Question: Are tenercs cannibals

Sive Finlay answered on 13 Nov 2013:

Hi Robert,

As far as I know tenrecs aren’t canibals – they eat insects, worms and fruit and don’t tend to go for animals that are as big as themselves.
That said, we don’t know very much about tenrecs’ behaviour in the wild so they might have some cannibalistic tendencies. In some animals adult males kill the offspring of other males because they want to mate with females and produce their own offspring. When male lions take over a new pride they often kill the cubs of the previous dominant males and sometimes they might eat them too.
I guess we can’t rule out that tenrecs might do something similar but I doubt it!
Sive