"L'animale mangia il proprio cibo."
Translation:The animal eats its own food.
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Without the article, "l'animale mangia proprio cibo", it would mean really/precisely/indeed, although it would be a strange sentence, marveling at eating food of all things. As adverb, those are the meanings of proprio, but as adjective and pronoun it generally means own (see http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/italian-english/proprio for all meanings).
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Meal is any of the occasions for eating food that occur by custom or habit at more or less fixed times.
"A meal" is "un pasto". "A starter" to a meal is "un antipasto". I remember years ago, before I was aware that languages develop in complex ways, coming across a recipe in an English language magazine for an "antipasto" dish and being surprised by the "o" ending to the word and to the fact that the word starts with "anti" not "ante".
I suppose "pasto" is cognate with English "repast", a very old-fashioned word.
I have come to realize that there are many things that are specific in Italian as oppose to English. Your answer "the animal eats its own meal" in English could be interpreted as "the animal eats its own food" as well since when you eat a meal, you're eating food. This is not the case though because duolingo is asking for a specific term: food. So to answer your specific question, because meal in Italian is pasto, whereas food is cibo.
Hope this helps!
Wouldn't accept "their" as a singular pronoun. I know some people would agree, but it's common in English English; is it outlawed in American English?
Yes, nowadays we do use "their" as a singular adjective and "theirs" as a singular pronoun in England and throughput the UK, and I think people do in all English-speaking countries. We say things like, "I'm going to feed the animals and I'll be careful what I put out for them. Each must eat their own food". "Each" is singular and so is the "their" that follows it.
The English language is changing and this innovation may not be entirely accepted yet.
That is true, but if you look from the other side: "The cat eats his food" could both mean "The cat eats his own food" or "The cat eats the dog's/the neigbour cat's/etc. food", if you do not specify.
For example, my mother tongue has a special genderless possessive adjective, called "reflexive possessive pronoun", to refer to something of your own and not to some other person's belonging.
svoj (masculine singular) / svoja (feminine sg.) / svoje (neuter sg.)
svoja (m. dual) / svoji (f. dual) / svoji (n. dual)
svoji (m. plural) / svoje (f. pl.) / svoja (n. pl.)
Note that gender refers to the object, not the subject. And there are other forms according to the declension of the noun.
While "njen/-a/-o" (singular) stands for "her(s)" (the subject is female) and "njegov/-a/-o" (singular) stands for "his" (the subject is male or neuter).