main conflict is set off when the boarding school's two resident mice eat the big wheel of cheese Lord Cucuface had bought for a special fondue dinner.
• In Magnus Powermouse by Dick King-Smith, the pest control officer baits his trap with a chunk of Mars bar, and the narration notes that the stereotype is wrong.
• In the Maisy First Exerpiences picture book Maisy's Surprise Party, the lunch served at the party includes a number of treats, the last of them being cheese, which is said to be Maisy's favorite.
• In MouseHunt, the mouse loves cheese so much that it devours an entire cheese wheel that the two Butt-Monkey Plucky Comic Reliefs are using to catch it. In the end, it becomes a string cheese food taster.
• MouseHunt involves using cheese to bait a trap, though the varieties of cheese are as weird and wonderful as the mice they attract.
• Mouse Math has Funny Animal mice which like cheese; the main character Albert is sometimes shown eating cheese sticks.
• Mouse Trap (1963): Cheese for mice. Players control mouse tokens, and collect Cartoon Cheese wedges as part of gameplay. The space over which the cage trap is set is called the Cheese space or the Cheesy Danger Zone, meaning someone has baited this mouse trap with cheese.
• Mr. Bogus: Ratty will periodically eat cheese, when he isn't trying to steal anything or trying to one-up Bogus.
• Muppets Tonight: At the end of the first episode, Rizzo the Rat has a Balloon Belly from eating all the Dancing Cheeses who performed earlier in the show (despite the fact that in The Muppet Christmas Carol he was averse to eating singing food).
• Also in The Muppet Christmas Carol, a poor mouse in the opening number begs a passing Scrooge for some cheese. At the end of the movie, when Scrooge has become a charitable individual and is sharing his generosity with his neighbors, he gives the mouse a gift-wrapped piece of cheese.
• Subverted in the Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Comics System comic "A Mouser in the Houser": the Mousers actually hate cheese despite being given it constantly.
• Nitrome: In Cheese Dreams, an anthropomorphic ball of cheese is captured by space mice so obsessed with cheese, they use it to power their ships.
• In Pinky and the Brain, Pinky once sang the "Cheese Roll Call", a musical tribute to cheeses from around the world. Brain isn't as exuberant, but has opined that Swiss is "the best cheese in the world." They rarely get to eat cheese, though; as captive mice, they live mostly on food pellets.
• Rhythm Heaven has a minigame called "Rat Race" based around the cat -> rat -> cheese food chain, with rats trying to reach a plate of cheese at the other end of a table guarded by a cat.
• Saved by the Bell: A mouse goes missing, and Screech walks around with his pockets full of cheese in an attempt to lure it out of hiding.
• Soupe Opéra: The mouse eats cheese after it's created, as does the rat.
• SuperKitties: Lab Rats' villainous inventions involve cheese in many ways, even to the point of turning the whole city into cheese.
• Tom and Jerry: For Jerry, cheese is still his favorite food, but he'll eat almost any food that's available to him no matter what it is.
• Tortall Universe: In Wolf-Speaker, Daine (who can speak to animals) has a conversation with a mouse, who tells her that mice aren't nearly as fond of cheese as humans seem to think, and suggests several things it would rather be fed instead.
• In Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object, Nazrin the mouse-youkai has a possible cheese emote when talking. Of course, being a youkai, she's also not one to pass up on human prey.
• Transformice is an online multiplayer game that revolves around mice and cheese. Players control the mice, with the goal of retrieving the cheese in each 2-minute round and bringing it back to the mouse hole. Each piece of cheese brought back results in the player getting a cheese coin, which can be used to purchase wearable items.
• Ultima:
  • In Ultima VI, cheese is required to convince Sherry the mouse to join the party, in order to retrieve the Rune of Valor from a mouse hole in the tavern in Jhelom.
  • Sherry returns in Ultima VII, and will gladly accept cheese.
  • Sherry has a song dedicated to her, the Cheese Song, in Ultima Runes Of Virtue.
• In Velká sýrová loupež (The Great Cheese Robbery), a group of three mice try to rob a cheese store.
• In Violine, Klaas, a white mouse, immediately thinks of cheese when Violine reads his mind, indicating that he is hungry.
• In Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego Wonder Rat wears a picture of a wedge of Cartoon Cheese on his chest and a cape that looks like Cartoon Cheese too. The episodes where he's the thief are usually full of cheese references.
• Who Moved My Cheese?: Mice eat cheese. Downplayed as the cheese is metaphorical. It's more literal in the direct parodies, which use rats instead of mice.
• In WordGirl, Professor Boxleitner was a friendly scientist who assisted the titular superhero until a Freak Lab Accident caused the brain of one of his lab mice to be grafted to the side of his head. Now he is the villainous Dr. Two-Brains, driven by his insatiable hunger for cheese. His evil schemes all involve either stealing cheese, or stealing things to turn into cheese with his Transformation Ray.
• Xanadu (Storyverse): In "Against Type", after Nicodemus is turned into a giant rat, he develops a strong obsession with cheese. This comes back to bite him when Max uses a "scent amplifier" to augment the smell of a block of cheese, both making it more odoriferous and strengthening its effects, in order to turn it into an irresistible lure.

Mongooses

Snakes. Mongooses are willing to eat anything they can catch, snakes being one of them, but they (and their close relatives the meerkats) will go after them even if not hungry — not due to any particular animosity, mind you, but because snakes eat their babies if given the opportunity.

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• Austin Powers: Dr. Evil mentions this when describing his relationship with Austin.
  He's the snake to my mongoose, or the mongoose to my snake... either way it's bad.
• Gravedale High: One episode has the Gorgeous Gorgon student Durze having her rented dress destroyed because a mongoose that someone took to school scare her head's snakes making them "run" away.
• Rikki Tikki Tavi: Rikki is a voracious snake hunter and even assures Chuchundra that mongooses don't eat rats, even though that's their most common prey in real life.

Monkeys and Apes

Bananas. Rather funny, as the Real Life wild bananas are smaller, green and far less tasty compared to the cultivated golden banana the humans are familiar with. Captive primates do go ape for bananas, though bananas cultivated for humans are too sugary for some species and it's basically like giving them candy, and should not be a staple (and anyway, they love grapes even more); at least one zoo actually had to stop giving bananas to their monkeys because they had too much sugar, causing their teeth to rot. Sometimes primates are shown just liking fruit in general, which is Truth in Television for most primates, though many of them are omnivores (such as us). Concerning the great apes, gorillas mostly eat either roughage or fruit depending on the species (fruits aren't widely available in most gorilla habitats); in fact, when given bananas, they usually prefer to eat the pith (the white stringy stuff in the peel) instead of the flesh. Meanwhile, chimpanzees are mostly herbivores but well known for fishing for termites and hunting small animals like monkeys, antelope and infants of rival troops, while orangutans are the biggest frugivores of the apes (and only great apes in the native range of bananas), preferring the much-dreaded durian, a giant spiky fruit said to smell like gym socks (they have been observed eating the meat of small mammals like squirrels and lorises, but they don't actively hunt like chimpanzees do and researchers believe they're primarily opportunistic scavengers, i.e. the animals they eat are already dead). Primates may also be seen eating nuts.

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• Animorphs: While in gorilla morph Marco is sometimes seen mounging on bananas, though he's probably invoking the trope for fun, and he placated the original DNA donor of that morph with an apple instead of a banana.
• Ben & Jerry's markets a banana-walnut ice cream under the name Chunky Monkey.
• Brandy & Mr. Whiskers: Parodied when Brandy tries to use a banana to bribe villain gecko Gaspar's giant monkey mooks, who takes offense to the stereotype (though they later express enthusiasm in finding bananas for themselves after Brandy leaves).
• Brawl in the Family parodies Donkey Kong's taste for bananas. The other Kongs eat the hoard, but Donkey and Diddy blame a nearby pair of Kremlings. Then Donkey and Diddy attack the Kremlings, and K. Rool must buy bananas at the grocery store to placate the Kongs.
• Curious George: George eats bananas... and anything else he can get his hands on.
• Discworld: This is the best way to get into the Librarian's good graces. Sometime between Light Fantastic and Sourcery he hires inept wizard Rincewind to fetch him bananas. While in Unseen Academicals he eats a poisoned banana without thinking (he survives).
• Donkey Kong Country: Donkey Kong enjoys them and keeps a hoard of yellow (or golden) bananas. The Kremlings steal the hoard, and Donkey and Diddy must recover the bananas. The other Kongs presumably like to eat bananas, but we know not why the Kremlings want them.
• Escape from the Planet of the Apes: In a rare live-action version, this was amusingly subverted — Zira is in a test room with a set of puzzle blocks that form a staircase. Hanging above is a banana. She completes the puzzle in about fifteen seconds, climbs the stairs, looks up at the banana and sighs. When one of the scientists wonders aloud why she won't take it, she replies testily "Because I abhor bananas!" (This is an In-Universe Wham Line, as the scientists had no idea the apes could talk).
• The Far Side has gorillas eating bananas a few times, even waxing sentimental about them.
  "You know, Sid, I really like bananas... I mean, I know that's not profound or nothin'... Heck! We ALL do... But for me, I think it goes much more beyond that."
• Futurama: Gunther, an uplifted monkey, likes bananas but prefers not to eat them since they remind him that he's only fully sapient because of Professor Farnsworth's experimental hat. He eats banana-flavored foods to get around this.
• Gainomax: The "Ring" parody commercial threatens humans to stop eating bananas after workouts, as it is "the monkey's food".
  • However, in a later ad campaign, the entire monkey race is shown getting fed up with eating bananas and want the Gainomax product instead.
  Monkey President: "Can you believe that we've limited ourselves to eating bananas for thousands of years?! It's just outrageous! Waste of time!"
• Ice Age: Captain Gutt, the pirate Gigantopithecus from the fourth film, is the only antagonist in the franchise who isn't a predator, and naturally he has a giant pile of fruit on his ship. His Villain Song also describes him as "looting, stealing, [and] banana-peeling".
• Julius Jr.: Subverted. Julius is a monkey who dislikes even the smell of bananas, but once pretends to love them when a friend makes banana treats for him, so as not to hurt her feelings.
• The Jungle Book (1967): King Louie the orangutan dines on bananas, and gives some to Mowgli to win his sympathy.
  King Louie: Have two bananas! (holds up three fingers)
• Justice League: Subverted in an episode where the Flash offers a banana to a gorilla in a laboratory, before being scolded by a scientist. When the gorilla reveals himself to be the Mad Scientist Gorilla Grodd, he clocks Flash a good one and remarks, "That was for the banana. I hate bananas." Grodd has the same reaction to Cisco offering him a banana in The Flash (2014). However, in Batman Ninja, Grodd eats a banana and Catwoman jibes him about how played out it is. Grodd replies that a cat-burglar who dresses as a cat is hardly in a position to judge.
• King Kong (1933): While the original may not have mentioned bananas, the Universal Studios theme park ride blasts the audience with banana-flavored gas from animatronic Kong's mouth.
• Looney Tunes: Parodied in a cartoon where a chimpanzee is shown in a room with several blocks and a banana hanging from the ceiling. The expectation of the narrator is that in this logic test, the chimp will stack the boxes on top of each other to reach the banana. Sure enough, he chimpanzee stacks the boxes, climbs up to the banana... then whips out a saw and uses it to cut the entire section of the ceiling away to bring down the refrigerator that happens to be sitting right above it. Cut to the next scene of it happily enjoying turkey legs and cake, much to the surprise and confusion of the narrator.
• Magilla Gorilla always ate bananas; he'd squeeze them at the bottom and they'd pop out the top & into his mouth.
• Manifold: Origin: Inverted; when the advanced hominid "Daemons" (who resemble gorillas) want to reward the human scientist Nemoto, they try offering her a banana. She is understandably insulted.
• Hoho, Kai-Lan's monkey friend on Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, loves bananas.
• Overwatch: Subverted by Winston; he's a gorilla and does eat bananas, but his Trademark Favorite Food is peanut butter (which he likes to dunk his bananas into).
• Oz the Great and Powerful: Parodied when Oscar is trying to get Finley, a flying monkey, to go along with his lies.
  Oscar: You can have a nice pile of bananas, alright?
  Finley: Bananas! Oh, I see. Because I'm a monkey, I must love bananas, right? That is a vicious stereotype.
  Oscar: You don't like bananas?
  Finley: Of course I love bananas! I'm a monkey, don't be ridiculous. I just don't like you saying it.
• Pokémon: Before Mankey and Primeape's favorite food was established (chestnuts), episode 65 of the anime has them munching down on bananas.
• Richard Scarry: Bananas Gorilla is even named after his Trademark Favourite Food.
• Roly Polys No Nanakorobi Yaoki: Banaten specifically loves fried bananas, to the point that he invented a machine to automatically grow, harvest, and fry bananas.
• RWBY: During his Establishing Character Moment, Sun Wukong is shown noshing on a banana while evading the detectives trying to arrest him.
• Schlock Mercenary: The Uplifted apes are often seen eating bananas, though Colonel Kerchak takes offense to one whisk-happy chef pureeing them. Later we're introduced to a traditional gorilla "balanced breakfast" known as a rock-a-stack consisting of a banana and five donuts speared into half a grapefruit with "protein" sprinkles.
• Starbound: The Apex love bananas. The Apex PC even mentions that every Apex's dream is freedom and owning a banana farm.
• Tarzan: Around the start of the Age-Progression Song, some of the gorillas are seen eating a pile of bananas before a young Tarzan accidentally falls on and ruins their meal. The apes then glare angrily at Kala, as the boy was her responsibility.
• In Uncle Albert's Mysterious Island, bananas are one of the two kinds of food you can feed Gus the monkey with.
• The Wild Thornberrys: Subverted. Darwin rarely eats bananas, instead preferring Cheese Munchies.

Moles

Earthworms, which form the majority of their diet in Real Life. They'll happily eat any other invertebrate they can catch, though, as well as nuts.

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• In The Animals of Farthing Wood, Mole is a Big Eater and earthworms are his Trademark Favourite Food. This actually saves his life, because when a fire breaks out he's busy hunting for worms underground and the fire can't reach him.
• The Butterfly Ball and the Grashopper Feast: Old Blind Mole has "a bunch of juicy worms to munch" in the pocket of his coat.
• G-Force: Done with Speckles the computer hacker, accompanied by a Visual Pun when he uses a computer worm as part of his hacking protocol.
  Darwin: You're a genius.
  Speckles: I'm a mole. I got a thing for worms. (slurps up a real worm)

Mosquitoes

Blood. Truth in Television, but only for gravid (egg-making) females, which is often ignored in fiction. In all other cases, mosquitoes actually eat mostly fruit and nectar.

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• A Bug's Life: One scene has a mosquito ordering a blood drink at a bar. The mosquito is male, however.
• One The Far Side panel showed a mosquito husband complaining to his wife about his work day, saying "I must have spread malaria across half the country." According to Gary Larson, this provoked letters from readers pointing out that male mosquitoes don't bite people.
• Rocko's Modern Life:
  • A trio of male mosquitoes that call themselves "The Blood Brothers" are bandits that terrorize "the Fat Lands" on Spunky.
  • In another episode, a female mosquito bites Filburt (who has an amphibian throat disease even though he's a reptile). She becomes infected, and falls apart before being eaten by (and infecting) Bev.

Mythical

• Unicorns, pegasi and Winged Unicorns tend to either eat just like regular horses or eat mostly candy and desserts, sometimes a bit of both.

• The Undead are usually portrayed as not needing (or in some cases, not being able) to eat and drink, with the exception of vampires (who, of course, drink blood, although whether or not they actually need to or can eat/drink anything else depends on the story. Some vampires who actually need to drink blood but feel bad about drinking human blood drink animal blood instead) and zombies (who eat human flesh, chiefly brains).

• Demons may eat meat and they may also eat abstract concepts such as emotions, "spiritual energy", and people's souls, or they may not eat at all.

• Dragons are usually portrayed as eating large animals such as cows and horses, fish, or occasionally humans. They may also be seen liking spicy food and it not bothering them because of their fire breath. In some cases, they may eat gemstones and precious metals.

• Giants either eat humans or large versions of normal food.

• Fairies may be portrayed as having a sweet tooth and liking candy, desserts, and/or fruit. They may also be seen eating flowers, and they may also be emotion eaters (particularly the evil ones). Those of The Fair Folk persuasion may occasionally be portrayed as carnivorous or even cannibalistic.

• Elves often have a sweet tooth, particularly Christmas Elves, and they're often portrayed as vegetarians. Even if not vegetarian, most elves are depicted as liking plant-based food due to the association with elves and nature.

• Leprechauns often like to drink beer. Their more rarely seen cousins the clurichauns subsist entirely on alcoholic beverages.

• Monsters will often eat all kinds of things and some of the more malevolent ones may include humans and pets.

• Dwarves often have a fondness for red meat and tubers, the former of which you can bet will be one of the many points of disagreement between them and the typically vegetarian elves. The other usual staple of their diet goes without saying.

• Griffons are famed for their appetite for horse flesh, a detail dating back to antiquity.

Neanderthals (and other prehistoric humans)

Meat, preferably megafauna such as woolly mammoths, woolly rhino and Irish elk which they take down with giant clubs. In the least serious works, dinosaurs. Neanderthals were long thought to be strictly carnivorous, but like modern humans it's been shown to depend on where they lived and many who lived in warmer, forested areas were nearly vegetarian. They also enjoyed mushrooms. And despite the common belief that we didn't start eating diets high in carbs until civilization, tubers (a food source not accessible to most animals) became a staple of many human diets once fire and cooking were discovered.

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• The Book of Bunny Suicides: One of the many creative deaths shows two bunnies parading a mammoth costume in front of a group of hunting cavemen.
• Cave Boy Dave is a comic book about a cave boy who stinks at getting meat during his adulthood ritual but ends up inventing the salad bar.
• Primal (2019): Spear is shown to chiefly hunt for his food and isn't particularly picky about his targets, whether they be large, small, aquatic or terrestrial. If no other food sources are available, he'll even eat insects. One episode shows him trying to gather fruit from a tree so he's at least partial to adding variety to his diet when the opportunity presents itself though he considers spiced food to be unpalatable, seen when a woman from a different culture offers him a cooked tuber.

Opossums

Like raccoons, garbage. Opossums are natural omnivorous scavengers, though they will also hunt small rodents. It's believed that the abundance of food waste and insulation provided by humans has expanded the range of opossums far up north from their original habitat.

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• Over the Hedge: Ozzy and Heather (an opossum father and daughter) are among a group of animals RJ convinces to raid human garbage for food, which they grow fond of.

Orcas

Seals, penguins and fish (including sharks). Truth in Television in that orcas will hunt and eat any sort of marine life, although different orcas populations tend to be very specialized eaters (for instance, "Sedentary" orca pods, which mostly stick to a stable home range, chiefly eat fish and squid, while semi-nomadic "Transient" pods feed most often on other marine mammals). They're also known to eat giant whales, polar bears, and even great white sharks. It's quite common for documentaries to show orcas beaching themselves on land to hunt seals and sea lions.

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• Arctic Circle: The main penguin trio frequently have trouble with orcas that try to eat them. Poor Ed can never catch a break.
• Futurama: In "The Bird-Bot of Ice-Catraz", Bender gets mauled by an orca that mistook him for a penguin due to him wearing a tuxedo. Later, that orca comes to devour the flock of penguins that menace Leela and Bender.
• Kenny the Shark: One episode has the titular tiger shark being bullied by an orca, who threatened to eat him.
• Pearls Before Swine: Some earlier strips involve an orca trying to trick his seal neighbors into leaving their house so that he would eat them.
• The Pebble and the Penguin has its penguin heroes Hubie and Rocko attacked by orcas, which leads to Rocko's Disney Death.

Otters

Clams. This is actually true as shellfish are a predominant part of a sea otter's diet. Seafood in general is also common.

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• The Angry Beavers: In one episode, Norbert attempts to lure out an otter family that took over their dam by tempting them with a buffet of cooked fish, mollusks, and shellfish. But the otters decline, explaining that they recently swore off seafood because of pollution in the waterways. Upon which Norb gets food poisoning, having tasted one of the dishes.
• Bear in the Big Blue House: Pip and Pop Otter are really big on clams. In the show's Christmas Special, they even asked for "tons of tons for clams" for Christmas. This was later made awkward when it was revealed in further installments that clams are currency in their hometown of Woodland Valley.
• A GEICO commercial saw the Gecko trying to explain insurance to an otter. He asks if the otter is eating clams, and then professes his own love for clams... Yeah.
• In Happy Tree Friends, Russell loves to eat clams and mussels.
• Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid: Ridley the otter is obsessed with eating clams.
• Windfall: One of the main characters is an anthropomorphic otter, of unspecified species, and her family's love of seafood is a running gag throughout the book. Their house's weathervane has a trout on it, family heirlooms include a collection of sushi knives and a stash of fish and oyster sauce, one of her uncles brews beer out of seaweed, and they have a crab roast at family reunions.
• Animal Crossing has Pascal the otter, who adores scallops. In most games he'll give you special items if you give him a scallop.

Owls

Mice and other small rodents. Though rodents are part of their main diet, they're only a part. Owls will eat just about any small animal it can catch, including other birds.

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• Calvin and Hobbes: In an arc in which Calvin turns into an owl, Hobbes wonders in one strip if the pet shop will sell him mice to eat.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: One episode has Billy's mother go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against a particular species of owl when she thought one of them ate her beloved snot-covered rat after she let it out to roam in the yard. In the end it was revealed by an animal expert that the owls could not have eaten her pet since they were vegetarians. It was actually Big Eater Billy's dad who devoured her rat.
• Harry Potter: Hedwig goes out every night to catch mice and frogs. Commercially-available Owl Treats are also mentioned, which in the games appear to be little rolls of meat.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Spike uses this assumption to try to frame Twilight Sparkle's new pet owl Owlowiscious (who he was jealous of), by finding a toy mouse and covering it in ketchup so that it looks like blood.
• Once Upon a Forest: A scary one-eyed owl chases down the main characters, who are a hedgehog, a mole and a woodmouse.
• The Owl House:
  • In order to access her harpy form, it is said that Eda must eat a few voles as part of a deal. The Owl Beast inside her seems to enjoy them.
  • Hooty is a subversion, since his Trademark Favorite Food is actually bugs.
• The Secret of NIMH: Mrs. Brisby is afraid to go see the Great Owl because owls eat mice. That said, he's also rather content with eating a spider instead of her, making him one of the few arthropod-eating owls in fiction.

Pandas

Bamboo. Pandas in fiction will only ever eat bamboo. Admittedly in Real Life it does form a major part of their diet, but not to exclusion as they will also eat other vegetation plus eggs, fish, and carrion. The bamboo association comes from the fact that pandas have the same dietary needs as your average grizzly, but (possibly when they noticed bamboo was edible) they got too lazy somewhere along the line to actually catch anything that's not rooted down, and bamboo is plentiful where they live; so if you see a panda in the wild, and it's eating, there's a good chance it'll be eating bamboo.

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• The Berenstain Bears: The Panda family from ...and the New Neighbors grow bamboo in their yard (which Papa mistook for a spite fence due to his initial distrust for them) and make bamboo-based dishes, including barbecued shoots and bamboo juice. However, they also enjoy the honey the Bear family offer them as a welcome gift.
• Kung Fu Panda: Mostly averted, as Po is a very indiscriminate eater, outside of a few incidents:
  • Kung Fu Panda 2: There's a brief mention of Po eating Mr. Ping's bamboo furniture when he was a cub.
  • The third film shows young pandas eating the dumplings and noodles he uses as markers on a map. He points his bamboo stick at one for a scolding, only for the young panda to eat half of the stick in one bite. Po even says he saw that coming.
• Minecraft: Pandas spawn in bamboo forests with jungle biomes, drop bamboo and will follow players holding the bamboo item. They will also breed when fed bamboo, but only if at least five bamboo plants are present in a five-block radius. However, they will also eat cake.
• Shirokuma Cafe: Panda is constantly asking for bamboo to eat. After he becomes a regular at Polar Bear's cafe, Polar Bear keeps a stock of bamboo and experiments with new bamboo-based dishes.
• We Bare Bears: Subverted. Panda mostly eats human foods, albeit vegetarian ones. When he actually gets to eat bamboo in "Bear Cleanse", he's shown to be rather disgusted. Interestingly, he seems to like bamboo-flavored foods in "Primal", although he was suffering Sanity Slippage at the moment and it may also have been a sign of him reverting to his primal instincts. "Panda 2" reveals he used to love eating bamboo when he was a cub at a wildlife sanctuary, but that was because it was the only food he was fed.
• Donkey Hodie: In order to determine who gets to bounce on the Bounce-a-rino in "A Fair Way To Bounce", Purple Panda suggests a purple bamboo-eating contest. This is odd, because according to "Panda Hodie", his favorite food is tuna fish sandwiches, and in other episodes, he's seen eating food like spaghetti and pancakes and has mentioned liking foods like pizza and cereal.

Parrots

Crackers. The association of parrots with crackers probably comes from parrots being kept as pets by sailors back when crackers were one of the only non-perishable foods available for long sea voyages. Real parrots are more likely to want fruits, seeds, nuts and even meat. It should be noted crackers are harmful to a parrot's health if eaten regularly, since many are high in sodium, fats and sugar.

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• Aladdin: Subverted. Iago the parrot hates crackers, but to his annoyance he's force-fed them by the Sultan anyway. After Jafar uses the Genie's lamp to take over Agrabah, Iago takes great delight in violently stuffing the Sultan full of crackers. He also hates it when anyone else brings up crackers.
  Cassim: Good birdie. Polly want a little—
  Iago: Say "cracker" and I'll let you have it on principle!
• Minecraft: Originally, you could tame parrots by feeding them cookies. However, it was later changed to that parrots will die if you feed them cookies (since they contain chocolate, which parrots are allergic to) and you instead tame them with seeds.
• Nancy Drew: Played with in Curse of Blackmoor Manor, in which Loulou eats homemade block cakes Nancy must assemble and microwave. The proper recipe comprises a variety of parrot-appropriate ingredients including crackers.
• In the book Radio Fifth Grade by Gordon Korman, Winston Churchhill the parrot is given crackers to try and make him talk. They end up giving him hiccups instead.
• Rio: Inverted, as Blu and other macaws will eat anything except for crackers. In Rio 2, Ricardo expresses his disgust for crackers as part of his trauma from being captured by humans.
  Ricardo: "Polly want a cracker? POLLY WANT A CRACKER?!" NO! ENOUGH CRACKERS! I hate crackers!
• Terraria: You can summon yourself a pet Parrot using the item Parrot Cracker.

Penguins

Fish, especially herring, sardines and mackerel. Truth in Television as fish is in fact their main food (although different penguin species eat different types of fish), though they also eat krill and squid. They're also shown eating frozen desserts like ice cream or shaved ice in cartoons, which needlessly to say is ill advised in real life.

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• Batman Returns: At one point, the Penguin greedily eats a raw fish.
• In Bloom County, herring is Opus's Trademark Favorite Food. Sardines, mackerel and squid are also occasionally mentioned.
• In Cheers, Carla's husband Eddie gets a job as a penguin mascot. When she asks him what he wants for dinner, he says he has a craving for mackerel.
• Chilly Willy is always searching for either fish to eat or a way to stay warm.
• Happy Feet revolves around Mumble trying to find a way to get the fish back for the starving penguins by communicating with the "aliens" who were stealing it (actually humans).
• The Penguins of Madagascar: The penguins have several episodes involving their love of fish (for example making a growth ray so they can have more fish to eat, stealing a truck filled with fish when their diet of fresh fish was replaced with disgusting fish-cake shaped imitations, and defeating a giant monstrous fish in a nearby park lake then turning it into sushi).
• Pingu: Fish is regularly eaten by the penguins, and Pingu's school includes lessons on fish-catching.
• Surf's Up: Played with. Cody the rockhopper penguin (and presumably the other penguins) eats fish, but enjoys the squid on a stick served on the island where the surfing competitions take place... because it Tastes Like Chicken.
• In the aforementioned The Wrong Trousers, the new tenant Feathers McGraw decides to move into Gromit's fully-furnished room instead of the spare room Wallace intended to rent out. When Gromit sneaks in later, he finds that his yellow bone pattern wallpaper has been replaced with a blue fish pattern.

Pigs

Corn cobs, pigswill (obviously), apples, and in the UK, turnips. Also humans. Pigs are also stereotyped as loving truffles or just any kind of mushroom due to the practice of using pigs to find truffles. The love of mushrooms is even applied to wild boars. When roasted, they will always have an apple in their mouth. Real life pigs are omnivorous and none too picky at all about their diet, hence why many family farms fed them whatever organic garbage they had on hand (pigswill), sometimes even emptying their outhouse into the feeding trough.

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• Joan from Animal Crossing is a boar who sells turnips every Sunday morning in every game up to New Leaf as the game's equivalent to the stock market. In New Horizons, her granddaughter Daisy Mae takes over. Then there’s the pig villager Truffles with her turnip shirt.
• In the 1954 Animal Farm movie, Squealer is teaching some piglets a math equation. As soon as he writes down the answer, he is shocked to see that his students ate all the apples on the abacus.
• Charlotte's Web has the pigswill. The lovingly-written lists of its ingredients and sensual descriptions of Wilbur indulging in it would be Food Porn if it weren't made of garbage and leftovers.
• Dennis the Menace (UK): Dennis' pet pig Rasher can be lured places with turnips, and otherwise has his head in a trough of swill.
• Discworld: Kids leaving out a sherry and a pork pie for the Hogfather also leave a turnip for the wild boars who pull his sleigh, as a counterpart to Roundworld kids leaving a carrot for the reindeer. When Death has to fill in for him his butler Albert eats one that he mistook for a pork pie after too many sherrys.
• Gravity Falls: Waddles' favorite food is caramel apples.
• Minecraft: While there are no turnips in the game, pigs maintain an affinity for root vegetables. They can be bred by feeding them potatoes, carrots or beetroots, and will follow any player holding one of these items.
• The Muppet Show: In one "Pigs in Space" skit, the crew of the Swinetrek are distracted from finding the Ultimate Answer because the galley is serving "Swill Stroganoff".
• In Story of Seasons games where you can befriend wild animals, wild boars will usually prefer mushrooms. In some games you can use pet pigs or boars to find truffles and other fungi.
• The U.S. Acres comics often show Orson eating pigswill. This, however, is averted in the animated adaptation, where the characters eat foods like sandwiches, pie, cookies and pizza. However, one stock pig food, corn, is used on occasion, usually as a joke where creamed corn is dumped on somebody, and there was even an episode where Orson had to find a missing corn crop.
• Hercules: When Hercules slays the Erymanthian Boar, the next scene shows a vase of him serving it with an apple in its mouth.
• During the luau scene in The Lion King, Pumbaa has an apple in his mouth because the song is performed to entice the hyenas into eating Pumbaa.
• In Pokémon the Pokedex states that the boar-based Pokemon Swinub loves eating mushrooms.
• The Hunger Games: When Katniss has to show off her skills for the Gamemakers, they're distracted by a feast that includes a roast pig with an apple in its mouth. When they can't even be bothered to pay attention to her (with her life at stake), she gets so pissed that she shoots an arrow at the apple, narrowly missing the Gamemakers. They're impressed by her fiery spirit and give her a score of 11/12.
• In Home on the Range, Maggie sticks an apple in a piglet's mouth, telling him "not to go near any luaus."

Piranhas

Meat, favoring humans and cows (the latter thanks to the famous story from Theodore Roosevelt's trip to the Amazon). Real Life piranhas typically hunt other fish (or even fruit), and only rarely engage in their infamous feeding frenzies; reports of attacks on humans are based on piranhas scavenging drowned carcasses.

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• Happy Tree Friends: Shown in the episode Something Fishy, as Russell's pet piranha goes on a killing spree at the school. Russell is also seen feeding it a chicken drumstick.

Praying mantis

The female praying mantis is almost always shown eating its mate, which was once believed to be their normal behavior. It's now known that it isn't actually extremely common, but the result of multiple individuals being put in terrariums together with not enough food. Has its own trope, Mantis Mating Meal.

Pterosaurs

The standard fictional pterosaur is an eagle-like carnivore capable of carrying off a man, but in more realistic portrayals of pterosaurs, they're almost always depicted as fish-eaters based on the behavior of the most famous pterosaurs Pteranodon and Rhamphorhynchus. Real pterosaurs ran the gamut of dietary preferences though.

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• The gigantic Quetzalcoatlus was frequently depicted as a vulture-like scavenger in early paleoart, due to living in more terrestrial areas than the coastal Pteranodon and based on its anatomy being adept at soaring flight. The most common invocation of this was usually depicting flocks of Quetzalcoatlus circling over herds of migrating dinosaurs, waiting for one of them to keel over from exhaustion so they can swoop down and eat the remains. Later findings suggest that Quetzalcoatlus would have been a more active hunter like a giant stork, striding or even galloping along to snatch up small animals with their long toothless beaks; nowadays, it seems Quetzalcoatlus' Trademark Favorite Food has become live baby sauropods. And sometimes live baby T. rexes.
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs has stereotypical ones that eat presumably eat fish while the other eat smaller mammals

Rabbits

Overwhelmingly focused on carrot, though non-anthromorphic rabbits are sometimes shown eating lettuce. Rabbits do like both vegetables, but mostly they eat hay or grass, and particularly love clover. Carrots also have too much sugar for them to eat regularly without causing diabetes (and they tend to eat the leafy part first). Darker works might portray hares as meat-eating rabbits however.

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• BabyFirstTV's Harry the Bunny character. His talking plush toy release even says "Carrots are my favorite treat."
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The rabbit/carrot stereotype is discussed and questioned by Anya: "And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyways?"
• Bugs Bunny: Bugs has been shown eating lettuce (with carrots, of course), exactly once in his career. Any other time has been strictly carrots.
  • Bugs eating a carrot was intended by Tex Avery and the other Looney Tunes directors as a Shout-Out to an old Clark Gable movie called It Happened One Night, one of the most popular movies of its day. Carrots became a favorite of other cartoon rabbits through Lost in Imitation and the Parody Displacement.
  • His carrot also acted as a perfect mimicry prop since it could substitute for just about anything, such as Groucho Marx's cigar or a gun. (And yes, the carrot is a deadly weapon.)
  • In Forward March Hare, his diet of carrots came in handy during his eye chart test. He was able to read everything, including the fine print: "Acme Eye Test Chart, Printed by the United States Printing Office, Washington, D.C., Reg. U.S. Pat. Off."
• Bunnicula: While Bunnicula sinks his fangs into most veggies, he notably drains several carrots dry.
• In "The Splat Spot!" from Butterbean's Cafe, the titular cafe serves the Hops family of rabbits a big carrot-themed family dinner and dessert.
• Creative Galaxy: In the Easter episode, Arty has to stop the Easter Bunny from eating up the carrots that they're using to make orange coloring for the Easter eggs. At the end of the episode, Arty and his family entice the Easter Bunny to join for Easter dinner with the promise of carrot cake for dessert.
• Creepy Carrots, written by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Peter Brown, is about Jasper Rabbit, a rabbit whose favorite food is the carrots that he regularly raids from the nearby Crackenhopper Field. The carrots are delicious and seemingly free for the taking, at least until one day they start coming to life and appearing to the rabbit everywhere, until finally he seals off the carrot patch so they can never trouble him again.
• The Crumpets: In "Insectator", Cassandra becomes obsessed with the video game Maxi Monsters Wars where her character is a ninja rabbit. After she defeats the robot character of her neighbor Pfff, she holds a partially eaten carrot as she laughs maniacally. She would be seen hopping in her bedroom with carrot leaves on the floor and she eats another carrot. When Pfff is sleepwalking and views the world as if he's in that video game, he finds Cassandra as the ninja rabbit as she eats another carrot.
• The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: The rabbits love to eat carrots (in fact, Gromit feeds the ones they catch only chopped carrots), but also enjoy eating any other vegetables and fruit they can find (which is unfortunate for those who were growing them for the vegetable competition) necessitating the need for Wallace and Gromits' temporary rabbit catching services.
• In Dark Chronicle, you recruit one character, an anthropomorphic rabbit, to your trainload of support characters by giving him a carrot. Not that he'd admit it.
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair brings it up during Monokuma's two-man comedy routine, where he attempts to guess the favorite food of Monomi (a rabbit). Monomi states that "it's obvious what rabbits like", and is expecting him to say 'carrots' after he starts off with the first two letters of the word. Monokuma, being Monokuma, answers in full with 'cadavers' instead.
• Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance: Zig-zagged. While Toto Bunny is known as a homeworld for rabbit demons and as a major exporter of carrots, you're just as likely to see the natives use them as a food source as you are to see them used as weapons.^note The Rabbit summons carrot drones to shoot the enemies before colliding and exploding, whereas a Toto Bunny Prinny uses carrots as exploding shuriken and a Ninja Log. As for Usalia herself, she overtly rejects them whenever offered because they accelerate the curse she's under; she secretly adores them.
• Disney:
  • Alice in Wonderland: The White Rabbit grows carrots in his garden; Alice ends up eating one to shrink herself after she grows to giant size in his house. His live-action counterpart in Adventures in Wonderland also adores carrots, lettuce, and other leafy green vegetables. He even enjoys carrot-flavored cereal, Carrot Crunchies.
  • Winnie the Pooh: Rabbit zig-zags this in the Disney adaptations. He has a vegetable garden with a variety of crops: carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, pumpkins, etc. But oddly, he's rarely, if ever, seen eating carrots despite growing them. In Welcome to Pooh Corner, in a song about trying new things, he sings that he used to only eat carrots, but now he loves all kinds of vegetables.
  • Zootopia: Judy buys an instant carrots pack for dinner, her parents run a carrot farm, she owns a carrot-shaped pen that works as a voice recorder, and Nick's nickname for her is "Carrots".
• Doraemon: Nobita's Chronicles of the Moon Exploration: The Moonbits, a Moon Rabbit race with their own technology, have carrots as part of their staple diet, from carrot cakes to carrot buns, houses shaped like giant carrots, carrot motifs in their architecture, and even carrot smoothie in bottles shaped like — you guessed it — carrots.
• Drawn: Pictures of carrots can be used to attract or decoy bunnies.
• In EarthBound (1994), the Carrot Key is the Plot Coupon required to make a bunch of rabbit statues disappear.
• Elinor Wonders Why:
  • In "No Need to Shout," Elinor, her father and mother all each have a single large carrot on their plates at dinner-time. To drive home the point further, before going to bed, Elinor puts on a pink shirt with a picture of a carrot and purple pants with a carrot pattern.
  • In "Backyard Soup," Elinor and her family make a soup from several of the vegetables in their backyard, including carrots. When they visit her grandparents in Desert Town, they find that they can't make the soup using the same vegetables because they don't grow in the desert. Despite this, the train station where Elinor and her family meet their grandparents is next to what appears to be a cafe with an emblem of three carrots and a giant carrot mounted on two pitchforks on the roof.
  • In "Colorful and Tasty," Elinor and her friends Olive and Ari, with the help of Elinor's father, bake carrot cupcakes to sell at the local park.
  • In "Pirate Treasure," Elinor's pirate cap has two crossed carrots in place of the Jolly Roger.
• Fluffy Gardens: Played with, since the narrator mentions real-life rabbits liking the animal's second stock diet (lettuce) rather than carrots. Scoopy the pink rabbit completely averts this with her preference for ice cream.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Mr. Herriman, an imaginary friend with the appearance of a giant bipedal rabbit, frequently eats carrots, and one episode shows it as a full-on addiction — rather appropriate, given the aforementioned problem with their sugar content.
• On Franklin, Rabbit is shown on at least one occasion to bring carrot juice to school as part of his lunch to drink and is sometimes shown eating carrots.
• Happy Tree Friends: Played with in regards to the rabbit Cuddles, who is stated by Word of God to love carrots, yet the only time he's seen eating one onscreen (in his Smoochie, specifically), he chokes from taking a big bite of it with a seemingly allergic reaction.
• Hero: 108: One episode has the rabbit leader, Jumpy Ghostface, and his clan briefly join villain High Roller's side because he gave them candy, angrily rejecting ApeTrully's offering of carrots as persuasion for living in peace with humans because they already have carrots growing in their kingdom.
• hololive: The VTuber Usada Pekora is rabbit-themed, so naturally she has carrots as hair and outfit decorations; her official description says that "She loves them so much that she always brings a few anywhere she goes". One of her alternate outfits, styled to look like a prisoner, even has a carrot-themed ball and chain — and the crimes that led to her having to don it in the first place include, yes, stealing carrots.
• Lonely Wolf Treat: Even though she hates the stereotype, the friendly bunny Mochi has carrots as her Trademark Favorite Food.
• Minecraft: Rabbits will follow any player holding a carrot, golden carrot or flower. Rabbits will also become ready to breed when these items are fed to them. They will also raid any carrot crops they can find access to, which they will "eat" by reducing their growth stage by one step. If the carrots are at their lowest growth stage, the crop will be destroyed instead.
• Monster Rancher 4: Most Hares and monsters with Hare as its sub-breed have carrots as their favorite food.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Angel Bunny is occasionally shown eating carrots, but he usually enjoys leafy greens and has turned up his nose at carrot pops. In "She Talks to Angel", he's also obsessed with drinking the concentrated carrot extract that Fluttershy keeps for revitalizing weak herbivores.
• One Piece: Carrot is a rabbit Mink (a race of various anthropomorphic mammals) whose favourite food is... well, carrots. When she sneaks onboard the Thousand Sunny as a stowaway the only thing she packs is two carrots for food and a canteen of carrot juice to drink. Then she nearly tears out Luffy's throat when he eats one of her carrots without permission.
• In "Pancake Pals" from Pip and Posy, Posy asks Pip, a rabbit, what his "favoritest" thing to put in a pancake is. He replies "carrots" and she tells him it's his lucky day.
• In The Seventh Brother, while the rabbit family also eats grass and clover as real wild rabbits do, carrots are their favorite food.
• The Secret Life of Pets 2: The rabbit Snowball, newly adopted, eats from a bowl of carrots given to him by his owner, Molly.
• 'Tis Time for "Torture," Princess: Defied. When the "torture" is the chance to play with a rabbit, Krall notes that carrots aren't good for rabbits, and as such she limits it to one carrot stick per rabbit per day.
• Touhou Project: Reisen and Tewi, a pair of youkai rabbits, are sometimes depicted eating carrots in fan works. Both of them also wear a carrot pendant.
• The Twisted Whiskers Show: One episode has Goosers try to prevent a rabbit from eating the vegetables from his master's garden, including carrots and lettuce.
• Watership Down: Subverted, as the rabbits correctly eat grass as their staple diet and don't even have a word for "carrot". At best, they'd lump them together with other tasty vegetables as "flayrah", meaning "princely food."
• This flash video parodies it, along with other traits of your typical talking rabbit.
• Bunny eats carrots. It's a treat food and is more like candy in that regard.
• Kevin Dewclaw in Kevin & Kell eats a wide variety of vegetation, including grass and leaves, but if there isn't a specific joke to be made about that, the strip "defaults" to carrots.
• Babs and Buster Bunny in Tiny Toon Adventures are closely modelled on Bugs, including the fondness for carrots. In one episode, Babs has a picnic comprising carrot juice, carrot salad, carrot chips, and carrot cake, and asks the audience if they're seeing a theme.

Raccoons

Garbage. Raccoons are omnivores meant to mainly subsist on small freshwater critters such as crayfish, mollusks and frogs, which is why they have those "hands" and a habit of dipping their food in water. But in urban environments, humans' food waste is much more convenient. They're also efficient enough climbers to raid garbage bins.

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• In Avengers: Endgame, when Natasha and Clint are talking about Rocket Raccoon, Clint comments that he thinks that Rocket technically isn't a raccoon. Natasha answers "Whatever, he eats garbage."
• Bojack Horseman shows a raccoon garbage man interrogating a raccoon dumpster diver.
• A GEICO commercial (which was briefly shown in the film adaptation of The Dark Tower (2017)) features a group of raccoons eating from a trash can, with one of them trying to get the others to sample his meal. A series of tie-in Internet videos associated with this ad features the raccoons cooking dishes using trash as ingredients.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The Fitness Raccoons don't eat trash, but ancient human garbage is a big part of their culture and they take their names from things they find in the dump.
• Over the Hedge: RJ, much like real raccoons, is an opportunistic thief who gets the other animals to start raiding human garbage.
• Regular Show: Rigby, the Funny Animal raccoon, likes to rummage through garbage, and admits he prefers doughnuts from the trash.
• Sandra and Woo: Woo subverts this, and even gets mad when told that raccoons eat garbage.

Rats

Human corpses (and if their numbers or size is unusual enough, they may not wait!), filth, garbage, cheese (examples for cheese go in the mice section, since it usually indicates that rats and mice are being used interchangeably), grain stockpiles. Real Life rats will happily eat all of the above, plus anything humans do.

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• All Quiet on the Western Front featured rats that would come out after battles to eat the dead soldiers.
• Charlotte's Web: Templeton goes along to the fair with Wilbur so he can gobble up garbage after the place closes. In the film, this gives him an enormous Balloon Belly.
• Ratatouille: Most rats are profoundly unfussy in their eating habits and will cheerfully eat garbage, which causes issues for Remy, who has a taste for fine cuisine.
• South Park: In early episodes, rats would always come to eat Kenny's dead body.
• Willard: Willard trains the rats in his basement to exact revenge on his overbearing boss. At the climax, he commands his Swarm of Rats to eat his boss alive. In the 2003 remake, the rats consume a live cat as well. And in the original movie, the rats turn on Willard himself at the end, and eat him.

Seals/Sea Lions/Walruses

Generally shown eating fish, but leopard seals will invariably be seen going after penguins. Walruses will also be shown eating clams. For most pinnipeds (the scientific term for seals and their kin), these are indeed Truth in Television.

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• Happy Feet shows a leopard seal as a regular foe of penguins.
• The Pebble and the Penguin portrays leopard seals as one of the penguins' chief predators.
• Pingu: Robby the seal always eats fish, but in his debut episode is shown eating the seaweed Pingu uses for bait in fishing.
• Pokémon: Dewgong, despite the name, is clearly based on a seal/sea lion, and its dex entry in Ultra Sun says that its favorite food is Wishiwashi.

Sharks

Humans, or anything else in the ocean (including fish, which is true). Seals and sea lions in more accurate works, with different species having different preferences. The prehistoric megalodon is always shown eating whales, which is accurate to fossil findings of whale bones with C. megalodon bite marks.

The notion of sharks preying on humans is especially inaccurate (and has led to unfair persecution of even harmless shark species), given the relative rarity of someone being attacked by a shark, let alone actually being eaten. Sharks can and do bite, with deadly results for larger species, but it's because biting is their way of figuring out what something is. It isn't their fault humans are so fragile. Additionally, they may simply assume that the figure swimming on the surface is a seal or a sea lion and take a chomp—the unlucky human survives if the shark realizes their mistake and loses interest before said human can bleed to death. Furthermore, sharks are a diverse group of animals with different diets, that can be more restrict than as depicted in media. For example, the whale shark, the basking shark, and the megamouth shark are filter-feeding species that primarily feed on plankton and pose no threat to humans at all. Notably, it's Truth in Television that the scent of blood can throw sharks into a feeding frenzy. This is actually used by tour guides for people who want to swim with sharks. First, some fish is cut up and thrown in front of the sharks, while the divers lay low. When the sharks have sated their appetite and calmed down, the divers can swim among them in relative safety. In some recent works, embryonic sharks have also been stated to eat each other while still in their mother's womb. While true for some species such as the lamniforme sharks, not all shark species do this.

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• Finding Nemo: Averted in-universe by the sharks, who are part of a vegetarian society. Before this they ate mostly fish and they still consider dolphins to be mockworthy, but there is no mention of them eating either seals or humans. The feeding frenzy part is played straight though, with Bruce going Axe-Crazy after smelling Dory's blood.
• hololive: Gawr Gura, a shark-turned-Cute Monster Girl, has salmon among her favorite foods, though her actual Trademark Favorite Food appears to be pizza, and has also implied once or twice that she ate all of her siblings in the womb before she was born. She has mentioned that unlike media portrayals, she doesn't eat people, since like real sharks, she doesn't like the flavor; on the other hand, her debut short in hololive - Holo no Graffiti has her succumb to her instincts and latch onto Flare's arm, much to the elf's discomfort.
  Flare: (screams in pain)
  Gura: (muffled) Can't fight my instincts.
  Flare: Say what?
  Gura: I'm eating to live!
  Mel: Don't gotta eat people.
• Jaws can almost fully be blamed for the "man-eating" stereotype, even though as noted above, no shark species habitually eats humans, let alone great whites. The sequel films are no better, and Jaws: The Revenge even goes so far as to have the shark of the hour try to kill the heroes out of vengeance, not mere hunger (which is confusingly explained in the novel as a voodoo curse, hence the Voodoo Shark trope). It should be noted that after this film, persecution of many real shark species skyrocketed, with many believing (erroneously) that this trope applied in real life.
• Kenny the Shark goes crazy with hunger whenever he catches scent or sight of a seal. He also eats any form of inedible objects such as junk due to the fact that he's a tiger shark. When it comes to humans, however, this is averted.
• The Meg has the titular megalodon eat a humpback whale and its calf. The second one notably doesn't target humans, though, only going into a frenzy among a crowd of beachgoers when they notice it and panic, exciting it too much. The protagonists eventually kill it by cutting its stomach open, which causes its blood to attract all the other sharks in the area and eat it alive.
• Sherman's Lagoon: The eponymous great white shark not only eats humans but anything that gets into his mouth, and has no problems with eating other talking fish.

Snakes

Rats, mice, and eggs if they're small, humans if they're huge constrictors. Real life snakes usually have a substantially more varied diet; constrictors are notorious Big Eaters, since they can open their jaws very wide to swallow prey that would otherwise be larger than their heads. Sufficiently large boas and pythons have been documented to eat things like antelopes, crocodiles, or even other constrictors. Verified accounts of a snake eating an adult human are another matter though, as its questionable if even the largest living snake could manage to get its jaws around an average human's broad shoulders, and in fact there have been documented instances of constrictors seriously injuring their mouths attempting to do just this. As for eggs, though commonly depicted in fiction due to being less Squicky than live prey, only a few species of snakes eat eggs as part of their main diet. Some species of snake such as boas and pythons can't digest eggs at all.

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• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The lair of Slytherin's basilisk is littered with various animal bones.
• The Jungle Book: Kaa the python infamously uses his hypnotizing stare on Mowgli in the hope of putting him in a suggestible, easily-eaten state.
• Lioden has a Snake-like minigame Reptile Roundup where you can choose from many different species of snakes to play as. Regardless of which one you picked, they all eat small rodents and eggs.
• In Pokémon, various Pokédex entries for Ekans (a snake Pokémon) mention that it loves eating eggs from bird Pokémon, such as Pidgey and Spearow. Just like real life egg-eating snakes, Ekans does not have any visible teeth, although it is also venomous, which is unlike its aforementioned real life counterpart.

Spiders

Flies, or in a series starring insects, any kind of bug. Spiders are generally treated like the cats of the bug world. This is also why parents tell their kids to never kill spiders in the house, as they do a fairly decent job at catching insects. Large tarantulas will often be portrayed attacking lizards, mice, or small birds, since they're also called "bird-eating spiders", even though they too feed mostly on insects. Giant Spiders, on the other hand, seem to subsist entirely on people.

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• Charlotte's Web: Charlotte eats all types of insects, but mainly flies, since Wilbur's smelly pigpen attracts them. Wilbur is very disturbed the first time he sees her catch one.
• James and the Giant Peach: The other bugs inside the Peach are wary about Miss Spider, in part because she's creepy, and in part because she's French. Oh, also, she might eat them.
• Averted by Lucas the Spider. He befriends a fly who was initially afraid Lucas was going to eat him, until Lucas explains that he eats mostly human food like buttered toast and strawberries and such.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: Both the spiders of Mirkwood and Shelob attempt to dine on the protagonists almost as soon as they cross paths. The film versions by Peter Jackson even show said spiders wrapping up the captured, still-living dwarves, hobbits, etc. in silk to be stashed for later.

Squirrels/Chipmunks

Any sort of nut, usually acorns or walnuts. In Real Life, they'll go after any source of carbohydrates, the easier the better. Hence stories of urban squirrels and chipmunks raiding bird feeders and trash cans. Most won't hesitate to nom insects or bird eggs, either.

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• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Subverted. When Alvin, Simon, and Theodore are first left with Dave, he initially tries to feed them nuts, but they decide that they don't like them, and are more interested in what Dave is eating. Any other time they're depicted eating, it's always human food.
• Animaniacs: Slappy Squirrel loves to eat walnuts, and often risked her safety (not that she had anything to worry about) picking walnuts from nearby yards defended by dogs.
• The BBC: The Daylight Robbery documentary of the late 80s features as its centerpiece a wild squirrel working out how to traverse a fairly fiddly obstacle course in order to obtain the nutty goodness at the other end. So awesome it spawned a sequel. (Original course featured from 1:04.)
• Arthur: "The Squirrels" has Buster and Arthur gaining a fear of squirrels thanks to the titular movie (which has squirrels eating people), and they try to overcome it by luring real squirrels closer to them with acorns. Subverted when Mr. Ratburn explains that squirrels actually have a more varied diet, including meat if they're really hungry (while also pointing out they don't eat people like in the movie).
• BlazBlue: The squirrel beastkin Makoto Nanaya has a thing for chestnuts, as she openly discusses with Celica in Chronophantasma and Blake in Cross Tag Battle.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The factory has a room full of trained squirrels shelling walnuts, because Mr. Wonka trusts only squirrels to extract the walnuts in one piece and to tell the bad ones from the good before even cracking them open.
• Chip 'n Dale: The titular chipmunks are a prominent example of chipmunks favoring acorns, though they've been known to expand their diet of acorns to include peanuts and apples in some shorts. And their diet seems much more varied in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
• Disney: In one Donald Duck cartoon, a flying squirrel (which, unlike Real Life flying squirrels, actually flies) harasses Donald and his peanut stand because Donald wouldn't give him a specific peanut. They proceed to engage into an Escalating War, all because of that specific peanut.
• Happy Tree Friends: Splendid the flying squirrel is associated a few times with acorns, including trying to eat one in his debut appearance. Subverted with Nutty, who enjoys candy and sugar, despite what his name may suggest.
• Ice Age: Every Scrat scene has the prehistoric squirrel trying to catch or find a safe spot for his acorn at the risk of his own sanity and safety.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In one episode, squirrels steal Sheen's Ultralord action figure and worship it because it cracks open their nuts.
• Kaeloo: Stumpy enjoys eating nuts.
• Kronk's New Groove: Bucky the squirrel is given a walnut by Kronk.
• Looney Tunes: In "Much Ado About Nutting", a squirrel looking for nuts finds a coconut and tries unsuccessfully to break it open. Real life squirrels regularly gnaw holes on coconuts to eat the flesh inside.
• The Nut Job flash cartoon from 2007 (no relation to the 2014 3D animated film, although it's also an example) is about squirrels building Humongous Mecha to steal their nuts back from a nut-packing factory.
• Over the Hedge: Subverted with Hammy, who finds himself enjoying human food like donuts, chips, and coffee more than the food he and his mixed animal family used to eat before their home became invaded by suburban home development.
• Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes has the Squirrel Herder Zombie teammate, who carries a few zombie squirrels on her. Her special ability is to One-Hit Kill a Nut or Berry tribe Plant teammate (or environment) by sending her squirrels to eat it.
• In Spongebob Squarepants, Sandy Cheeks has a big thing for nuts. Most of her inventions are nut-based, such as the machine that could read the thoughts of nuts.
• Tex Avery: Screwy Squirrel is sometimes shown cracking walnuts by placing them on his head and smashing them with a hammer.
• Tom and Jerry: The end of "In the Bag": Tom got his money bag swapped out with walnuts, and when he opens the bag in the forest and finds out he's been duped, a bunch of squirrels swarm him!

Termites

Wood. In Western Animation, their eating of wood will be accompanied by Buzzsaw Jaw. In reality termites are indeed among the few creatures that can digest wood, but they usually go for rotten wood as it's easier to digest, and some species are more general herbivores that feed on roots, grasses and leaves, while still others subsist on fungus farms they tend in their nests.

Tortoises

Lettuce. In reality, tortoises need to eat thick, fibrous vegetation. Some tortoise species can have lettuce in moderation. They do seem to love the stuff, it's just not good for them (especially if it's the low-nutrient iceberg kind). They also love mushrooms.

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• Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant is "a novel of love and lettuce".
• Mafalda: Mafalda's pet turtle Bureaucracy's favorite food is lettuce.
• Esio Trot: The tortoises much prefer lettuce to "thick old cabbage leaves".
• The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher: Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise brings a bag of salad when Jeremy invites him to dinner.

Tyrannosaurus rex

Other dinosaurs of various kinds, with Triceratops and Stegosaurus being among the most commonly portrayed. When revived in modern times (or encountering time travelers), humans. They're extremely persistent about it, too. We know for a fact that T. rex did eat Triceratops, as fossils of the latter have been found with tyrannosaur tooth marks in them. It also would have preyed on ornithopods (particularly the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus), ankylosaurs, pachycephalosaurs, and other theropods (including its own kind). Stegosaurus, however, is strictly out of the question due to it dying out eighty-two million years before the appearance of Tyrannosaurus ^note (Stegosaurus lived from around 155 to 150 million years ago, while Tyrannosaurus only appeared around 68 million years ago) — which means Tyrannosaurus lived closer in time to us than it did to Stegosaurus.

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• Darkwing Duck: In "Extinct Possiblity", Johnny T. Rex and his two henchmen frequently make quips about eating the Parasaurolophus citizens of Duckbill-ville. They also try to eat Darkwing, Gosalyn, and Launchpad.
• Wash’s dinosaur skit in the Firefly has a T. rex vs Stegosaurus thing going on. The rex betrays and eats the stegosaurus. “Mine is an evil laugh! Now die!”
• The Jurassic Park series, naturally.
  • Perhaps even moreso in the book where the tyrannosaur seems to be stalking Dr. Grant and the kids in particular, even leaving behind a Hadrosaur kill to pursue them down a river. In the movie, it generally only eats humans when they happen to be easily in reach.
  • In the sequel The Lost World (both the book and movie) the animosity justified because the humans took the baby of the T. rex mated pair (and one of them is smeared with the blood of said baby).
• King Kong (2005): The three Vastatosaurus rex (fictional T. rex descendants) are willing to fight a thirty-foot gorilla just to get at the pretty little human he was carrying. The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island says their preferred prey are actually Ligocristus (fictional hadrosaur resembling Saurolophus), Ferrucutus (fictional ceratopsian resembling Pachyrhinosaurus), and Brontosaurus (fictional version of the real sauropod).
• The Land Before Time: Sharptooth likes sauropods such as Littlefoot and his mother, but he also goes after Littlefoot's other dinosaur friends.
• The Valley of Gwangi: While technically an Allosaurus, Gwangi really loves humans. He develops a taste for elephant, too, though throughout the film it's shown that Gwangi will happily leave behind large kills just to chase after and devour tiny humans.
• You Are Umasou: Heart and his fellow "Big Jaws" are frequently shown hunting ceratopsians, sauropods, and hadrosaurs. The baby Ankylosaurus Umasou gets his name because when he first hatches — Heart thought he looked tasty, and umasou means "delicious" in Japanese.

Vultures

Anything that drops dead in a desert. Real vultures eat carrion in any environment, especially forests.

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• Bedknobs and Broomsticks: During the animated soccer match, the two "medics" are two vultures who look hungrily at the players and get excited when one is apparently wounded and they have the chance to go for him. One can only wonder what they do with the wounded.
• Ice Age: The Meltdown: As the animals flee en masse from the impending flood, a large flock of vultures shadows their movements while gleefully anticipating the feast they'll get from potential casualties. They even sing a song about how much they're looking forward to eating giant, deceased mammals.
  Vulture: There is some good news, though. The more of you die, the better I eat.
• Looney Tunes: The Lion’s Busy has Beaky Buzzard hanging around Leo the Lion, who is celebrating his tenth birthday, knowing that lions rarely live past that. Leo points out that Beaky should wait until he’s dead since buzzards typically eat their prey well after they are "decently deceased." Beaky ignores this fact.
  • The Looney Tunes Show's take on Beaky Buzzard is a helper buzzard that saves animals stranded in the desert, but will eat his clients if he doesn’t make it in time.
• Pokémon: Mandibuzz (a buzzard) will circle in the sky looking for weakened Pokémon (Cubone in particular is a favorite victim) to prey on; they will also decorate themselves and their nests with their prey’s bones.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The vultures eye the chase scene between the dwarfs and the witch with hunger in their eyes. They know that no matter the outcome, they'll feast tonight. They're last seen circling eagerly downward toward the witch's unseen body after she falls to her Disney Villain Death.

Weasels/Minks/Stoats/Ferrets

Rabbits and rodents. The tiniest mustelid can impressively take down rabbits three times its size. Also chickens; if the predator villain in a chicken story isn't a fox, it's probably a weasel. In the case of minks, fish and muskrats are preferred prey. Weasels will sometimes be portrayed liking eggs, which is Truth in Television. And like mongooses above, weasels will sometimes counter snakes or snake-like creatures (such as the mythical Basilisk and Cockatrice), despite the two species not being any more closely related than cats are to dogs.

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• Back at the Barnyard: Freddy the ferret is best friends with the chicken Peck but constantly has to fight his instinctual urge to eat him.
• Garfield and Friends: The recurring weasel villain from U. S. Acres frequently tries to eat the chickens, including Sheldon (who is still an egg).
• I Am Weasel: Eggs are the Trademark Favourite Food of I. M. Weasel.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Some of the Foghorn Leghorn shorts have a small weasel constantly trying to get within tooth's range of the chickens.
  • In My Green Fedora, Peter Rabbit's baby brother Elmer is kidnapped by a rather large, hungry weasel.
• The Wainscott Weasel: The titular character's father built a tunnel into a nearby farmer's henhouse in order to provide the local weasels with a ready source of eggs.
• The Wild Thornberrys: In "Show Me the Bunny", Eliza tries to protect a rabbit from a hungry stoat.

Whales

Krill and plankton, or, in the case of sperm whales, giant squid. The plankton-eating stereotype is true for baleen whales (blue whales, grey whales, right whales, humpback whales...) but not for toothed whales. Sperm whales are sometimes erroneously shown as krill eaters as well when they are toothed whales. If not, they'll usually be shown fighting giant squid.

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• Bojack Horseman has an anthropomorphic sperm whale swallowing up anthropomorphic krill.
• Finding Nemo has a blue whale who tries to eat krill but accidentally swallows Marlin and Dory.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The infamous episode “One Coarse Meal” has Plankton fearing that Pearl will eat him like a whale ate his family. Though Pearl is a sperm whale. Who prefers salad.
  • In "Feral Friends", the entire cast (sans Sandy) is reverted into animals that look and behave realistically. Pearl sees Squidward as a tasty snack.

Wolves

Sheep, pigs, and people (especially little girls in red hoods). In Real Life, they very rarely take humans, but will eat pretty much any animal in their habitat, with a preference for medium to large ungulates. Indeed, more realistically-oriented works tend to show them preying on deer or moose.

Many portrayals of werewolves also have them gaining a taste for human flesh.

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• The 10th Kingdom: Wolf often craves all classic wolf foods.
• Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf; apparently the whole of wolf society, including their nursery rhymes, are based on eating people.
• Looney Tunes: Ralph the wolf constantly tries to steal sheep from Sam the sheepdog's flock, and fails every time.
• Minecraft: Wolves will go after sheep and rabbits — they will chase down and try to kill any they spot. On the other hand, they'll only try to eat humans if you attack them first, and if you stand near them holding a bone or porkchop they will stare at it hopefully.
• Piggsburg Pigs!: The wolves Huff and Puff always try to catch the eponymous pigs.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf has an anthropomorphic wolf and his wife who try to hunt the (equally anthropomorphic) neighboring goats with the same results as Ralph.
• Rocko's Modern Life: In "Who's For Dinner?", the Wolfe family are shown eating a moose carcass at dinner much like how real wolves do, but they're also shown to keep pigs and little girls in red hoods captive presumably to be eaten later.
• In White Fang, the starving wolf pack tries to make a meal out of two human explorers as a last resort.
• This one is deeply rooted in Fairy Tales like Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and many more. Like with sharks, this has had the negative impact of people hunting wolves to extinction in some areas, despite that wolf attacks on humans are rare (their proclivity for eating livestock probably also had something to do with this, though).

Worms

Dirt. Truth in Television, but they're actually filtering out the tiny bits of organic matter in dirt. When a worm isn't shown eating dirt, expect it to be inside of an apple instead (which ultimately is its own trope).

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• Earthworm Jim: One of Jim's catchphrases is "eat dirt!"
• James and the Giant Peach: In the film version, Mr. Earthworm says he only eats dirt, and when he, James and all the other bugs taste the peach later, he remarks "It's not dirt, but it's not bad."
• Worms Armageddon: One of the Idle Animations is a worm picking up a piece of dirt from the terrain and munching on it.

Menageries

Several of the above at the same time.

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• Baku Baku Animal is based on this trope: dogs eat bones, rabbits eat carrots, pandas eat bamboo, monkeys eat bananas, and mice eat cheese.
• In Sid & Al's Incredible Toons, Sid E. Mouse goes for cheese and Al E. Cat goes for fish, though both of them also go for bananas and bubblegum and, of course, Al will also eat Sid. Eunice the elephant will Hoover up any peanut in sight.
• In the farming sim game Hay Day, cats and kittens drink milk, dogs and puppies eat bacon (the only meat in the game aside from fish), and horses, donkeys, and bunnies eat carrots. Chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats eat processed feed made from various mixtures of wheat, corn, carrots, and soybeans. Squirrels gather peanuts and bees gather flower nectar to make into honey, both of which can be harvested by the player.

Miscellaneous/Real Life

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• Lammergeiers, or bearded vultures, eat almost exclusively bones, or rather the marrow in the bones.
• If you see a lizard in a cartoon, chances are, he/she is gonna be shown eating insects and catching them with a long sticky tongue. This raises quite a few problems, since the only known lizards to have a long sticky tongue are Chameleons and Green Iguanas are often used... who just happen to be herbivores.
  • Green iguanas can and usually do subsist on plants only. But they will actually eat meat if it's easily available and doesn't require too much biting. Moreover, pet iguanas go gaga for chafer grubs. Also, the iguana can make the tip of its tongue slightly sticky — simply by flexing the tongue the right way.
  • A variation on this is that frogs — amphibians, not lizards, but regardless — will always be seen eating houseflies exclusively, when in reality they're much less picky about what they do eat. Most species of frogs and toads will eat anything that is smaller than themselves and doesn't have a good defense like a noxious taste, including smaller conspecifics, and in some cases they will even take on larger prey.
• A few lesser known examples: alligators love chicken, crocodiles enjoy rats, and caimans primarily subsist on fish. A fairly obscure extension for alligators is that they absolutely adore marshmallows. It's obviously not something they can live on, but they'll also eat fruit as part of enrichment. Like watermelon.
• Porcupines are salt addicts, due to the lack of sodium in their normal diet (tree bark & leaves). This is why you should never leave wood- or leather-handled tools or unwashed socks outdoors overnight in porcupine country, as they'll gnaw on sweaty grips or eat fabric for the sweat that permeates it. Avi did his research, having Poppy's Deadpan Snarker porcupine friend, Ereth, have a literal addiction to salt (especially salt lick; Poppy and her mouse family get him one for his birthday in the novel Ereth's Birthday). Darker portrayals of porcupines may portray them as carnivorous flesh-eaters when in real-life, Indian crested porcupines scavenge carrion.
• Songbirds and worms. Occasionally they will eat insects. Or breadcrumbs, if the focus is on the friendly Bird Woman.
• Truth in Television: Polar bears really love to eat toothpaste.
• Although they don't encounter it in nature, elephants LOVE chocolate. One episode of "Inside Nature's Giants" had a team of biologists determining the inner contents of an enclosure elephant's digestive system by feeding it a recording device with a chocolate outer coating.
• If you have a pet rabbit, they will eat all sorts of things, including human food. However, none of it is good for their delicate digestive systems, except romaine lettuce.
• Asian palm civets, known as luwak, eats (among other things) coffee fruit.^note The civet, contrary to what some may assert, does eat a wide variety of other things, particularly small mammals and fruit. It wouldn't make sense if it only ate coffee beans; coffee is native to Ethiopia and Yemen and was only introduced to Indonesia by the Dutch about 300 years ago—hardly long enough for an animal to evolve to have such an exclusive diet. After passing through the animal's digestive system, the beans are then turned into the most expensive brand of coffee in the world... TMI?
  • It's unclear whether the coffee's flavor is changed by the digestive juices or if the civet is simply able to detect the best beans. It's probably a combination of both.
• Cats love ham and pork. Bacon is often too salty, but cooked pork and ham are safe to feed as a treat. They also adore cheese, even if they aren't interested in regular milk. Some like to lick (or even eat) watermelon and/or cucumbers. They can also have a little salami as a treat.
• Rats eat virtually anything people do, which is why they thrive in our cities, but they're especially fond of scrambled eggs.
• People usually think of monkeys and apes as vegetarians, but chimps and baboons will readily kill and eat small animals, including small monkeys. Chimps also love termites, using spit-moistened twigs or blades of grass to get them.
• Big cats:
  • Lions are invariably shown as predators of zebras, wildebeest, antelopes, and buffaloes.
  • Tigers hunt water buffalo, deer, and wild boar.
  • Cheetahs prefer gazelles.
  • Leopards are generally shown to be hunting antelopes and monkeys.
  • Jaguars are usually portrayed as predators of tapirs, caimans, capybaras, and turtles.
• In nonfiction, grey wolf packs are typically shown preying on moose, elk, caribou, and bison.
• Giraffes are commonly described eating acacia leaves.
• Dinosaurs:
  • In older dinosaur books, Baryonyx will always be mentioned as a fish-eating dinosaur (with maybe one exception), although this is probably true for spinosaurids as a whole.
  • Also in older dinosaur books, Coelophysis will typically be eating its own young, although bones once attributed to juvenile coelophysoids more likely came from nondinosaurian reptiles.
  • Also in older dinosaur books, Oviraptor tends to eat the eggs of other dinosaurs. In fact, it was named "Egg Thief" because its fossil was found next to a clutch of eggs. However, this may be a subversion and a Never Live It Down due to studies showing that those eggs were its own, and was trying to take care of them instead! Its current diet is something of a mystery, but science leans towards most likely omnivore (this of course means eggs are still potentially on the table, just unlikely to be its primary source of food).
  • Much like Oviraptor, ornithomimids and Troodon often take roles as nest-raiders as well. Although the latter usually goes after hatchlings rather than eggs and its victim usually being Maiasaura. However, for ornithomimids this has fallen out of practice as of late and nowadays they are portrayed as omnivores with a slight herbivore leaning.
  • Therizinosaurs were once considered piscivores or insectivores, but these days, they'll invariably be mentioned as unusual herbivorous theropods. In really, really old works when they were still paleontological enigmas, they were portrayed as ferocious carnivores that used their massive claws to eviscerate other dinosaurs (this is where Dino Crisis got their portrayal).
  • Allosaurus is generally shown as the mortal enemy of Stegosaurus and the various sauropods of the Jurassic period (Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus). Definitely Truth in Television for the former as fossils of Stegosaurus and Allosaurus with grievous injuries from each other exist. The latter is a subject of debate among dino-buffs though. Juveniles might have been more preferable. Lesser known in popular fiction, but universally accepted amongst scientists is that the Iguanodon-like Camptosaurus was a big part of Allosaurus' diet.
  • Gastornis (aka Diatryma), the large flightless bird, was traditionally portrayed as a hunter of small horse-like ungulates such as Hyracotherium. This is now a case of Science Marches On, as isotope analysis have shown it was actually a herbivore that used its powerful beak to crack open nuts or snap branches (though this has yet to catch on in popular media, for fairly obvious reasons).
• The other famous non-dinosaurs, marine reptiles (plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, pliosaurs), are typically depicted eating fish, turtles, cephalopods, or seabirds, all of which are consistent with the fossil record. The large mosasaurs, like Tylosaurus, also tend to be depicted with a particular fondness for eating Pteranodons that they snatch out of the sky midflight (no fossil evidence exists for this behavior—barring Pteranodon and Tylosaurus living in the same environment—and even if it did occur, the mosasaur would almost certainly have attacked the flying reptile while it was in the water rather than flying over it). Sometimes, the sea reptiles are also shown going for each other, which is not out of the question for large mosasaurs and pliosaurs.
• Harlequin shrimp eat starfish and nothing but.
• Sperm whales are typically mentioned as predators of giant squid (they compromise 80% of its diet!). Baleen whales are, of course, plankton and krill eaters.
• Rays are usually shellfish-eaters, although manta rays are plankton-skimming filter feeders.
• Starfish are commonly portrayed as predators of clams and mussels.
• Octopus and squid are typically portrayed as predators of fishes and crabs, which does apply for most species. The bigger ones are usually shown as man-eaters, despite there being no actual reports of this happening.
• Harpy eagles are known for being predators of monkeys and sloths, which form about half their diet, but they'll take on any sorts of prey such as macaws and even deer.
  • The Philippine eagle is also often shown eating monkeys in books and documentaries, and was even known as the monkey-eating eagle at one point. However, the name was changed due to the discovery that monkeys are not its Trademark Favorite Food— it prefers to feed on flying lemurs and cloud rats.
• Flamingos are often said to be shrimp-eaters, but this is a generalization (the greater flamingo does eat crustaceans, but the lesser flamingo mostly feeds on algae).
• Parrots and toucans are often thought of as frugivores or at least herbivores, but they will occasionally eat smaller animals such as insects, frogs, rodents, and even other birds.
• Pelicans are famous for their affinity for fish, and indeed are specialized for feeding on such meals. Occasionally, however, they've been known to go after smaller birds, though the reason behind this is not known.
• Storks, at least in Eastern Europe, are stereotypically associated with eating frogs (and thus appear as villains or menaces in stories about frogs).
• Smilodon, the iconic saber-tooth cat, is often shown hunting mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, and cavemen. While there are kernels of truth to this idea, Smilodon, much like tigers and lions, likely preferred large ungulates (as supported by isotope analyses) such as bison, horses, llamas, tapirs, and North American camels, while in South America, they also went after the native ungulates such as Toxodon or Macrauchenia. As Smilodon was about the size of a tiger or lion, undoubtedly, its relationship with mammoths and mastodons would have mirrored that of extant big cats and elephants, i.e. they would have mainly preyed on young animals, while adults (due to their sheer size) would have been safe from predation, even if sabretooths hunted in groups like lions (as some workers suggested). Smaller, bear-sized ground sloths like Megalonyx or Paramylodon could have also been on the menu, but probably not as much as ungulates, as there were powerful beasts with formidable claws (for comparison, the much smaller giant anteaters can chase off and even kill jaguars), while elephant-sized ones like Megatherium or Eremotherium were off-limits for obvious reasons. And since Smilodon was native to the Americas, it only overlapped with anatomically modern humans (as in, not primitive cavemen) for a brief time (a few thousand years) and we have no evidence of predation, though it is possible that they would have attacked humans occasionally. Interestingly, its smaller, Old World cousin/ancestor Megantereon coexisted with much more primitive hominids, like Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and even australopithecines, and we do have some evidence of predation on our ancestors from South Africa and Georgia.
• Giant ground sloths are often portrayed as omnivorous in fiction based on a controversial theory that they may have supplemented their diet with meat. It's more likely they were purely herbivorous, but when portrayed as meat-eaters, expect it to be carrion stolen from a sabertooth cat. Some go a little further to have them using their massive claws to tear prey to pieces!
  • Other depictions of giant ground sloths show them eating avocados, based on a hypothesis that avocados coevolved with ground sloths and other prehistoric South American megafauna. The idea is that avocados look like fruits ready to be eaten whole by a large animal, with the pit being pooped out ready to sprout, but no animal currently alive in the region where avocados are from is big enough to eat an avocado whole. Quetzal birds, by the way, can eat small avocados (about olive-sized) whole and disperse their seeds that way. Humans, the theory goes, basically saved avocados from extinction by taking the effort to cultivate them. Humans still can’t swallow avocado seeds though.
• Craneflies are sometimes nicknamed "mosquito hawks", "mosquito eaters" or "skeeter eaters" and assumed to be specialist predators of—you guessed it!—mosquitos. Turns out, however, that this is a misconception; most adult craneflies only feed on nectar from flowers. Their larval forms are usually omnivores or carnivores with a taste for other insect larvae, but there's still no evidence that they feed on mosquito larvae. Not only that, but some adult craneflies don't eat at all, lacking mouthparts to even do that—this adaptation allows them to pour all their energy into finding a mate and laying eggs before they die.
• The fruit known as the wolf apple, which is actually a relative of the tomato, gets its name because it is the favorite food of the maned wolf. It composes about 50% of the maned wolf's diet. It is believed that the fruit helps to protect them from parasites.

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