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The most popular character in Hellsing? Look no further.

Hellsing characters by Kohta Hirano

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?

gettingvetted here.

Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.

In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”

Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”

Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.

God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.

Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.

“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”

And that’s all you need to know about horses.

lizziedoesvetpath

Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia

avoiding-claws

Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.

gallusrostromegalus

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 fucked 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 out run thier 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 Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks 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 Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier 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 fuck 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 Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier. 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 hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental. Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking 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 fucking insane.

headspace-hotel

This is the biology version of what’s known as “redneck engineering.”

lpbear

they also can’t vomit, which I’m not sure I can bring that back to tie in to the one toe thing, but it means that the slightest tummy upset can just straight up kill them because they have no way to get it out and they can tangle up said loose guts and fully kill themselves over a tummy ache

obaewankenope

It doesn’t link directly to the one-toe thing but does kinda connect to how the evolution of a horses physiology to allow it to still breathe when cantering and galloping sorta is to blame for the lack of being able to hurl.

Right, so, condolences for your boy first, because I saw your tag mentioning that. It sucks when this happens. But I’ll try and explain it as best I can in a shorter way than ten million sentences like I normally do.

As @gallusrostromegalus mentions, when horses do their ZOOM they don’t actually breathe the way most mammals do. Instead, their muscles and ligaments of the limbs pull the diaphragm and shit about to stretch and contract it to push and pull air in when moving.

This is why horses breathe in time with their gait and why it’s a problem when they Won’t Stop Running because they literally cannot keep going forever before their heart (which gallus again talks about) basically goes boom because their Major Cardiovascular Disease solution isn’t as effective an hour after Jimbo McStressHorse decides to fucking pelt across the field at a full gallop and Not Fucking Stop.

Anxiety makes horse go ZOOM and ZOOM makes horse get MURKED, basically.

Anyway. Stomach anatomy.

So, horses have really sensitive stomachs because of course they do. They obviously need THAT on top of everything else.

Horses have One (1) stomach like us and eat plants and grass that they have to break down in just one stomach unlike cattle who have multiple tum tums. So horses break down plant matter differently to cattle. They do it by fermenting the shit outta it (microbial fermentation, to be exact).

Fermenting shit like grapes is how we get wine so yeah… You get the general idea.

Their intestines are huge and have a really delicate fucking balance of microbes that the slightest upset to can be disastrous. Gas can actually be deadly to a horse, I’m not even joking. A horse that can’t fart is a horse that needs a vet.

The biggest cause of death for horses is colic which is, honestly, gas build up, gastro problems, abdominal pain and inflammation.

I really wasn’t kidding when I said if a horse can’t fart then you need a vet. Seriously.

Mold and toxins like… Well, any really, are dangerous af to horses too because of how delicate their digestive system is. Haylage, aka fermented hay aka dried grass, is used to feed horses but can be dangerous if there’s mold or anything used that is a toxin. You can bet your booty that I am hyper-vigilant about this shit.

They can’t regurgitate from the stomach because they literally don’t have the muscle structure to do so. Like, they’ve actually evolved in such a way that the only way to contract the stomach is with ZOOM and that’s only because it gets shoved and stretched by the stretching of the toe-legs in gallop and canter.

Great evolutionary idea, that.

ALSO, just as a side thing:

did you know that horse teeth never stop growing? They grind them down by eating/grazing but horse teeth are literally infinite. Another reason to adore horse evolution, right?

weirdalbestshirts-archive

Weird Al playing with signs: a collection

thedman0310

Do they know?

sunshinetheinspiration

Context:

mrawkweird

Did you know that there are ghosts....in the shell?

ducissatenebrarum

For the first time in art history, the powerful depictions of "Saturn Devouring His Son" by Rubens (Left) and Goya (Right) are being presented together.

homunculus-argument

I think it would be funny to write a murder mystery where not only did every single character involved have an obvious motive to kill this mf, they were actually all attempting to murder him first, but the murder attempts all cancelled each other out all except for one. Two people tried to poison him but the poisons just happen to work as antidotes for each other, and instead of killing him only gave him the shits, and due to having the shits he couldn't go hunting that day like he had planned, foiling the plans of the one who had conditioned his favourite hunting horse to panic and bolt at the cue of a whistle, and the other murder attempt of tampering with his gun so that it would have exploded his whole face off.

The whole mystery isn't about who could have done it or how, but who was the one who got lucky and actually succeeded.

terriwriting

Sherlock Holmes and The Case of Perhaps We'd Best Leave This One Alone, Watson. There Appears To Be An Excess Of Armed Maniacs In The Vicinity.

copperbadge

When I was in high school a friend of mine would host murder mystery dinners once or twice a year. They were the kind you could buy as a kit -- I don't even know if they exist anymore -- and everyone was assigned (or chose) a character, then received a booklet of clues to share. The idea was to spend an evening in a one-shot LARP designed like an Agatha Christie novel.

I was a year above most of them at school so they threw a "goodbye" murder mystery for me just before graduation, and about 2/3 of the way through the game we all realized that everyone had at least attempted to kill the victim. The game then shifted from "whodunnit" to "who succeeded in dunninit" which we all felt was not only super fun but above the usual level of narrative complexity for those games.

After we solved it, we discovered that the game wasn't from a kit -- the host had written it herself and meticulously printed out the booklets in replica style of the kits. It was the best going-away party I think I could possibly have had.