Types of Food

• The collared peccary is omnivorous, meaning it eats animals and plants. While it occasionally eats meat in the form of prey, the bulk of its diet is plant matter. Prickly pear cactus is a favorite, since the cactus species has a high water content. The collared peccary also will eat such things as fruits, nuts, berries, agave, roots and the bean pods of mesquite trees.
  
  

Other Foods

• When the collared peccary deviates from its generally vegetarian ways, it eats a variety of foods. The peccary will dislodge grubs from the ground and eat them. It also will devour toads, lizards or snakes that it comes across. The peccary also will eat the eggs it discovers in the nesting sites of turtles and alligators, as well as the chicks of birds that nest on the ground across the animal's range.
  
  

Water

• Peccaries cannot prevent overheating in hot weather by panting, as other mammals can. For this reason, the peccary often stays close to a water source unless there is an abundant supply of succulent plants from which it can get adequate moisture. Peccaries will forage for food on summer mornings when it is somewhat cool and again at dusk. They frequently spend the day in the shade, often doing so in a thicket of prickly pear cactus.
  
  

Behavior

• While most species of pig root around in the soil and tear up the land, the collared peccary refrains from doing so. Instead, it pushes potential food around on the surface of the ground until the food breaks free from the earth. The collared peccary will push a cactus along the ground to break off its spines and then will eat it, even if some spines remain on the plant.
  
  

Considerations

• The collared peccary is beneficial to the range land upon which it lives, since it eats many types of cactus that grow so densely they crowd out other plants. The collared peccary normally lives in herds, with the animal going to elevations as high as 6,000 feet above sea level to look for the acorns from scrub oak trees.