Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Things I didn't know, part MLXVII

 

I enjoyed this exchange on Tumblr, referenced on social media.  An anonymous user asked:


I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?


Among others, this amusing and entertaining answer was submitted by reader gallusrostromegalus.  I've edited out most of the profanity and corrected the spelling.


My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:

Horses don’t got enough toes.

So, back right after the dinosaurs ****** off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:

They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.

But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and outrun their predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well.  Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides.  Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM.  So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses.

The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really ******* Fast is that it kind of ***** your everything else up.

When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync.  But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates.  It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major ******* Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real ******* Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of their heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that.  But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the **** faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia.  Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.

ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Mother******s means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating ****** up bones that replicate the way birds store air in their bones but much, much ****tier.  So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also having a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fact that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of their evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for their already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, ******* mental.  Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if denied the opportunity to ZOOM, its options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just ******* Die”.  The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.

TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them ******* insane.


There's more at the link, including illustrations.

I did a brief check, and it looks as if the explanation given is basically anatomically correct (minus the profanity and simplified breakdown).  Interesting!  I didn't know any of that - but I do now (and so do you, dear reader).  It also made me smile;  an added bonus when discovering something new.

Peter


18 comments:

  1. Lol. Loved the explanation.
    She's not wrong: physically pretty sturdy, but metabolically pretty fragile. Mine just passed, and I miss him terribly. I find myself horseless and dogless for the first time in decades. 😥
    One bone to pick, horses are not ungulates: those have cloven feet and 4 chambered stomachs, i.e., cows, camels, deer, etc.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I had the same reaction, but wondered if I misremembered and learned that, per encyclopedia Britannica, ungulate means any hooved mammal:
      https://www.britannica.com/animal/ungulate
      Well, yet another example of my unreliable memory. Whee!

      Delete
  2. Filed under
    An answer I never would have even come close to figuring out.
    I've always wondered why a busted leg on a person got a cast, and a busted leg on a horse got a cast bullet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As a horse owner, rider and half assed competitor I think that response is generally correct.

    1) The more domesticated the breed, the worse they are. Do not even stare at a Thoroughbred, it will find some strange way to become sick or injure itself. Thoroughbreds make sure that farriers and vets kids can afford college.
    2) Take a grade horse that was raised in the Rockies and you can't kill it with gun. They eat aspen bark in the winter, grow coats like a musk ox and have hooves of steel. Mustangs are a close second.
    3) Horses run, every man for themselves
    Cows circle the wagons and fight.
    My wife and I are down to our last horse, a mare that is 29 years old. I have enjoyed them but don't ever let them you have any disposable income. The will dispose of it for you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. So basically, horses are politicians: the things that make them very good at running degrade all their other life functions.
    Pity. We should do somethig about that.
    .

    ReplyDelete
  5. A frind of mine tried working some cattle with a arabian he inherited. That didn't work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. As a former horse owner and former sheep owner, now do sheep. I'm convinced sheep will roll over and die just out of shear spite. Horses are positively bullet-proof compared to sheep.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I wonder about draught (draft to you colonials) horses. Percherons, Clydesdales, Shires, etc. Ancestors probably carried heavy knights into battle. Panicking or just dropping dead would not be useful.
    Clydesdales opened up the prairies. They were big and teams could pull huge forerunners of combine harvesters.
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PD2JITVuBAQ
    My Irish grandfather had a big stallion on which I aged 3 would happily sit.
    For two horse ploughing (plowing - see above) he would borrow a nieghbours (OK).
    Thank you for insight on your life and community.

    ReplyDelete
  8. MYOB - Sheep are designed to die. Simple. As the herd runs away, the weakest die first leaving a trail of dead sheep for the attacking horde to feast upon. Evolution by death. It IS the Prey way of life, and sheep have maxed out on their potential.

    It's why I laugh every time some idjit gets teary-eyed about some lamb or sheep ending up cooked and in my mouth. Friggin weeds have a stronger will to live than sheep.

    ReplyDelete
  9. In veterinary school, back in the early 1980s, there were 2 things we were taught about sheep: 1) Sheep are born looking for a place to die. And, 2) Sick Sheep Seldom Survive.
    That was about it ...

    ReplyDelete
  10. I always laugh at that one. Basically correct, especially on the really, really weird adaptation of the lungs/intestines.
    Humans haven't helped, if you want to turn your stomach look up warmblood fragile foal syndrome: the recent desire for hypermobility in the show ring has led to a mutation that can make All connective tissue too mobile...including things like the skin, muscle sheaths... Or in Quarter Horses, look up HYPP...Both lethal. But, the passion for breeding horses means we have a really good understanding of genetics from them!
    Horses do best when allowed to eat stemmy grass all the time (like 18 hours out of 24), walk for miles, and live in dry and ideally cold (steppe) climates.
    Contemplating my current three: two Shires and an elderly pony. The Shires are happily sleeping in a snow bank. And not actually looking for a way to die, for a minute!

    ReplyDelete
  11. That was a Masterclass overview of equine anatomy and physiology, which is also why local college and graduate professors should be made obsolete, and the subjects taught once, on video, by the most brilliant and fascinating instructors available, downloadable by anyone, and updated maybe once every 5 years.

    It could even be written by Ph.Ds, and presented by the top tier of folks doing stand-up comedy.

    College and graduate tuition would drop to the cost of WiFi, students could learn at their own pace, and the you-gotta-buy-Professor-X's-textbook racket would be killed off at long last.

    The only use for in-person professors would be hands-on lab work and supervised preceptorships, and we'd get generations of graduates taught by the most brilliant minds in every subject, for mere pennies, and the lessons would stick for life.

    ReplyDelete
  12. @Aesop - Matt Parker, stand-up mathematician.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I wonder if mules are any better. Mule people seem to that no so.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Sounds like a biology class taught by AUSSIE MAN.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Have a welcome mat that says ... "Our Vet drives a Porsche. See horses for details."

    ReplyDelete
  16. The concept that cattle are sturdy is overblown. They are good at dealing with non-stressful situations (bad weather, cold, heat for most breeds, etc.). Put them into stress and keep them stressed, they start dropping like flies. That’s why transportation of cattle still has an incredible loss rate, etc.

    ReplyDelete

ALL COMMENTS ARE MODERATED. THEY WILL APPEAR AFTER OWNER APPROVAL, WHICH MAY BE DELAYED.