Wait what’s the deal with the horses? I want to feel good about myself today.
Edit: Wow, those bastards have it rough.
Their genetics have sacrificed nearly every aspect of basic resiliency for maximum speed on the plains. Most of the work caring for horses is keeping them from accidentally killing themselves. Full disclosure: I worked as a stable hand as a child in exchange for riding lessons. Will never ever own a horse.
Basically a 900LB Cocker Spaniel that’s afraid of it’s own farts and will eventually kill every single tree within reach. I also will never own horses.
i mean if i haven’t kept the best diet for a couple days i’m afraid of my own farts too
I did this too and will also never own a horse lmao. This is why horse people are weird.
Some people love caring for fragile things. Boosts their self-esteem. It can also break them when they fail.
*one reason
Same here haha
What preditor was so fast horses had to evolve to that extent??
Us. They basically tried to beat pursuit predation by outrunning the distance humans will be willing to track over.
It did not work, they went extinct in North America because of how much it did not work.
Large predatory flightless birds probably didn’t help either.
Ah, sweet home Caelid
Saber toothed tigers and shit
Saber toothed shit is a serious reason
Same for rabbits. The are basically as much lean muscle that can fit on the lighest possible skeleton.
If you pick up a rabbit wrong, they can snap their own back with the momentum from kicking their back legs.
They only have 4 toes total.
Humans have multiple toes because our ape ancestors used their toes like fingers. Having multiple, separate toes is probably bad for survival unless you’re using toes to manipulate tools.
Animals that have distinct toes include apes, geckos, mice, raccoons and similar animals which need them to grip onto surfaces or to manipulate things. There are predators which have separate toes because they’re a place to mount claws: eagles, cats, etc. There are animals that have separate toes with webbing between for swimming. But, for a lot of animals, separate toes aren’t really useful, so they’ve evolved away: elephants, rhinos, giraffes, horses, cows, etc.
Tbh if I could I think I would turn on the gene for prehensile feet.
Just to try. Looks fun.
you can train your feet to be pretty prehensile, there are people who paint and write with their feet.
Oh yeah I pick up stuff with them sometimes but I wanna try the monkey experience lol
Yeah, but at least most of those still have multiple toes to spread the weight around. Horses decided to get rid of that completely.
Spreading the weight around using toes doesn’t seem to be a useful strategy. It’s also not something that humans do. Human toes are not at the weight-bearing part of the foot. And, while I’m sure toes are somewhat involved in agility, having individual toes doesn’t seem to be. In fact, if you look at apes like gorillas and chimps, it’s pretty clear that our toes have been getting shorter and less important as we’ve been evolving as upright-walking creatures who don’t live in trees. Instead, the sole of the foot, which used to be much more like the palm of a hand, has been getting longer and sturdier.
If you have separate toes, you have multiple fragile things that can break or be torn off. If you have one mega-toe it’s going to be sturdy. That’s probably why the heaviest animals have the fewest / smallest toes.
As someone who goes barefoot whenever possible, i can tell you that the idea of toes not being particularly useful for agility is very incorrect. If i have to restrict my toes i feel like dogs do when you put booties on their paws, so incredibly clumsy.
The toes play a large part in keeping your balance, making minor corrections to your weight distribution, and especially the big toe is pretty significant when pushing off the ground.
Try walking (or even running) around with your toes lifted off the ground, it’s very awkward.The problem is that a lot of people these days are constantly wearing shoes that make their toes useless, and even when not wearing such shoes their toes have been squeezed into a pointy shape (bunions are almost entirely caused by this) and become weak from atrophy. A healthy foot has toes splayed quite wide and the toes will be pretty strong and probably a lot thicker than you’re used to, look at baby feet for a rough example.
I mostly go barefoot too, and the shoes I have are “barefoot shoes” that have extremely thin soles. But, I still don’t think the individual toes are that important to grip. Sure, the toe pads are important. If you’re moving on the balls of your feet, I’d guess maybe 30% of your weight is in your toes. But, I don’t think I’m getting much contribution to agility from my baby toe being splayed out. If I glued my toes together, I think it wouldn’t hurt my agility much, and it would mean I’m much less likely to catch that individual, fragile baby toe on a corner.
And they run around at 60mph on the tips of their toenails.
I mean, humans run around on something that birds would consider knees, and stupidly try to support their entire body weight using only half their legs.
Sometimes they will die because they can’t puke. Also broken legs are usually fatal even with vet care.
The term healthy as a horse is mostly survivorship bias
The term healthy as a horse is mostly survivorship bias
From what i read here there’s no unhealthy horse, it’s either healthy or dead.
“So, Timmy, do you want to be healthy as a horse?”
Horses not breathing while running opened a whole new world of anxiety for me.
What?!
They don’t aspirate when they run, their organs slosh around and just sort of push their lungs enough to keep them alive.
So a medieval charge would have been even more insane for them.
Tbf, our teeth aren’t bad. They just didn’t evolve to consume so much sugar.
They just didn’t evolve to consume so much sugar.
Bro, eating oranges puts our tooth enamel in a weakened state. If we were designed, it was by an idiot.
Oranges do not naturally have that much sugar.
It’s not the sugar, but the acid that our teeth can’t handle.
The fact that healthy foods can’t be consumed without a risk of harm is not an intelligent design.
I mean, even apples (i.e. “Garden of Eden”) can promote the growth of plaque!
I mean, biblically speaking we weren’t supposed to eat those apples.
If an all-knowing creator didn’t want humans to eat fruit from a specific tree, he shouldn’t have grown that tree in the only garden he had humans in.
Missing the point of obedience by choice.
Oh, right. The obedience only matters if you have to make yourself do it. It doesn’t count if it’s natural and painless and costs you nothing. Can’t believe I forgot about that?
Yahweh and mind games. What an asshole. 😂
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Oranges don’t exist naturally, was the point I was making. Theyre a hybrid, derived at least partly from pomelo.
You are right, it’s just that in Spanish a “pomelo” is a grapefruit, and I was unaware of the whole rabbit hole that is the hybridwtion of the pomelo, mandarin, citrus and all that. I deleted my old comment because I was just confused.
No worries, I don’t know all the details and looking more deeply, it looks to be more complicated than I was remembering too.
Actually a bigger contributor is underdeveloped jaws due to no longer requiring to chew from.a very young age for nutritional requirements.
Why would stronger Jaws prevent teeth decay?
Why would not having developmentally impaired mouth including teeth, muscle, and bone be beneficial for longterm resilience?
Idk dude, figure it out. Some people, I swear.
Wow, are you always this much of an asshole when people ask you questions?
Why does being mean to you make me an asshole? (This is a facetious question)
You’re insufferable
This you?
(This is a facetious question)
At least we agree on your assholery then.
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Half our expected lifetime was our expected lifetime back when they evolved. Teeth are doing quite well, all things considered.
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I am 99% sure humans are supposed to have tails
Its only a valve. Topologically speaking, the passage from the mouth to the anus only constitutes one hole.
The passage of air into the lungs is not a hole however, that is a cavity. Same difference with the vagina, that’s not a hole, that’s a cavity.
People are donuts!
No, since you have a nose. Topologically, people have 3 holes.
7, if the cut-off is 60 microns (tear ducts). Smaller than that, we’re essentially Swiss cheese.
Tbh, I was kinda hoping for someone with better biology knowledge than me to correct me. Thanks.
What are the the 7?
Important note, if you take a straw that separates into two split straws (kinda in a “Y” shape) that from a topological point of view is two holes, because one is for one of these paths, and the other is an extruded hole on the side of the first path. In topology you can’t break or mend material, but you can pull, stretch, squeeze and move it all you want. So you can move one of the split straw “legs” to the bottom of the whole straw, getting a shape similar to a “V”, it would look pretty much like a pair of pants. And topologically speaking it would be exactly the same. So… One straight hole for your mouth all the way down to your anus. Another two are there for your nostrils, that’s 3 already. The rest are for your tear ducts, which have two holes on the edge of your eye, (so four in total) which merge and then connect to your nose.
So a human, from a topological perspective, is just a seven holed doughnut. Also Vsauce made a great video about that, with pretty great animations.
I am well aware that people have three topological holes. Matter of fact, I proved that years ago.
In this case, I only referred to one topological hole, from mouth to anus.
I never mentioned the nose, nor was that part of the topic in question.
Yum.
You don’t need that
Mmm
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Depends on the state of your esophagus, doesn’t it? If it’s closed (which it mostly is) then your mouth and nose holes go to your lung cavity. Your anus is also part of a cavity that goes through your intestines all the way up your throat and stops at your esophagus.
THE APPENDIX HAS ENTERED THE CHAT.
Being able to make our own Vitamin C aside, the fact that a vestigial organ can randomly decide to fucking kill you is asinine from a design perspective. Its the equivalent to building a pool in the sims and removing the ladder for the first person who wanders inside.
It’s not totally vestigial, it helps regulate colon bacteria. People without their appendix take longer to recover from diarrhea, which is important when bad water and spoiled food are a more regular part of your life.
Look up the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
So it loops around the aorta. That’s weird, but is it a problem?
high ping to your larynx, basically
It’s a perfect example of non-intelligent design and evidence of evolution.
tbf horses have big dicks, it could have been worse for them
You stand on your toenails
Right, but literal horsecock
I always thought the fact that turning our heads too fast can give us strokes was rather inconvenient.
Yikes. That’s why I get a little worried about the high velocity neck stuff that some chiropractors do.
Or that sneesing / trying to hold back a sneeze can give you an aneurism. But I guess although it’s rare in animals it’s not exclusive to humans.
Rupture an existing one, right?
Waiting both sneezing or trying to hold back is dangerous? What are we supposed to do half-ass it?
The breathing and eating tubes gotta cross so you can blow with your mouth and choke on cock. Non-negotiable.
You could still probably blow with your mouth if you didn’t have your lungs connected, I imagine it would involve a kind of burping type of action. I think the bigger problem would be that if your nostrils closed up, you wouldn’t be able to breathe, and probably also talking would be a lot harder if your vocal chords and mouth were separate from your main air sacs.
I think the solution is probably just an easily opened and closed internal valve that separates the stomach and the lungs, rather than this bullshit we currently have with two separate valves that lead into both and open for one and then close for the other whenever it’s required. It’s still good to be able to close both when you want to, but you can already close your mouth on command, and another valve with the nose is a notable upgrade in that it keeps everyone from smelling bad smells they don’t wanna smell, and it also doesn’t take any more valves than we already have.
There’s probably some way you could fix this all with enough surgical intervention, I bet…
We’re God’s creation but God is a lazy kid that rushed the science project for the whole semester in six days and barely half assed it hoping no one digs too deep into it
as long as you ditch the whole “omniscient and omnipotent” part, god is pretty relatable.
i’d like to see you do better when you’re literally creating the fucking universe on your own.
Well let me pull out of the drawer my really dusty degree in Biology and let’s see.
First of all, do I still have to follow the principles of Embriology or do I get to make it from scratch? Because that’s where I reckon most of the problems that came up come from
you can do precisely whatever you want, but you have to personally compute every single interaction, you are THE game master of EVERYTHING, ALL the time, FOREVER.
frankly the fact that we have sensible physics all the way down to quarks is pretty impressive, i struggle to make a sensible day dream in my head. Put me in charge of a universe and you have something somehow worse than the fey wilds.
What use is grief to a horse?
I feel like feet and ankles have a lot of responsibility. I had a really bad case of plantar fasciitis for like 2 years and it sucked. Every step you take was a stabbing pain
That’s really just a modern problem. If you were part of a tribe walking out of Africa, you’d never have that problem. Our feet are pretty impressive actually
