where hooves and fins collide

fable || 18 || Land and wildlife || equine management || animal care || marine biology

[russianhorses]

Russian Don stallion Gabdiyar

[backtosmallthings]

first of all none of us could afford hannibal’s therapy

[licensetocannibalize]

unaired episode where hannibal accepts medicaid

[sockdrawerdemon]

Hannibal is independently wealthy and deeply invested in fucking with people who are interesting enough. Show up with a good story about how you are trying very hard to not give in to the urge to make tiny statues out of people's teeth and he'll see you for free.

[assassinationtipsforladies]

Sliding scale payments where the scale is how fucking weird you are

[tikkety-tok]

sound on

[kelpies-studies]

What better way to learn the skeletal system than drawing it on a live horse 😍

[ask-a-vetblr]

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.

[myhoneststudyblr]

my masterpost | my studygram | ask me anything 

[click images for high quality]

[transcript under the cut]

Other advice posts that may be of interest:

All About Procrastination

How To Study When You Really Don’t Want To

Common Study Mistakes

7 Strategies to Improve Concentration

How to Make Your Notes Aesthetic

How to Stop Procrastinating Series

Keep reading

[acetheticallynice]

The hungry crows will try any trick to steal a morsel, and they are annoyingly persistent. (Planet Earth II)

[sakrogoat]

Domenico Fetti - Vanitas

[oakfern]

Photographs by Eliot Furness Porter, 1972.

Clockwise from top left: Ice in Glacial Lake Fjallsarlon, South Coast, Fractured Obsidian, Landmannalauger, White Flowers in Black Ash Cliff-Breidhidalur, Steam Vent, Landmannalauger.

[tesnuzzik]

I’m in an autumn/winter mood already

(Tiny horses are great btw)

[tireddahlia]

I 👏🏽need 👏🏽to👏🏽 talk👏🏽 about👏🏽 this 👏🏽horse👏🏽

*I read Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand for the 5th time and need process my feelings*

Okay, so this good boy is named Seabiscuit, a renowned racehorse. Or this might be his identical brother Grog. They got switched out for photo ops regularly, and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between the two. 

Look at his legs!! Look at his knees! Those wobbly, crooked little things! People would think Seabiscuit was lame (as in unsound, not uncool) when they met him. He couldn’t even run straight. He had this wonky gallop in which his legs would fly out in the completely wrong direction. And people would get concerned. They would write to his stable, “How is it ethical to race a horse like that?” Or “WTH I’m going to call 1930s PETA on y’all!” And his owners would have to be like, “No we promise he is perfectly fit and happy. He just wobbles a little.” Seabiscuit was also only 15 hands high ( 5′2″), which is on the smaller side for a racehorse. Physically, it made absolutely no sense that Seabiscuit was a fast horse. He had short legs and couldn’t run streamline fashion. He didn’t show much promise in racing until 1936, when he was sold to the Howard family for the paltry sum of $8,000. He flourished under their care and started to dominate racetracks in California.  

*Skipping ahead a lot*

So in 1938, Seabiscuit enters a match race against War Admiral. 

War Admiral, as seen above, is a racing legend. He had legs for days and an aerodynamic racing bod. He won 21 out of his 26 races. Three of those races included the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes, making him the fourth American Triple Crown winner in history. Being the ultimate racing machine that he was, War Admiral was named the 1937 Horse of the Year. When running the Belmont Stakes, he literally sliced part of his hoof off in the starting gate and still won. It’s sorta like winning the Olympic 100 meter dash after losing a toe at the starting line. What an absolute bad ass. The odds were against Seabiscuit, literally. You could bet 1-4 for War Admiral or 2-1 for Seabiscuit. Not only did War Admiral have the better racing record and physique, but he also was a notoriously fast starter. In match races, the horse that gains the early lead almost always wins. Seabiscuit typically made his move more towards the end of his races. Additionally, Seabiscuit was only a big deal in the West Coast racing community, which was not taken seriously in the East Coast where War Admiral reigned supreme. It was thought that War Admiral simply the faster horse and would lead wire to wire. 

Except none of that happened. Seabiscuit, not War Admiral, broke faster at the starting gate and led by two lengths. It was inexplicable. Seabiscuit out-gunned the legend! But then War Admiral, tough as nails, managed to catch up. The two horses were even, and it was thought that War Admiral, having managed to make a herculean recovery after loosing the initial lead, would make mince meat out of Seabiscuit. Little did they know that George Wolf, Seabiscuit’s jockey, was intentionally holding his horse back and letting War Admiral pull even. See, Seabiscuit did not just use his speed to best his opponents, he was also adept at pYchoLoGicaL WaRefAre. Seabiscuit was a dick and would slow down to let other horses catch up. Then every time they tried to pass him, he would speed up a little. His stablemates could only stand to train with him few times before refusing to run with him again. Seabiscuit looked War Admiral in the eye and something about this knobby-knee’d wonder horse just absolutely destroyed the reigning champion. Wolf later recounted that he saw War Admiral’s eyes rolling back in their sockets. Both horses ran their personal bests for a 1 3/16 mile distance, and Seabiscuit still won by 4 lengths. 

Seabiscuit was the 1938 Horse of the Year, and got more press than FDR. It was estimated that 40 million people tuned in via radio to listen to him defeat War Admiral. His races were usually won carrying 15+ pounds more than any other horse on the track (It is thought that each 2-3 pounds slows a horse by a length in mid-distance races). In 1940, he set a world record for the amount of money earned by a horse, winning $437,730 (roughly $8 million USD today). To many people, the success of this crooked-legged horse represented hope during a period of economic turmoil. 

What a good boy!

[kelpies-studies]

I'm a few weeks into my equine course and so far it's going pretty good. I'm just annoyed that instead of doing behaviour, my lecturer said we were doing competition grooming this year.

[er-cryptid]

Patreon | Ko-fi  

[bored-vet-student]

Vet terms everyone else seemed to know 😱 -  Laminitis

When I first came to vet school lots of people (especially horsey people) would talk about their horses with Laminitis and I didn’t have a clue what it was. I sort of worked out it was to do with feet and was BAD and made appropriate noises when others discussed it. So you don’t be an awkward me here is an explanation of what laminitis actually is…

Laminitis

Laminitis is an equine disease that is caused by inflammation of the connecting bit between the bone and the hoof outer horn. It is a very painful and serious condition that causes lameness often on multiple limbs and if serious enough can lead to euthanasia.

Lamin (laminae) - itis (inflamation) = inflammation of the laminae, the connection between the bone of the hoof (distal phalanx) and the horn of the hoof (the keratinised bit you see on a horses hoof).

Understanding the anatomy of the hoof can be really useful to understand laminitis.

The distal phalanx (or the coffin bone or the pedal bone) is suspended in the hoof capsule and connected to the hoof wall (the horn). The horns surrounds the outside and bottom of the hoof and is made of keratinised epidermis growing down from the top of the hoof. The full weight of the horse travels down to the coffin bone and then needs to be transfered to the horn of the wall. This means there needs to be a super strong connection between the bone and the hoof.

The way to make this connection so strong is to interdigitat the horn and the dermis attached to the bone. This creates a really large surface area and a very strong connection. - think two yellow pages stuck together page by page = its really strong! This means the bone and the horn work together as a cohesive unit.

In laminitis the connection becomes inflammed - this lead to it weakening. It becomes very painful for the horse to stand on its foot/feet and the bone is no longer attached strongly to the horn. If the inflammation is bad enough then the bone will rotate inside the hoof capsule, eventually pointing through the base of the hoof. This can be grounds for euthanasia. 

predisposing factors

overfeeding/ grazing on lush pasture

metabolic/endocrine disorders - e.g equine cushings

sepiticaemia / toxaemia

stress / steriod treatment

increased weight bearing

past laminitis increases the risk of future laminitis occuring

clinical signs

pain, lameness and a reluctance to move

‘sawhorse’ stance - taking it’s weight off its front limbs (the front limbs are more commonly affected than the hind)

digital pulses

heat over hoof

[vykodlak]

commerson’s dolphin looks like malayan tapir looks like commerson’s dolphin

[ndiecity-deactivated20241101]

If you put either one of these guys in the others environment, they turn into the other guy

[appaloosa-jumper]

60 equestrian questions!

[thatawkwardequestrian-blog]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

1. dish face or roman nose? why?

2. mares or geldings? why?

3. Do you think warmbloods are over-rated?

4. Describe your dream horse.

5. What kind of bit do you use and why?

6. Stock horses or sport horses?

7. Favorite horse color?

8. Least favorite horse color?

9. Dressage or Jumping?

10. Favorite stock horse breed?

11. Favorite Hot-blooded breed?

12. Favorite cold-blooded breed?

13. Dapple grey or Fleabitten grey?

14. Most expensive piece of tack you own?

15. When did you start riding?

16. Leather or Nylon halters?

17. Apples or Carrots?

18. Chestnut or bay?

19. Palomino or Buckskin?

20. Lazy horse or Hot horse?

21. Have you ever been trail riding?

22. Have you ever had to put down a horse that you loved?

23. How many saddlepads do you have?

24. How many bridles do you have?

25. Favorite saddle brand?

26. Beige or White Breeches?

27. Least favorite discipline?

28. Do you own a horse?

29. Do you collect breyer horses?

30. Favorite color of saddle pad?

31.Private barn or Boarding stable?

32. Opinion on spoiled riders?

33. Have you ever ridden tackless?

34. Have you ever stood up on a horse?

35. Overo, Tobiano, or Tovero?

36. Favorite face markings(s)?

37. Why you started riding?

38. Does anyone in your family ride?

39. Have you ever owned a horse?

40. Something you want to improve on?

41. A bad habit you have?

42. A bad habit your horse has?

43. How high have you jumped?

44. Have you ever had a dressage lesson?

45. What really makes your horse spook?

46. Trail riding or ring work?

47. Indoor or Outdoor arena?

48. Colorful or plain saddle pads?

49. Do you like horses with blue eyes?

50. Have you ever gotten into a fight with your trainer?

51. Light bay or Dark bay horses?

52. What is your equestrian dream?

53. Long mane or Pulled mane?

54. Opinion on fake tails?

55. Least favorite thing about your barn?

56. Favorite thing about your barn?

57. Have you ever ridden a stallion?

58. socks or no socks on a horse?

59. Favorite horse names?

60. If you could ride any horse in the world, which one would it be? why?

[drferox]

Hi Doc! Love reading your blog, I found you first through the Lucifer story (reminded me of a friend of mine actually) and then again through your mermaid post and have been hanging around ever since. I looked thru your archive but didn't find this question so hopefully it hasn't been asked before: what is it about horse anatomy that makes their legs so (seemingly) fragile? You'd think being as big as they are, they'd be more all-around solid. Thanks for reading, have a good one!

The horse, Equus caballus, is one of my favorite arguments against Intelligent Design. I’ve spoken before about why I no longer see them, but even as a student I would wonder why and how this species existed when there were apparently so many things that could go wrong with its own anatomy, especially next to something tough like a trusty cow.

I don’t know how it’s possible to believe in a benevolent, loving, wise creator when creatures like the horse come to exist.

So I’m going to use your question as an excuse to write a post that had been on my mind for a while:

Things That Are Wrong With Horses

The basic structure of a horse has a few significant design flaws.

Cannot vomit. This means that anything which would make another species sick enough to vomit results in a horse getting s distended stomach and colic, where the stomach can rupture and the horse can die. Also means symptoms of illness are hidden longer

The large bowel (hind gut) of the horse is fricking huge, but can actually displace itself and bend around the wrong way, resulting in obstruction, colic and death without surgical intervention. This can commonly happen after exertion (splenic contraction) and giving birth. Colic due to nephrosplenic entrapment is particularly common after the horse has an adrenaline release, which causes the spleen to temporarily contract, and this seems like a poor design to risk death every time you spook or go for a fast run, especially in a species known for spooking and running fast.

Giving birth is a fast and explosive affair in the horse. The whole pushing business should be over and  done with in about 20 minutes, however this assumes that everything is lined up just right for a normal delivery. Foals are all long legs and necks, which are easy to get tangled or bent around the wrong way. A mare is strong enough to push her foal’s feet through her uterine wall, which is death all round.

Speaking of strength, sometimes horses will kick each other when they have attitude, and they can do so with enough strength to rupture each other’s spleens.

When galloping most horses, best studied in thoroughbreds because they are made to gallop on a regular basis, horses routinely bash their diaphragm with such force against their liver that their liver bruises.

Galloping also often makes their lungs bleed. That’s why racehorses have their head held up after a race, so you don’t see any blood come out their nose and disqualify them. Even horses that you don’t see bleed have evidence of pulmonary bleeding after a gallop if you scope them.

Their leg bones are actually pretty damn tough, but the ends are spindly little things compared to the mass of musculature up top. Their legs are subjected to huge biomechanical forces when a horse runs which can often subject them to ligament damage and lameness. A fractured leg bone can heal like any other, but if a horse can’t bear weight evenly on all four legs for an extended period of time (eg after a fracture) then they are at risk of laminitis.

Laminitis can cause the hoof to slough off. (Aaargh!) They can also get laminitis from eating a bit too well.

Speaking of eating, they can also get colic (and risk death) from eating not enough fiber or the wrong sort of plants or from eating too much dirt.

Oh, and just to mess with you, horses have a space in their head called a guttural pouch which seems to exist for no other reason as far as I can tell (okay, maybe it’s about heat regulation) other than to get fungal infections that eat through the exposed artery and cause the horse to die from blood loss through it’s nose.

And Bonus: Exquisite sensitivity to tetanus and vulnerability to Hendravirus

This list is by no means complete. I haven’t even touched on their anesthetics or drug reactions, but it’s a simple start.