Difficult algebra question

Question

Lilly is feeding animals. for every squirrel she feeds them 1 apple, for every deer, she feeds 4 apples, for every rabbit 2 apples, for every bird 3 apples, and for every bear 6 apples. if she feeds 72 animals and used 244 apples, how many of each animal did she feed?

Answer 1

I'm going to try and map this out.

Squirrel=S

Deer=D

Rabbit=R

Bird=X

Bear=Y

I put the last two as those variables simply because they start with the same letter. Illustrate however works for you.

There are 5 variables and the rule is that you need as many equations as there are variables, here 5. The equations I can come up with from the problem are S+D+R+X+Y=72 and X+4D+2R+3X+6Y=244. That is not enough to solve this set of equations. The question is impossible.