When you tap your fingers around like a little prancing horse you are being scientifically accurate.
#KillRacingNotHorses
California alone has already had 20+ horse deaths this year at only 3 tracks. No legitimate sport would accept the deaths of their athletes on a routine and consistent schedule, as just a fact of life.
‘athletes’ is pretty anthropromorphic here.
When horses are able to launch a protest about poor working conditions, then it might come up as a point on the agenda worldwide.
Is that rate significantly different from other working horses? No other sport has athletes who can die of a stuffy nose.
Darts?
Only the bottom third or so of the leg is a finger. The rest is a leg.
well they arent fingers. they are still anatomical legs.
they are ungulates. meaning they walk on a developed digit, yes, but the legs above that are still legs as a whole and are not without tendons and muscles.
and their abilty for running is more from directional of the torso to hip and shoulder girdle to how the legs are angled down. the digit is evolved for speed and less shock absorbtion from taking away from the speed to travel faster in a particular direction.
that person callig their whole leg digits needs to read up on quadrapedal anatomy
I would also argue against their reasoning for poor health outcomes after breaking a leg. The poster stated it was because the legs are evolved digits, but that really has nothing to do with it. I would argue they never needed to evolve anatomy that can handle a broken limb because wild horses who broke a limb very quickly became a meal.
I think thats taking what they said a bit too literally, both the knowledge they do have and the tone makes it pretty clear to me that they know what they are saying but are using it for humerous (heh) exaggeration and effect.
Appreciate this.
Lol Tumblr biology is wild. 😂
They were wildly disturbed by walking on finger tips (like pretty much every four legged creature), but skipped right over lungs bleeding???
Also don’t forget that all horses officially have their birthday on January 1st. So when celebrating the new year, you are obligated to say happy birthday to all the horses.
Don’t forget that they can die of a tummy ache!
They have VERY precarious digestion and digestive anatomy. They can very easily colic (colic is a very generalized term here btw) and die. Almost saw a horse die this past spring because it had an empty stomach for just a little too long.
Colic is my biggest fear as a horse owner. My childhood horse died from it. We don’t know what exactly happened with her. We found her exhibiting all the symptoms and we did what we could but by the time the vet got there, she’d been deteriorating for almost 10 hours. She couldn’t stay standing at that point and had nearly crushed me and two other people trying to keep her on her feet. She was put down and the whole thing fucked me up real bad for a long time.
She put up one hell of a fight for being as old as she was. She was 33 and didn’t act it at all.
Gods help them if they get into the hay silage.
Hay ≠ silage. Hay is tedded and dried grass/straw. Hay is normally baled, but you can just throw it in a pile. Silage is grass that has been fermented to make it easier for cows to digest. Silage must be baled and wrapped, or stored in a silage silo so that it can ferment.I grew up in farm country surrounded by pigs, horses, cows, and an absolute FUCKTON of tobacco, corn, and soybeans. Also a fair amount of weed if you knew which cornfields to go into.
Hay silage often has species in it that are hell on horses, like clover and ryegrass. And silage can just be piled and covered to ensile, we put up about 2500 tons of it each year, both hay and cereal silage.
In fact, I’m prepping the swather right now to start cutting for a silage chopper showing up this week.
TIL. Apparently the farmers in my parents area are a bit more picky. They made hay for the horses, and silage for the cows. The pigs get slop, grain, and any bio-trash that’s available.
Oh yeah, I forgot that silage bunkers exist. Again not used in the area I grew up in. I don’t know why. I don’t use them in Farming Simulator, because they are buggy as shit, and the bales and silos aren’t.
Edit: also, 2500 TONS‽‽ are you Australian? That must be an absolutely enormous farm.
Canadian. Actually, it’s what I would say is a small to medium sized farm, we have about 350 cows which is about average for cattle operations around here, but we also do about 2000 ac of grain production as well, canola/barley/oats/peas.
You’d probably have seen a lot of corn silage in the US, which is rare here, corn takes too many heat days for us, though of course that’s changing. We will do barley or oats into silage in August, besides a round of hay silage at this time of year.
I have several horse riding people in my social circle.
Several horses have just randomly died for them. It’s apparently a thing that sometimes happens.
Last time one had twisted intestines or something and had to be put down. Apparently that can happen if a horse moves wrong. It’s what the vet said.
I imagine this as when you take a sudden move and pinch a nerve in your neck. But instead of some time of slight pain and discomfort, you just die.
Last time one had twisted intestines or something and had to be put down. Apparently that can happen if a horse moves wrong. It’s what the vet said.
from what I remember it can also happen to large dog breeds
Twisted gut cuts off bloodflow, and since intestines are soft tissue they can just stay twisted until that part of the organ dies, and then having a section of intestine dead is just fatal unless you get surgical intervention and usually still even then.
It’s less common in humans and more survivable, maybe because we can do bed rest. You cant just tell a horse not to move wrong or go to a liquid diet.
that can happen in humans too. you can get torque on the lower intestines just on anatomy alone.
all of our digestive tracks are uniquely slightly different. some people can get a perferated bowel much easier than others.
Testicular torsion might be a closer comparison. Sometimes it just happens.
I get this meme is funny but like, if horses really were that fragile then they would not have been domesticated into the work machines we had before combustion engines. They were our automobiles, they plowed our fields and fought in our wars. Yes evolution is a messy ordeal, but it can produce beings that have wild amounts of endurance and horses are near the top of that list.
If you consider Przewalski’s horse as being closer to the original lineage than what we’ve bred them to be, I’d imagine they didn’t have as many issues, in the same way Przewalski’s horse doesn’t. They’re smaller but stockier, so they can hold themselves up on three limbs, their skin isn’t as tight so it can heal from wounds better, and their soles are thicker so they can run on rough terrain without as much risk of injury. We bred horses to work, to carry us, and to be shiny, and I think that ruined much of their resilience.
Horses are like the ultimate fascist’s enemy, powerful and fragile at the same time.
They really are glass cannons though. When I was young I watched a bird land on the paddock rail, a horse who was standing right there didn’t notice, turned a little and saw it, JUMPED WITH ALL 4 LEGS straight up and broke one when it landed. What the fuck!?
What is your brain that you had to contort horses in “the ultimate fascist’s enemy”.
Fascinating
In fascist ideology, “the enemy” is simultaneously very strong and powerful but also very weak and incompetent. It’s how they get you to hate the outgroup. Immigrants are strong and powerful because they take all of our jobs but are also weak and incompetent because they dont speak English. How can they take all the jobs if they don’t even speak English? It makes sense to a fascist.
Horses, in a roundabout way, are also strong and powerful but also kinda fragile. I believe this is the line of thought OP had.
I’ll also say. As I think about it, it makes sense of something I have been struggling with about MAGA Trump. And makes me way more sympathetic to them and conservatives.
Thanks for explaining.
I want to applaud you for explaining in a good faith way befitting of one person to another.
Big updoots to you
Got it.
Sneak up on cats with cucumbers and on horses with birds.
What do we do for dogs?
Sneak up to them with a broken horse leg and club them.
Horses are scared of two things. Things that move, and things that don’t
Hey buddy fuck you too
Yeah, it’s not the leg that’s a finger, it’s the hoof-part. The legs are legs, but instead of ending in 5 digits they end in 1.
Most of their leg is a finger look closely. Count the joints. The hand begins 3 joints up (one is hidden in the hoof so it’s not as obvious. Count down from the shoulder works too.) The wrist is 4 joints up, elbow 5, shoulder is the last one at 6 total. They have the same number of joints in the same spots that we do, just like a giraffe has the same number of neck bones as a rat.
At least 80% of the leg, by length, is arm/leg, not finger/toe.
Compare that to a bat wing, where the bones really are long fingers:
The lower leg is the palm, not a finger.
Why didn’t nature ever learn to evolve fewer bones?
Like in 100 million years how much worse is the situation going to be?
Whales have a tiny remnant of a pelvis left
Once you’ve evolved it, one more or less is basically free *. Might fail sooner in old age, but everything after procreation is an afterthought.
* my aunt has a long neck, 3 vertebras more.
* my aunt has a long neck, 3 vertebras more.
Apparently it’s really rare for mammals to evolve that without getting somthing else that’s really nasty like cancer. There was a recent video about it on SciShow or HanksChannel
Wha, really? She’s fine.
because it was never vital to survival to have fewer bones. evolution is a term that does a ton of conceptual heavy lifting but has sadly been warped by ignorance and a lack of understanding of the nuance of what is really happening.
somehow, life existed. we dont really know how it got started but it did. due to the laws of physics and thermodynamics, some life died and some life lived. that went on for a long ass time until today we see the stuff that has survived to now. evolution just says life changes over time because some life dies without reproducing and some life reproduces before dieing. thats it. its a statement about the effect of survivorship bias over the long term existence of life.
so why didnt animals evolve to have fewer bones? because it never mattered enough to happen. things kept on surviving with the number of bones they have. we can look at them and say their body would function better with more or fewer bones, or different chemistry, or different soft tissue, or whatever you like. but none of those things mattered enough to happen, or if they did happen they werent better enough to change anything at the time. but also animals do have different numbers of bones, just not so different.
i wish i could describe this better, but evolution isnt an active process. if you have to think of it as a thing, keep in mind that it produces only what barely works. every adaptation we have was developed by the deaths of countless individuals, so we only have it because at some point it was necessary, or so benefitial it couldn’t help but propagate. having way less bones was never either of those things.
Tl:dr = Because they haven’t. Yet. Maybe. As far as we know.
I think you’ve described it quite well. That’s just evolutionary biology. Any adaptation requires some kind of pressure behind it.
Not pressure, just absence of negative effects. Pressure might help but is not required. And I use “absence” quite loosey-goosey.
Yes, and ‘pressure’ is used similarly. Think atmospheric pressure. It can lower and heighten, so a lack of pressure is low pressure, not the absence of it.
Evolution is not an intentional process. It’s just statistics compounding over time. Simplified example: By random chance this bird grew a 5% longer beak than its peers, which means it can catch 5% more food and raise 5% more chicks than the others. If its descendants have similar success, over time it means that their long-beak trait will become more and more prevalent in the population, and projected over thousands of years, the whole species will end up having this long-beak trait, simply because those who had it, had more kids grow to reproductive age than those who didn’t.
Meanwhile somewhere in the same time, worms that the bird feeds on start to die more because of that beak, except for those that were genetically wired to burrow a bit deeper.
Whales have a tiny remnant of a pelvis left
Because evolution doesn’t “learn” anything.
people often think of evolution as this purely positive force. very “survival of the fittest” types. the horse is a great example that evolution sometimes ends up making very very silly creatures.
It’s survival of the genetic line that reproduces enough to stay alive. The weird shit is often related to path dependence, or is just not enough of a detriment to affect evolutionary outcomes.
Horses must have plenty of good evolutionary traits, because even without human breeding they’re very successful creatures. I guess they don’t reproduce quickly, so that isn’t it. I guess they can’t shrug off injuries. They must be really good at not getting caught by predators, so they live enough to have at least a couple of foals.
I mean, I think they also evolved on steppes and open plains, where running fast is not too often super dangerous, so breaking a leg is not common enough to counter balance the advantages of being fast.
More like a couple of FOOLS! HA!
Redditor /u/coffeeincluded:
Horses. Dear god, horses.
First off, horses are obligate nasal breathers. If our noses are stuffed up we can breathe through our mouths. If our pets’ noses are stuffed up (except for rabbits, who are also really fragile but unlike horses aren’t stuck having only one baby a year) they can breathe through their mouths. If a horse can’t breathe through its nose, it will suffocate and die.
Horse eyes are exquisitely sensitive to steroids. Most animal eyes are, except for cows because cows are tanks, but horses are extremely sensitive. Corneal ulcers won’t heal. They’ll probably get worse. They might rupture and cause eyeball fluid to leak out.
If you overexert a horse they can get exertional rhabodmyolysis. Basically you overwork their muscles and they break down and die and release their contents. Super painful, and then you get scarifying and necrosis. But that’s not the problem. See, when muscles die hey release myoglobin, which goes into the blood and is filtered by the kidneys. If you dump a bucket of myoglobin into the blood then it shreds the kidneys, causing acute renal failure. This kills the horse. People and other animals can get that too but in school we only talked about it in context of the horse.
Horses can only have one foal at a time. Their uterus simply can’t support two foals. If a pregnant horse has twins you have to abort one or they’ll both die and possibly kill the mother with them. A lot of this has to do with the way horse placentas work. EDIT: There are very, very rare instances where a mare can successfully have twins, but it’s sort of like the odds of being able to walk again after a paralyzing spinal injury.
If a horse rears up on its hind legs it can fall over, hit the back of its head, and get a traumatic brain injury.
Now to their digestive system. Oh boy. First of all, they can’t vomit. There’s an incredibly tight sphincter in between the stomach and esophagus that simply won’t open up. If a horse is vomiting it’s literally about to die. In many cases their stomach will rupture before they vomit. When treating colic you need to reflux the horse, which means shoving a tube into their stomach and pumping out any material to decompress the stomach and proximal GI tract. Their small intestines are 70+ feet long (which is expected for a big herbivore) and can get strangulated, which is fatal without surgery.
Let’s go to the large intestine. Horses are hindgut fermenters, not ruminants. I’ll spare you the diagram and extended anatomy lesson but here’s what you need to know: Their cecum is large enough to shove a person into, and the path of digesta doubles back on itself. The large intestine is very long, has segments of various diameters, multiple flexures, and doubles back on itself several times. It’s not anchored to the body wall with mesentery like it is in many other animals. The spleen can get trapped. Parts of the colon can get filled with gas or digested food and/or get displaced. Parts of the large intestine can twist on themselves, causing torsions or volvulus. These conditions can range from mildly painful to excruciating. Many require surgery or intense medical therapy for the horse to have any chance of surviving. Any part of the large intestine can fail at any time and potentially kill the horse. A change in feed can cause colic. Giving birth can cause I believe a large colon volvulus I don’t know at the moment I’m going into small animal medicine. Infections can cause colic. Lots of things can cause colic and you better hope it’s an impaction and not enteritis or a volvulus.
And now the legs. Before we start with bones and hooves let’s talk about the skin. The skin on horse legs, particularly their lower legs, is under a lot of tension and has basically no subcutaneous tissue. If a horse lacerated its legs and has a dangling flap of skin that’s a fucking nightmare. That skin is incredibly difficult to successfully suture back together because it’s under so much tension. There’s basically no subcutaneous tissue underneath. You need to use releasing incisions and all sorts of undermining techniques to even get the skin loose enough to close without tearing itself apart afterwards. Also horses like to get this thing called proud flesh where scar tissue just builds up into this giant ugly mass that restricts movement. If a horse severely lacerated a leg it will take months to heal and the prognosis is not great.
Let’s look at the bones. You know how if a horse breaks a leg you usually have to euthanize it? There’s a reason for that. Some fractures can be repaired but others can’t. A horse weighs thousands of pounds and is literally carrying all that weight on the middle toes of their legs. They are simply incapable of bearing weight on three legs. And a lot of that is because of…
Laminitis. This killed Barbaro and Secretariat. Barbaro would have made it through the broken leg but he got laminitis in his other legs. First, a quick anatomy lesson. The horse hoof is like our fingernails, except it covers the whole foot and is a lot thicker. And to make sure it stays on their food, which again is carrying all that weight on one middle toe per leg, the hoof interdigitates with the skin underneath. And these interdigitations have interdigitations. Think of it as Velcro, and the Velcro also has Velcro. When the horse is healthy, this system works great. But let’s make something go wrong. Maybe there’s too much weight on the hoof. Maybe the horse is septic. Maybe there’s too much sugar, or insulin resistance. Whatever happens, the tissues in the hoof get inflamed and swell up. And because the hoof itself is there, there’s nowhere for the swollen soft tissues to go. So the laminae get crushed, and you lose the support system that’s holding the entire foot up. This is incredibly painful, and has to be caught early. Because if you let it go on too long, their toe bone will start to rotate because there’s nothing holding it in place anymore (this is founder). And in some cases, the toe bone can actually fall through the bottom of the hoof.
TL;DR: Horses are actively trying to die on us.
Source: I’m a veterinary student.
I choose to believe this is why horses originally went extinct in the Americas
stupid short geraffes
They are simply incapable of bearing weight on three legs
This must mean “for an extended period of time” or something, because walking (and especially moving at any speed faster than walking) requires at a minimum that one foot be off the ground.
All four legs are of the ground while a horse is running
Wrong. It’s 5:50 AM. Still didn’t need to know this though.
Re: why didn’t horses evolve better leg healing, if you’re a proto horse and injure your leg you’re probably not living to heal it, because you can no longer run. So there is no evolutionary pressure to spread those genes through the population, even if a horse did randomly get born with genes that let it heal its legs better than other horses, because no selection mechanism would exist.
Why heal? If they are slowed by their injury they can’t keep up when the herd flees, and a predator will eat them
Healing won’t increase chances of survival
I think most of their problems are because they are optimised for speed over everything else
There are certainly some injuries that are survivable, and that would let a horse survive long enough to heal, if they were a creature that could heal. I assume it’s that leg healing reduces their speed or endurance, or requires that they consume more calories. They put all their points into “get away from predator” and zero points into “deal with injuries”. I guess as long as the average female horse has more than 2 young that survive, that’s enough.
So, probably there were mutant horses that could heal a bit better, but maybe they required a bit too much food, or they were a bit slower than the other horses.
I assume it’s that leg healing reduces their speed or endurance
Basically this, part of how they get their speed (legs being mostly tendon and cartilage) is what makes healing so difficult. Both tendons and cartilage have far less blood supply compared to muscle or skin, which heal much more quickly. So if a horse developed legs with more tissue and muscle (and thus an increased blood supply, improving healing), they would have been slower than their skinnier legged cousins and had no competitive advantage.
Maybe these are the ones that heal better.
So… When I make a horse with one hand to run on the table, I’m not far off?
As long as you actually run on the tips of your fingernails, yes
and only one the middle finger, called the cannon bone.
