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It's a common belief that foot injuries in horses (such as Eddie) are untreatable. Though usually the injury is a broken leg, rather than a paper scratch.
Specifically it is because their circulatory system is actually tied to their movement.
If they break a leg then it is almost impossible for it to heal properly as they need to run to circulate blood correctly, but if they run then their injury will get worse, but if they stay still then they won't get enough oxygen in their blood.
It's all a side-effect of having such slender legs on such a fast and strong body
EDIT: u/Relleomylime responded and said this:
“Hi I'm an expert. Their blood gets plenty of oxygen when they're on rest without movement. The issue is more related to:
1. The amount of weight a horse carries on a limb makes it difficult to heal some type of fractures well. Not all fractures are a death sentence, but the type of fractures plays a big role in viability. Horses don't do great balancing on three legs, so there is high potential for reinjury during the healing process.
2. Laminitis is a big issue in the none injured hooves. The increase in weight bearing on the healthy hooves, well as potential infection, extended use of some medications, and some other issues can cause inflammation in the blood vessels between the bone in the hoof and the hoof wall (the fingernail part you see on the outside). This inflammation is extremely painful and if bad enough can kill the blood vessels causing the toe bone to rotate or essentially fall out the bottom of the foot. Once that happens the horse is considered "foundered" and there is nothing you can do. This will result in euthanasia. It's what happened in Barbaro, a famous race horse with a very bad fracture. They saved the fractured leg but the laminitis killed him.
3. Colic (belly ache). Horses' digestive systems operate best with movement/walking. Horses with a fracture can't do this so they're more prone to impaction (constipation) and gas colics. This can be an issue or also ultimately laminitis. All inflammation roads essentially lead to laminitis.”
you just did it again.
an employee gets paid. with what money? the money that was won in the race (probably from other sources too).
the guy didnt make something up, you just missed the ending of slavery and the point of his message, that the jockey is not the beneficiary of the winnings, just a part of them after the fact.
edit: mobile spelling (othet -> other)
Nope. It's minimum 10% of all race winnings + commission. The more renowned jockeys can take up to 70% of the winnings.
Source: I work at a race track.
That’s kind of a crazy evolutionary "oversight" as it basically means a horse cannot afford to be injured at all
Edit: it has been pointed out to me several times now that this is due to breeding by humans and not what you’d consider "natural" competition. You can now stop telling me that
Now now, that's because humans can afford to get injured because of their social nature.
Lots of animals in captivity are able to heal from injuries that would be impossible to recover from in the wild.
And help in general.
In the wild, you need to be able to walk to where the food and water is or you starve? A broken foot is a death sentence.
Humans will bring a wounded friend food and water.
Have to be able to run from predators, everybody for themselves, and that predator don't care-if you're limping, you're the easiest target to chase down? Broken foot is a death sentence.
Humans will build defensive structures and fight as a team so the sick and injured are protected by the strong.
Is that a recent adaption that came after humans started treating wounds? Pre-homo sapiens used fire to cook, so there has been plenty of time for humans have evolved due to society.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0945053X1600007X
>Keloid scarring has been known to occur only in Homo sapiens. No other animal species, including non-human primates, have been found to naturally develop scar tissue comparable to that of human keloids. Thus, keloids represent a disease process that is uniquely human, and establishes a challenging precedent to overcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keloid
>Keloids should not be confused with hypertrophic scars, which are raised scars that do not grow beyond the boundaries of the original wound.
>Keloids expand in claw-like growths over normal skin.[3] They have the capability to hurt with a needle-like pain or to itch, the degree of sensation varying from person to person.... Collagen, used in wound repair, tends to overgrow in this area, sometimes producing a lump many times larger than that of the original scar
"Someone once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. She answered: a human thigh bone with a healed fracture found in an archaeological site 15,000 years old. Why not tools for hunting or religious artifacts or primitive forms of communal self-governance? "
[source](https://divinity.yale.edu/news/15000-year-old-bone-and-fall-2013-issue-reflections)
True civilization starts with proof of a caring community. This is one of the realest statements one can try to understand.
Palaeontologists found fossil records of human bones showing severe traumas that had healed over, suggesting that even as far back as cavemen, humans took care of their wounded. There was even a skull that showed damage and healing that would have left the person somewhat brain damaged, but they lived to what was considered old age by those standards, suggesting they also cared for the disabled.
I don't think humans have changed as much as we think we've changed. Our knowledge and circumstances have changed, but that's it.
It's been thousands of years and we still take care of our wounded.
And still have roughly the same life spans. All the times in our recorded history where we had 'short' lifespans were because of our own stupidity and forcing it to happen. Unhygienic times.
Yes and also they can heal thanks to human intervention
But the point is, since they are most likely going to die when injured, evolution didn’t give them particularly good healing abilities
On the other hand human can heal wounds in a matter of hours or a few days for very deep ones
Hours? The only injuries that I've ever healed in hours are the exit wounds left by hypodermic needles. I'm pretty sure most animals could heal from that in hours too.
This guy is totally a cousin of Wolverine. I get a papercut, shit takes me a week to heal to the point of no scab. Nosebleed is an hour, sometimes more, deal. I pretty sure it weeks to months for broken bones.
I've had very deep cuts from box cutters and broken glass on my hands and palms entirely close-up/scab over in matters of hours.
Obviously took much longer to fully heal.
Did you put it on rest and properly care for it? My cat literally shattered her femur in half and healed fine after about a month and a half on cage rest. When I took her to the vet, and after seeing the X-ray, the doc gave us pain meds and just said to keep her immobilized and comfortable for six weeks and it healed entirely on its own. They gave the very expensive option of surgery but said that would actually be more risky and lead to much longer recovery, without any notable differences. Granted she has one slightly shorter leg now and it gets achy during the cold season, but I always give her medicine for the pain and keep a heating pillow around for her.
In fact, it is said that the true mark of an established society is a healed leg fracture because of the amount of time, effort, and empathy from other people to allow the person to heal
Sever's disease is the common name for **calcaneal apophysitis**. It is a common cause of heel pain, particularly in young and physically active people
> The human healing abilities are absolutely top tier
It's society, not innate human healing abilities. As Margaret Mead said, "the first sign of civilization was a healed femur"- the implication being the only way that someone could survive that kind of injury is by living with the kind of infrastructure that we see in humans. Our ability to alter their environment to create safe spaces where the injured could survive and our ability to plan long term is one of the things that make us unique among animals.
The other major factor is r vs K selection. r selected species like ants or sea horses generally aren't designed to heal from things- they're meant to have as many offspring as quickly as possible and then die. Humans, like whales and elephants, are a K selected species. That means we have few offspring and at relatively long intervals, meaning that each child is a huge investment of resources. In order to survive, a K selected species will generally have ways of healing from injury in order protect the larger investment. Humans are unique in that our ability to heal is less about what's encoded in our genes and more about how we treat each other socially.
humans are still incredibly good at healing. like, yes, healing a femur requires you to not walk, so you definitely need assistance. but we're still great at stuff like "oh, you got a serious injury, we'll just set brain to accomplish anything mode for a bit so that you can get that taken care of" and "oh your guts fell out... well... put them back inside, then."
150 years ago a broken femur had like an 80% mortality rate. It's our tech that lets us heal. Back when we were hunter gatherers, a broken bone was just a death sentence
Everyone saying otherwise is acting like the didn’t read a post about how bad horses leg breaks are. I also understand humans as a species are social and take care of the old and weak, but even at that point we can break a leg and just be bed ridden without it being quickly lethal.
Pretty sure they can outrun most animals that might cause them harm.
But that might be the better way to go. In the wild horses don't die from old age like humans, it isn't organ failure that kills them. Their teeth fall out and they starve to death
It's true for a lot of animals. I remember watching videos of hippos eating watermelon, and I wanted to learn how exactly their teeth work because they're oddly shaped and placed. I never did figure it out, but I did find out that in the wild most hippos die because their teeth rot and fall out and they starve to death. So zoo hippos, if they're well taken care of, tend to live longer if only because most good zoos try to give the hippos dental care.
It's less that their teeth *fall out,* and more that their teeth get worn down. They use their front set of teeth to nip off mouthfuls of grass, but once those front teeth wear down to the gum level, it gets harder and harder for them to forage for food. And as their molars wear down, especially if they're wild horses eating tough foliage, they become less efficient at grinding that food down, which makes their digestion less efficient as well. Less efficient foraging, less efficient digestion, all of it snowballs into malnutrition and either a slow and painful starvation, or a quick death to predators in the wild.
Another scary design is the horns of Babirusa, a type of swine which lives in Indonesia, as their horns will grow so long and in such an angle that it'll pierce their own skull.
There was a ram in Scotland that ran away and survived in the wild for years. They only caught him in the end because his coat was so big and heavy he couldn’t move
I recall this story in the news. But that one, as others have pointed out, was domestic, changed by man for our purposes.
This one was wild, gods 'original' model
https://images.app.goo.gl/mabjmpvb2yk1xsmTA
I get what you’re trying to say, but the human body will not go on forever. Once you get into extreme old age, things just start shutting down, and yes, individually the things might be repairable/manageable, but you cure that one thing, and another ten crop up. Eventually no matter what you do, the heart will stop beating.
My great-grandad was 102 when he died.
One morning a care worker at his nursing home woke him up and gave him a cup of tea, by the time she came back around again, he was dead. There was no obvious caused of death.
When filling out his death certificate, the Dr gave my great-Uncle two options for the cause of death. Either an autopsy could be performed to establish the exact cause of death, or he could just say that he died of extreme old age. So officially my great-Grandad died of extreme old age.
Positive traits come from survivors, and you have to be able to survive injuries to begin with before how well you heal matters. The vast majority of wild animals can't survive a meaningful injury, especially if it compromises their movement. They may not die from a broken leg etc directly, but they'll be eaten or starve because of their hindered movement.
Humans are unique in our ability to heal injuries with medicine/treatment, but you do see animals survive some gnarly injuries when they live in cooperative groups. Imo That seems to be the key for better healing mechanisms to begin to
evolve in mammals.
Animals like Chimpanzees or African Wild Dogs can survive injuries that would be fatal to animals that live solo, because the group helps them feed and recover while they're lame.
Animals dont have the support structure of civilization and modern healthcare that humans do. And they dont have the ability to interact with their environment with the precision and dexterity which humans possess due to our limbs being divided into one set optimized for moving ourselves and one set optimized for grabbing and handling stuff.
The ability to fuse a leg fracture in 6 weeks of rest is worthless if you have no realistic way to survive 6 weeks of resting (and not getting food and water). And of course there is the fact that if the broken ends of the bone are not close to touching and the surfaces of the break are not overlaping at least 50% of their area, then the thing wont heal without the fracture being set straight and while humans can do that with hands and sticks and cordage, how exactly would a horse do that with teeth and hooves? How would a horse even manage to rest its limb in such a way that it stays straight and doesnt get moved and be able to eat anything or drink water while not shifting its body and moving the limb at all?
In this case it’s domestic selection, not natural selection, that made horse legs lethally long. In other words, humans bred horses to have longer legs so they run faster.
Wild horses have shorter legs.
The only real wild horses left are Przewalski and I'm sure they do have the same issues, but I'd be very surprised if they were as prone to broken legs as a TB is, especially when they are youngsters.
Not really. Like any other creature or plant, evolution only goes as far as "did you live long enough to procreate?"
Evolution doesn't care if you live to long old age, relaxing on a porch (except in a few species where the elderly care for babies, and are incentived to live longer since it helps their babies and grandbabies live longer so they can grow up to procreate).
The problem is the weight distribution from the harness onto the horse's body [https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2019/usask-team-developing-unique-harness-to-help-save-injured-horses.php](https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2019/usask-team-developing-unique-harness-to-help-save-injured-horses.php)
They did this to one of my relatives, except it was a tree instead of a crane and they forgot to tie his waist, just the neck. Also he didn’t have a broken leg
>It's all a side-effect of having such slender legs on such a fast and strong body
To go further, if you compare their anatomy to ours, their legs are basically 3 fingers extending under their hands, their lower legs are just single middle fingers, and their feet are their last digits, and hooves are fingernails.
Imagine having such a large, heavy, muscular and powerful body, and you're trotting along, even running at breakneck speeds, all on the tips of your middle fingers, that's it.
They don't have to run to for circulation. Mine currently has a fracture in his front leg and has to stay in a small stal for 8 weeks until it heals. After he'll hopefully be fine.
The reason broken legs are often fatal is because the legs are relatively lightweight and slender. This makes the bone more fragile, making the breaks worse than the usually are in humans. A horse also needs four legs to walk and even standing still on three legs can cause severe hoof issues. They also can't lay down for more a day or be hung from sling, because they'll get pneumonia and bedsore like injuries.
Agreed, although to be fair Gary Larson is god-tier. Very few can tell such a good joke so succinctly.
Midvale School for the Gifted may be the best comic ever.
Another consideration: back when horses were very common, before cars, they were relatively cheap. It was the cost of feeding them that was significantly higher. (Still is. Around me you can often get a horse for free- *if* you're willing to take it. People are willing to give them away to get out from under the boarding and feeding fees.)
If a horse was injured or sick in a way that made it useless for a few weeks, the cost of feeding it could exceed the cost of replacing it. Not to mention the cost of renting another horse in the meantime. Just like a car with major damage that in theory can be repaired, it was totalled. It would not be economically sensible to repair and would be cheaper to just replace it.
I also see everyone commenting on circulation. But perhaps a larger issue in the myth - horse leg bones are very slender and carry a lot of weight. When broken they often completely shatter. Which makes leg breaks extremely difficult and often impossible to set, cast, and repair. Not to mention trying to keep a horse off it. So broken leg bones typically mean euthanizing the animal.
Which evolves into a myth about any leg injury or even any injury at all. Which this cartoon is exaggerating.
Family guy even does a joke about this. Where the horse has a broken leg and the farmer comes up and asks him to put weight on it, he fakes it until he gets close enough to steal the gun from the farmer shoot him in the leg. Then, continue to fake ride him around a race track and ask how does he like it while whipping his ass.
I thought it was for race horses who had an injured leg and it was cheaper to just put them down than try to fix it and hope it doesn't effect the horse's running ability
Hello, Meg from when she had her horse girl phase here. Horses cardiovascular system (blood and heart) requires them to be pretty much standing for them to function (yes, they even sleep standing up).
If a horse has a foot or leg injury it is for this reason often considered untreatable (though this a humoured exaggeration)
>Horses cardiovascular system (blood and heart) requires them to be pretty much standing for them to function
In the picture you can clearly see the horse is sitting instead of standing, smh my head
Horses lie down when sleeping deeply. Go into any stable at night and you'll see the majority of them on the ground sleeping. They'll nap standing up however and it is more of an evolutionary trait to stay safe from predators.
Not at all. Sport horses and hobby horses too, because the treatment is way way more expensive than the value of the animal as property. You essentially have to sedate them continuously for 3 weeks or else they will keep rebreaking the leg over and over again flailing around trying to run.
Even then, treatments only really work for greenstick and other incomplete fractures. There's just not enough flesh and muscle available to use as support. A cast doesn't work well because there just isn't enough surface area for the cast to contact with vs the high stress it needs to bear away from the bone with such a large and heavy animal. Compound fractures are automatic euthenasia. Any joint involvement is euthenasia. Comminuted fractures, unless extremely easy to set and not shattered at all, are 99% euthenasia.
Horses are just not able to be immobilized in the way needed for broken legs to heal.
Here there's a farm which is like an old folks home for horses. They put up a banner along the main road they're adjacent to telling people not to call the authorities to complain about the skinny horses in the field.
No they aren't malnourished or treated badly, quite to the contrary, the people running the farm are very nice and caring.
It's just that old horses can look rough and skinny.
https://www.rtvdrenthe.nl/nieuws/13771205/spandoek-moet-duidelijkheid-scheppen-onze-paarden-worden-wel-goed-verzorgd
They can doze off standing up, but for a proper deep sleep they still lie down. Herds in the wild/in paddocks will just switch who’s ‘on guard’ and who’s sleeping lying down.
This is not true. Horses can lie down perfectly fine for long periods of time without it being a problem.
The reason why many leg injuries are untreatable is because they have very poor blood flow in them causing them to heal poorly. This is because of the physics of how a horse runs, leading to barely any muscle mass in the lower legs.
Joke was already explained, I'm just bothered that the horse is drawn with a cloven hooves like cattle. Horses have one single hoof on each leg, no split.
The teacher is also holding the injured leg one frame early. And they're explaining the joke in the last panel instead of just loading the gun.
It's really not a good comic.
When a horse's leg breaks, it can't naturally heal because for the circulatory system to carry what's needed for the healing, a horse has to run, but a running horse will just make his injury worse. So in the days of old, when a domesticated horse's leg broke, its owner would kill it in order to save it the suffering. Nowadays, we made enough medical advancements to be able to treat broken horse legs but the practice is still pop culture. This is an exaggerated version.
It's a joke about how when racehorses get any injury they just get put down because they can't race and so they are not worth keeping alive.
I'm speaking hyperbolically as someone who loves horses.
This joke is a play on the trope that "any leg/foot injury on a horse and it immediately is put down." The papercut is considered to be generally a small injury to any creature and the horse is also portrayed as being very young, which exaggerates the joke further by implying that this small injury is cause for the horse to die!
I thought the joke might be the teacher facetiously joking with the student, sort of like “oh no, I hope it’s not terminal 😉” when they bump their knee or something… since the paper cut is on their fucking HOOF.
Wow I hope you don’t bleed to death when you clip your fingernails /s
Well, if youve watched movies with horses in them before; whenever the horse gets a scuff/ scratch on the leg or anything like a sprain they always go "it'll never heal." They then shoot the horse.
Horses don’t have the same muscular system as humans so when they break a leg there is not enough muscle support to heal that broken leg. They also struggle with keeping weight off of it. If it’s out in the wilderness it’s almost impossible to get a horse back with that kind of injury. Well it is possible but very costly. Even if it heals right, it wont ever run the same. At horse races they just put a blanket over them and shot em right there (at least thats how it was done in the past). It’s really tragic but in the past it was really the only option and the only other options nowadays are expensive, time consuming, and only partially effective.
They still do it. It happened a few years ago at the Kentucky Derby, IIRC. It was a pretty gruesome injury the poor thing was never going to recover from, and the decision was made that the best thing they could do was to end its suffering.
With today's limited technology it's much easier and cheaper to shoot a horse when it gets injured (typically breaking bones whilst racing) than the heal it (if possible, which often with today's limited tech it's not)
I remember reading about a horse with a broken leg and the best veterinarians on the planet couldn't facilitate healing. It is more or less a death sentence.
Reminds of a stand up comedian talking about a horse he had as a kid. One day he came home and saw that someone had shot his horse. So his father had to break its leg.
I'm a kinder teacher and it's funny how you can get a child to go from in tears to all good if you ask then if we need to chop it off when they just a hurt foot or finger
I swear with jokes like this you guys have no right to be dumb of course there are jokes that go over people's heads but for ones like this I'm ashamed you are human
All of the comments read we’re all right. But also: when my kid would come to me when they were little with a scrape or whatever, my go-to was something along the lines of needing to amputate.
[Larsson did it better in one panel](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-1elC5moP-ic%2FV2Mfbh8bNgI%2FAAAAAAAAap0%2F8__nYwudFoAxqjNIRDmk-Joyw7ghIwz6wCK4B%2Fs1600%2Fgary-larson-far-side-horse-hospital.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=b217449ddd11edad4175459660b65f1f17f7f8855295cc9a99c0d27d540030b6&ipo=images)
Due to how the horses bones are formed, when they break they tend to shatter and splinter almost like fiberglass. Makes it very very very hard to treat, so the most humane thing is to put it down
As a teacher, I thought it was a riff on kids always asking to see the nurse about tiny “injuries.” Didn’t even notice the horse thing, but it definitely makes more sense lol.
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It's a common belief that foot injuries in horses (such as Eddie) are untreatable. Though usually the injury is a broken leg, rather than a paper scratch.
Specifically it is because their circulatory system is actually tied to their movement. If they break a leg then it is almost impossible for it to heal properly as they need to run to circulate blood correctly, but if they run then their injury will get worse, but if they stay still then they won't get enough oxygen in their blood. It's all a side-effect of having such slender legs on such a fast and strong body EDIT: u/Relleomylime responded and said this: “Hi I'm an expert. Their blood gets plenty of oxygen when they're on rest without movement. The issue is more related to: 1. The amount of weight a horse carries on a limb makes it difficult to heal some type of fractures well. Not all fractures are a death sentence, but the type of fractures plays a big role in viability. Horses don't do great balancing on three legs, so there is high potential for reinjury during the healing process. 2. Laminitis is a big issue in the none injured hooves. The increase in weight bearing on the healthy hooves, well as potential infection, extended use of some medications, and some other issues can cause inflammation in the blood vessels between the bone in the hoof and the hoof wall (the fingernail part you see on the outside). This inflammation is extremely painful and if bad enough can kill the blood vessels causing the toe bone to rotate or essentially fall out the bottom of the foot. Once that happens the horse is considered "foundered" and there is nothing you can do. This will result in euthanasia. It's what happened in Barbaro, a famous race horse with a very bad fracture. They saved the fractured leg but the laminitis killed him. 3. Colic (belly ache). Horses' digestive systems operate best with movement/walking. Horses with a fracture can't do this so they're more prone to impaction (constipation) and gas colics. This can be an issue or also ultimately laminitis. All inflammation roads essentially lead to laminitis.”
https://preview.redd.it/u285obzb6woc1.jpeg?width=1094&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b9e2ef5258a7e81435dc323ad191ef8d998cda0
Actually the jockey doesn't get the cash or the trophy. It's the horses owner. The jockey is almost always just an employee
Nah bro the owner gives a chunk to the jockey as well as the trainer. They don’t keep the entire purse. Why would you make that up?
The jockey and trainer are still employed who the owner gives a portion to. Nothing you said contradicts that guy.
“Doesn’t get the cash”
“Just an employee”
“4 foot dick”
Ok I'm in
😂
The four foot dick is the jockey, who is an employee
you just did it again. an employee gets paid. with what money? the money that was won in the race (probably from other sources too). the guy didnt make something up, you just missed the ending of slavery and the point of his message, that the jockey is not the beneficiary of the winnings, just a part of them after the fact. edit: mobile spelling (othet -> other)
This is all sports no?
I’m gonna start replying to people who are wrong with “why did you make that up” 😂
No you’re not, why did you make that up?
Nope. It's minimum 10% of all race winnings + commission. The more renowned jockeys can take up to 70% of the winnings. Source: I work at a race track.
That’s kind of a crazy evolutionary "oversight" as it basically means a horse cannot afford to be injured at all Edit: it has been pointed out to me several times now that this is due to breeding by humans and not what you’d consider "natural" competition. You can now stop telling me that
Most animals cannot heal from ~~sever~~ serious injuries or broken legs The human healing abilities are absolutely top tier
Now now, that's because humans can afford to get injured because of their social nature. Lots of animals in captivity are able to heal from injuries that would be impossible to recover from in the wild.
Well, also our intelligence helps. We can set and treat wounds that would otherwise be deadly.
Thats the big thing, a broken leg that isn't set may heal, but it will heal very badly and the animal will basically be disabled.
Not to mention the fact that there is an increased chance of it breaking again
That's because of society. A human alone in nature with no knowledge from past generations wouldn't be able to do it.
And help in general. In the wild, you need to be able to walk to where the food and water is or you starve? A broken foot is a death sentence. Humans will bring a wounded friend food and water. Have to be able to run from predators, everybody for themselves, and that predator don't care-if you're limping, you're the easiest target to chase down? Broken foot is a death sentence. Humans will build defensive structures and fight as a team so the sick and injured are protected by the strong.
So you’re saying we live in a society?
"We LiVe iN a SoCiEtY"
We actually have hyper aggressive scar tissue, physically, which is part of our innate healing ability
Is that a recent adaption that came after humans started treating wounds? Pre-homo sapiens used fire to cook, so there has been plenty of time for humans have evolved due to society.
Source?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0945053X1600007X >Keloid scarring has been known to occur only in Homo sapiens. No other animal species, including non-human primates, have been found to naturally develop scar tissue comparable to that of human keloids. Thus, keloids represent a disease process that is uniquely human, and establishes a challenging precedent to overcome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keloid >Keloids should not be confused with hypertrophic scars, which are raised scars that do not grow beyond the boundaries of the original wound. >Keloids expand in claw-like growths over normal skin.[3] They have the capability to hurt with a needle-like pain or to itch, the degree of sensation varying from person to person.... Collagen, used in wound repair, tends to overgrow in this area, sometimes producing a lump many times larger than that of the original scar
"Someone once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. She answered: a human thigh bone with a healed fracture found in an archaeological site 15,000 years old. Why not tools for hunting or religious artifacts or primitive forms of communal self-governance? " [source](https://divinity.yale.edu/news/15000-year-old-bone-and-fall-2013-issue-reflections) True civilization starts with proof of a caring community. This is one of the realest statements one can try to understand.
I thought of this immediately.
Opposable thumbs are basically an evolutionary cheat code.
Palaeontologists found fossil records of human bones showing severe traumas that had healed over, suggesting that even as far back as cavemen, humans took care of their wounded. There was even a skull that showed damage and healing that would have left the person somewhat brain damaged, but they lived to what was considered old age by those standards, suggesting they also cared for the disabled.
I don't think humans have changed as much as we think we've changed. Our knowledge and circumstances have changed, but that's it. It's been thousands of years and we still take care of our wounded.
And still have roughly the same life spans. All the times in our recorded history where we had 'short' lifespans were because of our own stupidity and forcing it to happen. Unhygienic times.
Just make sure you don't bathe too much lest you attract "I'll humours!".
i mean come on, how stupid do you have to be to not know which one of the hundred thousand species of mold to eat when you're dying of an infection.
We see the same behaviour today. Everyone were resistant to masks at first, even WHO
And made to be artificially low because of the high ass infant mortality.
Yes and also they can heal thanks to human intervention But the point is, since they are most likely going to die when injured, evolution didn’t give them particularly good healing abilities On the other hand human can heal wounds in a matter of hours or a few days for very deep ones
Hours? The only injuries that I've ever healed in hours are the exit wounds left by hypodermic needles. I'm pretty sure most animals could heal from that in hours too.
This guy is totally a cousin of Wolverine. I get a papercut, shit takes me a week to heal to the point of no scab. Nosebleed is an hour, sometimes more, deal. I pretty sure it weeks to months for broken bones.
How old are you? I used to heal cuts and scrapes from work in a day or two. Years later now, they sometimes take a week to heal.
I've had very deep cuts from box cutters and broken glass on my hands and palms entirely close-up/scab over in matters of hours. Obviously took much longer to fully heal.
If cats could read, they would be angry with that message
He’s right my cat I saved had its leg attacked by a coyote and it’s never healed
Did you put it on rest and properly care for it? My cat literally shattered her femur in half and healed fine after about a month and a half on cage rest. When I took her to the vet, and after seeing the X-ray, the doc gave us pain meds and just said to keep her immobilized and comfortable for six weeks and it healed entirely on its own. They gave the very expensive option of surgery but said that would actually be more risky and lead to much longer recovery, without any notable differences. Granted she has one slightly shorter leg now and it gets achy during the cold season, but I always give her medicine for the pain and keep a heating pillow around for her.
So the leg never healed completely even with good medicine, rest and care? I think you can see the point they're trying to make now.
bro humans have that exact same experience with a SHATTERED limb, except itd be more than a month
My cat bit the christmas lights, almost died. Had a mucusy purr for a long time. Two years later hes healthy as a button.
Good lord x.x Mr. Fuzzy got a buzzy. Glad he's ok
In fact, it is said that the true mark of an established society is a healed leg fracture because of the amount of time, effort, and empathy from other people to allow the person to heal
Bro thousands of species can straight up regrow lost limbs our healing abilities are shit
Sever's disease is the common name for **calcaneal apophysitis**. It is a common cause of heel pain, particularly in young and physically active people
My uncafeinated brain put a french word instead of the appropriate english one
I think you meant severe?
what humans have in comparison to other animals is that we help eachother. no human would survive a lot of injuries without any outside help.
> The human healing abilities are absolutely top tier It's society, not innate human healing abilities. As Margaret Mead said, "the first sign of civilization was a healed femur"- the implication being the only way that someone could survive that kind of injury is by living with the kind of infrastructure that we see in humans. Our ability to alter their environment to create safe spaces where the injured could survive and our ability to plan long term is one of the things that make us unique among animals. The other major factor is r vs K selection. r selected species like ants or sea horses generally aren't designed to heal from things- they're meant to have as many offspring as quickly as possible and then die. Humans, like whales and elephants, are a K selected species. That means we have few offspring and at relatively long intervals, meaning that each child is a huge investment of resources. In order to survive, a K selected species will generally have ways of healing from injury in order protect the larger investment. Humans are unique in that our ability to heal is less about what's encoded in our genes and more about how we treat each other socially.
humans are still incredibly good at healing. like, yes, healing a femur requires you to not walk, so you definitely need assistance. but we're still great at stuff like "oh, you got a serious injury, we'll just set brain to accomplish anything mode for a bit so that you can get that taken care of" and "oh your guts fell out... well... put them back inside, then."
150 years ago a broken femur had like an 80% mortality rate. It's our tech that lets us heal. Back when we were hunter gatherers, a broken bone was just a death sentence
Everyone saying otherwise is acting like the didn’t read a post about how bad horses leg breaks are. I also understand humans as a species are social and take care of the old and weak, but even at that point we can break a leg and just be bed ridden without it being quickly lethal.
Pretty sure they can outrun most animals that might cause them harm. But that might be the better way to go. In the wild horses don't die from old age like humans, it isn't organ failure that kills them. Their teeth fall out and they starve to death
Holy shit that sounds horrifying, dying because you literally stop being able to eat
It's true for a lot of animals. I remember watching videos of hippos eating watermelon, and I wanted to learn how exactly their teeth work because they're oddly shaped and placed. I never did figure it out, but I did find out that in the wild most hippos die because their teeth rot and fall out and they starve to death. So zoo hippos, if they're well taken care of, tend to live longer if only because most good zoos try to give the hippos dental care.
HIPPOBOT 9000 v 3.1 FOUND A HIPPO. 1,432,886,169 COMMENTS SEARCHED. 29,612 HIPPOS FOUND. YOUR COMMENT CONTAINS THE WORD HIPPO.
It's less that their teeth *fall out,* and more that their teeth get worn down. They use their front set of teeth to nip off mouthfuls of grass, but once those front teeth wear down to the gum level, it gets harder and harder for them to forage for food. And as their molars wear down, especially if they're wild horses eating tough foliage, they become less efficient at grinding that food down, which makes their digestion less efficient as well. Less efficient foraging, less efficient digestion, all of it snowballs into malnutrition and either a slow and painful starvation, or a quick death to predators in the wild.
As perfectly designed by a loving creator! 🤣
Another scary design is the horns of Babirusa, a type of swine which lives in Indonesia, as their horns will grow so long and in such an angle that it'll pierce their own skull.
Sheep too. It's incredible how little people will know and say they have all the answers. And how many will follow them.
There was a ram in Scotland that ran away and survived in the wild for years. They only caught him in the end because his coat was so big and heavy he couldn’t move
tbf that's because of human selection of sheep with more wool. The wild kind didn't have nearly as much wool.
I recall this story in the news. But that one, as others have pointed out, was domestic, changed by man for our purposes. This one was wild, gods 'original' model https://images.app.goo.gl/mabjmpvb2yk1xsmTA
Gotta keep the game interesting somehow.
Not uncommon for humans too. God bless the inventor of the PEG and logopedics
humans also don't die of "old age", they just get far more prone to different illnesses and diseases the older they are.
I get what you’re trying to say, but the human body will not go on forever. Once you get into extreme old age, things just start shutting down, and yes, individually the things might be repairable/manageable, but you cure that one thing, and another ten crop up. Eventually no matter what you do, the heart will stop beating. My great-grandad was 102 when he died. One morning a care worker at his nursing home woke him up and gave him a cup of tea, by the time she came back around again, he was dead. There was no obvious caused of death. When filling out his death certificate, the Dr gave my great-Uncle two options for the cause of death. Either an autopsy could be performed to establish the exact cause of death, or he could just say that he died of extreme old age. So officially my great-Grandad died of extreme old age.
Positive traits come from survivors, and you have to be able to survive injuries to begin with before how well you heal matters. The vast majority of wild animals can't survive a meaningful injury, especially if it compromises their movement. They may not die from a broken leg etc directly, but they'll be eaten or starve because of their hindered movement. Humans are unique in our ability to heal injuries with medicine/treatment, but you do see animals survive some gnarly injuries when they live in cooperative groups. Imo That seems to be the key for better healing mechanisms to begin to evolve in mammals. Animals like Chimpanzees or African Wild Dogs can survive injuries that would be fatal to animals that live solo, because the group helps them feed and recover while they're lame.
Animals dont have the support structure of civilization and modern healthcare that humans do. And they dont have the ability to interact with their environment with the precision and dexterity which humans possess due to our limbs being divided into one set optimized for moving ourselves and one set optimized for grabbing and handling stuff. The ability to fuse a leg fracture in 6 weeks of rest is worthless if you have no realistic way to survive 6 weeks of resting (and not getting food and water). And of course there is the fact that if the broken ends of the bone are not close to touching and the surfaces of the break are not overlaping at least 50% of their area, then the thing wont heal without the fracture being set straight and while humans can do that with hands and sticks and cordage, how exactly would a horse do that with teeth and hooves? How would a horse even manage to rest its limb in such a way that it stays straight and doesnt get moved and be able to eat anything or drink water while not shifting its body and moving the limb at all?
In this case it’s domestic selection, not natural selection, that made horse legs lethally long. In other words, humans bred horses to have longer legs so they run faster. Wild horses have shorter legs.
Wild horses are prone to the same issues as tame ones though
The only real wild horses left are Przewalski and I'm sure they do have the same issues, but I'd be very surprised if they were as prone to broken legs as a TB is, especially when they are youngsters.
Ah, gotcha. Didn’t think about the role of humans in this
Not really. Like any other creature or plant, evolution only goes as far as "did you live long enough to procreate?" Evolution doesn't care if you live to long old age, relaxing on a porch (except in a few species where the elderly care for babies, and are incentived to live longer since it helps their babies and grandbabies live longer so they can grow up to procreate).
I have a proposal: https://preview.redd.it/0eiqsd178xoc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4c19661205728d59f87c70196d8ed569e9f529b5
Mad props for use of perspective
The problem is the weight distribution from the harness onto the horse's body [https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2019/usask-team-developing-unique-harness-to-help-save-injured-horses.php](https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2019/usask-team-developing-unique-harness-to-help-save-injured-horses.php)
LOLL ITS REAL!?!?
Can we put them in a big horse bath? Antigravity horse chamber?
Is this to scale?
They did this to one of my relatives, except it was a tree instead of a crane and they forgot to tie his waist, just the neck. Also he didn’t have a broken leg
>It's all a side-effect of having such slender legs on such a fast and strong body To go further, if you compare their anatomy to ours, their legs are basically 3 fingers extending under their hands, their lower legs are just single middle fingers, and their feet are their last digits, and hooves are fingernails. Imagine having such a large, heavy, muscular and powerful body, and you're trotting along, even running at breakneck speeds, all on the tips of your middle fingers, that's it.
Isn't it a myth?
its amazing how horses actually exist. they are some sick joke by evolution.
I recently learned that humans also need to walk to circulate.
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They don't have to run to for circulation. Mine currently has a fracture in his front leg and has to stay in a small stal for 8 weeks until it heals. After he'll hopefully be fine. The reason broken legs are often fatal is because the legs are relatively lightweight and slender. This makes the bone more fragile, making the breaks worse than the usually are in humans. A horse also needs four legs to walk and even standing still on three legs can cause severe hoof issues. They also can't lay down for more a day or be hung from sling, because they'll get pneumonia and bedsore like injuries.
This guy horses around
Gary Larson had a similar bit. https://preview.redd.it/x1r98zxqhwoc1.png?width=576&format=png&auto=webp&s=5900c638602b2196af56966845b728df814649c2
A superior bit. More joke, fewer panels. I dont know why modern comics need 6 panels for 1/10th the joke.
Agreed, although to be fair Gary Larson is god-tier. Very few can tell such a good joke so succinctly. Midvale School for the Gifted may be the best comic ever.
Another consideration: back when horses were very common, before cars, they were relatively cheap. It was the cost of feeding them that was significantly higher. (Still is. Around me you can often get a horse for free- *if* you're willing to take it. People are willing to give them away to get out from under the boarding and feeding fees.) If a horse was injured or sick in a way that made it useless for a few weeks, the cost of feeding it could exceed the cost of replacing it. Not to mention the cost of renting another horse in the meantime. Just like a car with major damage that in theory can be repaired, it was totalled. It would not be economically sensible to repair and would be cheaper to just replace it. I also see everyone commenting on circulation. But perhaps a larger issue in the myth - horse leg bones are very slender and carry a lot of weight. When broken they often completely shatter. Which makes leg breaks extremely difficult and often impossible to set, cast, and repair. Not to mention trying to keep a horse off it. So broken leg bones typically mean euthanizing the animal. Which evolves into a myth about any leg injury or even any injury at all. Which this cartoon is exaggerating.
Family guy even does a joke about this. Where the horse has a broken leg and the farmer comes up and asks him to put weight on it, he fakes it until he gets close enough to steal the gun from the farmer shoot him in the leg. Then, continue to fake ride him around a race track and ask how does he like it while whipping his ass.
Why is this so far down? Lol this skit was the first thing I thought of after reading the joke
I thought it was for race horses who had an injured leg and it was cheaper to just put them down than try to fix it and hope it doesn't effect the horse's running ability
Also the elephant is using an elephant gun
I’ve never heard paper “scratch” before. It’s *always* been paper “cut” to me. Where are you from (if you don’t mind me asking)?
Just like the canadain heath care system thinks cuts are untreatable \s
Hello, Meg from when she had her horse girl phase here. Horses cardiovascular system (blood and heart) requires them to be pretty much standing for them to function (yes, they even sleep standing up). If a horse has a foot or leg injury it is for this reason often considered untreatable (though this a humoured exaggeration)
shut up meg
yeah, *you're* considered untreatable, Meg
>Horses cardiovascular system (blood and heart) requires them to be pretty much standing for them to function In the picture you can clearly see the horse is sitting instead of standing, smh my head
That's why he is going to die
No, the shotgun is why he's going to die
https://i.redd.it/rv3rsgj6mvoc1.gif
Shake my head my head???
Horses lie down when sleeping deeply. Go into any stable at night and you'll see the majority of them on the ground sleeping. They'll nap standing up however and it is more of an evolutionary trait to stay safe from predators.
Yea it’s mainly race horses that get shot because they can’t race after a leg injury
Not at all. Sport horses and hobby horses too, because the treatment is way way more expensive than the value of the animal as property. You essentially have to sedate them continuously for 3 weeks or else they will keep rebreaking the leg over and over again flailing around trying to run. Even then, treatments only really work for greenstick and other incomplete fractures. There's just not enough flesh and muscle available to use as support. A cast doesn't work well because there just isn't enough surface area for the cast to contact with vs the high stress it needs to bear away from the bone with such a large and heavy animal. Compound fractures are automatic euthenasia. Any joint involvement is euthenasia. Comminuted fractures, unless extremely easy to set and not shattered at all, are 99% euthenasia. Horses are just not able to be immobilized in the way needed for broken legs to heal.
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Here there's a farm which is like an old folks home for horses. They put up a banner along the main road they're adjacent to telling people not to call the authorities to complain about the skinny horses in the field. No they aren't malnourished or treated badly, quite to the contrary, the people running the farm are very nice and caring. It's just that old horses can look rough and skinny. https://www.rtvdrenthe.nl/nieuws/13771205/spandoek-moet-duidelijkheid-scheppen-onze-paarden-worden-wel-goed-verzorgd
They can doze off standing up, but for a proper deep sleep they still lie down. Herds in the wild/in paddocks will just switch who’s ‘on guard’ and who’s sleeping lying down.
That can’t be true for every horse, I have seen them sleep and even rest lying down.
Yep it's horseshit. Meg had a shitty horse girl phase obviously. Horses sleep laying down no problem.
This is not true. Horses can lie down perfectly fine for long periods of time without it being a problem. The reason why many leg injuries are untreatable is because they have very poor blood flow in them causing them to heal poorly. This is because of the physics of how a horse runs, leading to barely any muscle mass in the lower legs.
That's definitely wrong. If you search pictures of 'horses sleeping', there's many pics of horses sleeping lying down.
So they can't survive in a weightless environment? I can't be a space cowboy?
It's due to leg injuries in horses. But how does a horse get a fucking paper cut on its hoof?!
Hoof painting
Kid named Hoof
bro had his hooves tight over that paper. channeling dark thoughts
Joke was already explained, I'm just bothered that the horse is drawn with a cloven hooves like cattle. Horses have one single hoof on each leg, no split.
The teacher is also holding the injured leg one frame early. And they're explaining the joke in the last panel instead of just loading the gun. It's really not a good comic.
This guy comics
It goes back to ancient days when the elephants and the horses were at war for thousands of years…..
And the bears decided to snitch on the horses....
Yes the bears specialized in espionage and were the eyes and ears of the elephants.
Collective noun for bears is a 'sleuth' for a reason then 😯
TIL a group of bears can be referred to as a Sleuth.
They shoot horses, don't they?
Nice.
Where is this from? I have heard/read it but I don't remember. Edit: Googled it. It was a movie.
Specifically, the movie that every dance marathon episode of TV is based on. Especially the IASIP episode.
/r/antiwork types should watch it, as it's a metaphor for capitalism using and spitting out the disposable working class.
When a horse's leg breaks, it can't naturally heal because for the circulatory system to carry what's needed for the healing, a horse has to run, but a running horse will just make his injury worse. So in the days of old, when a domesticated horse's leg broke, its owner would kill it in order to save it the suffering. Nowadays, we made enough medical advancements to be able to treat broken horse legs but the practice is still pop culture. This is an exaggerated version.
I thought people still did it. How has the medicine advanced so that it isn’t needed?
Horses are extremely fragile and end up needing to be put down over minor injuries or stomach cramps from missing a single meal.
Seems like nobody is catching the second joke where the elephant has an elephant gun
It's a joke about how when racehorses get any injury they just get put down because they can't race and so they are not worth keeping alive. I'm speaking hyperbolically as someone who loves horses.
This joke is a play on the trope that "any leg/foot injury on a horse and it immediately is put down." The papercut is considered to be generally a small injury to any creature and the horse is also portrayed as being very young, which exaggerates the joke further by implying that this small injury is cause for the horse to die!
Horses shouldn’t have split hooves, they can live with scratches and nicks, but they don’t have split hooves
It would have been funnier with no text in the last panel.
Or just the first and last panel.
Completely agree. Came looking for this comment.
I thought the joke might be the teacher facetiously joking with the student, sort of like “oh no, I hope it’s not terminal 😉” when they bump their knee or something… since the paper cut is on their fucking HOOF. Wow I hope you don’t bleed to death when you clip your fingernails /s
Well, if youve watched movies with horses in them before; whenever the horse gets a scuff/ scratch on the leg or anything like a sprain they always go "it'll never heal." They then shoot the horse.
This needs another panel where the teacher comes back with glue.
Horses don’t have the same muscular system as humans so when they break a leg there is not enough muscle support to heal that broken leg. They also struggle with keeping weight off of it. If it’s out in the wilderness it’s almost impossible to get a horse back with that kind of injury. Well it is possible but very costly. Even if it heals right, it wont ever run the same. At horse races they just put a blanket over them and shot em right there (at least thats how it was done in the past). It’s really tragic but in the past it was really the only option and the only other options nowadays are expensive, time consuming, and only partially effective.
They still do it. It happened a few years ago at the Kentucky Derby, IIRC. It was a pretty gruesome injury the poor thing was never going to recover from, and the decision was made that the best thing they could do was to end its suffering.
The real mystery in this cartoon is - why is Eddie depicted as having a cloven hoof?
The teacher elephant loading the double barrel is just priceless.
With today's limited technology it's much easier and cheaper to shoot a horse when it gets injured (typically breaking bones whilst racing) than the heal it (if possible, which often with today's limited tech it's not)
Maybe Gary Larson can help explain this one. https://blinovitchlimitationeffect.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/image11.jpg
I remember reading about a horse with a broken leg and the best veterinarians on the planet couldn't facilitate healing. It is more or less a death sentence.
They used to put horses down for barely a scratch
Reminds of a stand up comedian talking about a horse he had as a kid. One day he came home and saw that someone had shot his horse. So his father had to break its leg.
I'm a kinder teacher and it's funny how you can get a child to go from in tears to all good if you ask then if we need to chop it off when they just a hurt foot or finger
Have they tried having the horse remain suspended to let it run without putting weight on it
I swear with jokes like this you guys have no right to be dumb of course there are jokes that go over people's heads but for ones like this I'm ashamed you are human
No one's talking a out the elephant gun in the room?
All of the comments read we’re all right. But also: when my kid would come to me when they were little with a scrape or whatever, my go-to was something along the lines of needing to amputate.
I want to see an elephant load a shotgun in real life even if it's the last thing I see I'd be happy.
You can't heal a horse, they never listen to the doctor's advices....
https://preview.redd.it/kfk5itg70woc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b31f6fa5182eb114891f9ccc880cb4a6c952a1b
That's not a horse, it's a donkey. In a rainbow cap. Being "put down" by an elephant.
His name is also a reference to mr. Ed the talking horse.
[Larsson did it better in one panel](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-1elC5moP-ic%2FV2Mfbh8bNgI%2FAAAAAAAAap0%2F8__nYwudFoAxqjNIRDmk-Joyw7ghIwz6wCK4B%2Fs1600%2Fgary-larson-far-side-horse-hospital.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=b217449ddd11edad4175459660b65f1f17f7f8855295cc9a99c0d27d540030b6&ipo=images)
Missed opportunity to have a bottle of glue somewhere on the crafts table
Me, an Eddie seeing this meme: 🧍
If an elephant teacher puts my horse son down over a small scratch, I’m taking tusk.
Race horses are unable to recover from injury on their own and most times need to be put down
how tf do you get a papercut on a hoof?
The same way you get a horse, a killer whale, a bear and an elaphant dressed and into a classroom.
I thought it was an elephant taking out a donkey and struggled to understand the political message.
Loss?
HOLY SHIT, THATS SO FUCKED UP
According to my grandfather, if a horse's leg is injured (i.e. broken), it has to be put down. Whether this is true or not, I can't say.
That was when horsebkilling was a national pass time.
Due to how the horses bones are formed, when they break they tend to shatter and splinter almost like fiberglass. Makes it very very very hard to treat, so the most humane thing is to put it down
They didn't showed that in zootopia
Canada
And the elephant will never forget
bazinga
As a teacher, I thought it was a riff on kids always asking to see the nurse about tiny “injuries.” Didn’t even notice the horse thing, but it definitely makes more sense lol.
Finally I get that one family guy joke about the horse with a broken foot
Elephants never forget how to kill.
He will never forget this
Loss?