Do animals eat fertilized eggs?

[Boba Phat]

I usually keep my chicken coop in the same barn with all my other animals and never had any problems with eggs being eaten, but in my most recent game I  had to wait years for a trader to sell me some chickens.  I ended up buying 20 fertilized eggs, which went into my warehouse.  All my animals (boars, huskies, bears) have access to the warehouse because they're haulers.  Now my eggs are gone.  I have kibble and hay storage in my barn, so all my animals have ready access to food on waking.  Despite this, I had to forbid my boars from my colonist bedrooms because they'd spend all their time trotting from bedroom to bedroom eating daylilies from planters.  I also ended up having to block them from my devilstrand farms and haul it all manually because, again, despite having ready access to kibble and hay (and my warehouse full of food), they'd spend all day munching devilstrand.  I have this nasty suspicion that the boars ate my fertilized chicken eggs.

Do animals -- particularly boars -- eat fertilized eggs?  Seriously, animals are really starting to piss me off.  They need constant micromanaging to the point I'm starting to think of them as more trouble than they're worth.

[Thane]

Yes. You need to make a closet for the eggs that they are forbidden from.

[Zhentar]

Animals have no preference for different kinds of food (I think they're supposed to only drink beer if there's nothing else, but that's not the observed behavior). When they get hungry, they eat the closest edible thing. You have to use animal areas to keep them away from anything you don't want them to eat, although putting sleeping spots by the things you do want them to eat helps.

[Andy_Dandy]

I don't think for instance Wargs eat any vegtables.

[Lizardo]

I never saw that happen, and I just let them free roam the map except for key spots on the base.

At about 500 chickens I finally got rid of all of them. Just too much to manage and it slowed down the program, a lot.

[Zhentar]

I don't think for instance Wargs eat any vegtables.

Yes, different species have different definitions of "edible".

I just took another look at the code. My memory was slightly off - animals do have a preference against eating fertilized eggs (in addition to beer and chocolate). But I also finally noticed what I was missing - animals only consider food that is in the same room as they are (and that they can see!). So it doesn't matter how much kibble you have, if it's not in the same room as the eggs; if they get hungry and eggs are the only thing in the room to eat, that's what they'll eat.

edit from the future: I was misreading the code; it does check other rooms for tamed animals. I'm gonna have to investigate animal food behavior further...

[Boba Phat]

So it doesn't matter how much kibble you have, if it's not in the same room as the eggs; if they get hungry and eggs are the only thing in the room to eat, that's what they'll eat.

Aha, that's why my boars gobbled up my fertilized eggs.  I keep kibble and hay in the barn, so the eggs are safe there.  But when I bought them from a trader, they went into my unrefrigerated warehouse, and of course there's no food stored in there.  The boars need access to the room to haul, so the eggs were doomed.

[Zhentar]

Oh, one other thing I should mention: tamed animals do respect forbidden items. So forbidding eggs you want to hatch will assure they are safely left alone, even if your animals have access to them and have nothing else to eat at all.