Hello Hanquan; Foraging behavior - Seeking food items. The pattern of behaviors that leads a hungry animal to food items.

Feeding behavior - The behaviors involved in handling, dismantling and ingesting a food item.

Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers

I agree with James Des Lauriers :)

Indeed James Des Lauriers , this is the correct explanation of both behaviours, although feeding behaviour is also used when actually describing foraging behaviour. So it is good to be aware of that and check what is meant.

I agree with all the above. Certainly in the primatological literature, there is generally the functional distinction between "foraging" vs. "feeding" that James Des Lauriers noted (a lot of "foraging" behaviour might turn up only small amounts of edible items, while if an individual is "feeding", they are actually chewing, swallowing, and ingesting food items). Ralf Mullers raises a very good point. Gaining foraging/feeding field data can be extremely challenging (especially when working with species that are mainly arboreal, like most primate species). Sometimes a field researcher cannot clearly distinguish when a relatively small arboreal species is actually "feeding" as opposed to "foraging". In such cases, labelling all foraging/feeding behaviour as "feeding" is not uncommon (especially in older sources).

I think these concept usually bring to mind plant foods and perhaps arthropods. I'd like to emphasize that they are equally important with regard to obtaining and consuming larger animals. My viewpoint is the comparison of baboons with early hominins. Baboons include helpless young antelopes in their foraging acquisitions, which contrasts with the focus and energy expenditure in hunting hares or more mature antelope. On the other hand, feeding behavior is much the same for both animals in that the prey are torn apart with the hands (as well as the teeth). Partly arboreal early hominins probably had hands strong enough to do the same.

Glenn E. King -- I absolutely agree. Early hominins would have been grabbing sun-basking lizards, raiding the nests of ground-nesting birds (and even the nests of small passerines that utilize "reachable" shrub-layer habitat), and making opportunistic use of predation opportunities... the mass birthing periods that many east and southern African ungulates exhibit would almost certainly have been periods when early hominins fed opportunistically on newborn ungulates. It would have been a "seasonal buffet" for them!

Foraging behavior refers to the search and acquisition of food resources, including activities such as searching, detecting, handling, and consuming food items. It encompasses the entire process of finding and obtaining food.

Feeding behavior, on the other hand, specifically refers to the act of consuming food once it has been acquired. It focuses on the physical act of eating, chewing, and swallowing food items.

In essence, foraging behavior is broader and includes all activities related to obtaining food, while feeding behavior specifically refers to the act of consuming food.

The best I can say is that to have a discussion we can just define our words and proceed from there. Really, there's not much more to it, unless you're a linguist concerned with the ordinary use of these words in some way.

Foraging behavior is the process where by an animal searching for and obtain feed Eg hunting scavenging

While feeding behaviors is the way animals consume and digest feed eg chewing and mastication