Animals understand play. Although not sure where the ball is.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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You know where the balls are ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
"He's running so slow...."
1 hour later
"How can he still be running like that?"
Run for fun? What the hell kinda fun is that?!
Here's to ya' blacksmith 🥃
Jogging is practice for how humans killed pretty much all the megafauna in the world: exhaustion hunting.
Also fire probably. Lots and lots of fire
Pointy sticks.
damn those pointy sticks said the animal
I think scaring them over Cliff sides came into okay as well, though you aren't wrong.
I mean, if animals engage in pretend fights and other forms of play, it seems that they can on some level grasp the idea of practicing or doing something for fun.
I mean, the ability to run long distances without tiring is kind of what makes humans an apex predator. We can out-endurance just about every other creature. Most ancient human hunting techniques involved just wounding an animal, and then literally chasing it until it got too tired to keep going.
Wolves are very similar, which is what made us such natural hunting companions. The co-evolution of humans and dogs is an extremely interesting rabbit hole, if anyone is looking for one.
All that to say, the wolf would understand the need to run more than just about any other animal. A bear would work better here. A wolf would just see us running and think 'game recognizes game', just like they already did eons ago :3
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Other animals get zoomies too.
Dogs do love a good jog though. Give that good boi a bit of kibble and then see how he feels.
I also get confused when I see people jogging, don't they know lounging around eating snacks is way more fun?
So apex that most of us outsource our hunting and farming, which makes us fat and slow unless we purposefully burn energy for no other purpose than to burn it.
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So this is pretty neat:
Humans aren't good at running fast, but we are good at running for a long time for long distances, so it's thought that we would just run after things until they got tired.
So like you know how people in horror movies would run and then look over their shoulder and Jason is somehow still there?
Funny enough there is another animal I know that can sweat, have more endurance than humans, and much faster than humans. Horses.
Imagine you fear getting caught by a horse or a human and then suddenly a human riding a horse shows up.
humans can beat a horse in a marathon!
That's pretty cool. However, no human has ever won by more than 15min, and every horse has a 15min delay built into their times. So even the biggest winning margin of nearly 11 minutes would have lost to the horse if they had started at the same time.
The horses also all had humans on their backs. To my knowledge, none of the humans had horses on their backs.
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This study analyzes historical results of three different man versus horse races (in Wales, in Virginia, and in California). The data shows that human performance decreases with temperature, but less so than horses, so that 30°C is approximately where the best humans can start outperforming the best horses that year.
I would think that even with 15 minutes of intermittent pauses/checks, that time is still productive for cooling the animal and would add less than 15 minutes to the theoretical total if they were allowed to run the whole time.
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Back in my reddit days I wrote a long comment about the fact that zombies are scary because they are the ultimate persistence hunters.
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I can't see why anyone would down vote
“I don’t know why they’re running, but let’s chase them!”
I cannot stop laughing 😂
Personally I think humans run because they are a species with enough cognitive abilities to be masochists
It's because we grew out of having to do physical work 8-12 hours every day just to stay alive.
I actually love physical work! I just hate running 😆
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