Redditor /u/coffeeincluded:

Horses. Dear god, horses.

First off, horses are obligate nasal breathers. If our noses are stuffed up we can breathe through our mouths. If our pets' noses are stuffed up (except for rabbits, who are also really fragile but unlike horses aren't stuck having only one baby a year) they can breathe through their mouths. If a horse can't breathe through its nose, it will suffocate and die.

Horse eyes are exquisitely sensitive to steroids. Most animal eyes are, except for cows because cows are tanks, but horses are extremely sensitive. Corneal ulcers won't heal. They'll probably get worse. They might rupture and cause eyeball fluid to leak out.

If you overexert a horse they can get exertional rhabodmyolysis. Basically you overwork their muscles and they break down and die and release their contents. Super painful, and then you get scarifying and necrosis. But that's not the problem. See, when muscles die hey release myoglobin, which goes into the blood and is filtered by the kidneys. If you dump a bucket of myoglobin into the blood then it shreds the kidneys, causing acute renal failure. This kills the horse. People and other animals can get that too but in school we only talked about it in context of the horse.

Horses can only have one foal at a time. Their uterus simply can't support two foals. If a pregnant horse has twins you have to abort one or they'll both die and possibly kill the mother with them. A lot of this has to do with the way horse placentas work. EDIT: There are very, very rare instances where a mare can successfully have twins, but it's sort of like the odds of being able to walk again after a paralyzing spinal injury.

If a horse rears up on its hind legs it can fall over, hit the back of its head, and get a traumatic brain injury.

Now to their digestive system. Oh boy. First of all, they can't vomit. There's an incredibly tight sphincter in between the stomach and esophagus that simply won't open up. If a horse is vomiting it's literally about to die. In many cases their stomach will rupture before they vomit. When treating colic you need to reflux the horse, which means shoving a tube into their stomach and pumping out any material to decompress the stomach and proximal GI tract. Their small intestines are 70+ feet long (which is expected for a big herbivore) and can get strangulated, which is fatal without surgery.

Let's go to the large intestine. Horses are hindgut fermenters, not ruminants. I'll spare you the diagram and extended anatomy lesson but here's what you need to know: Their cecum is large enough to shove a person into, and the path of digesta doubles back on itself. The large intestine is very long, has segments of various diameters, multiple flexures, and doubles back on itself several times. It's not anchored to the body wall with mesentery like it is in many other animals. The spleen can get trapped. Parts of the colon can get filled with gas or digested food and/or get displaced. Parts of the large intestine can twist on themselves, causing torsions or volvulus. These conditions can range from mildly painful to excruciating. Many require surgery or intense medical therapy for the horse to have any chance of surviving. Any part of the large intestine can fail at any time and potentially kill the horse. A change in feed can cause colic. Giving birth can cause I believe a large colon volvulus I don't know at the moment I'm going into small animal medicine. Infections can cause colic. Lots of things can cause colic and you better hope it's an impaction and not enteritis or a volvulus.

And now the legs. Before we start with bones and hooves let's talk about the skin. The skin on horse legs, particularly their lower legs, is under a lot of tension and has basically no subcutaneous tissue. If a horse lacerated its legs and has a dangling flap of skin that's a fucking nightmare. That skin is incredibly difficult to successfully suture back together because it's under so much tension. There's basically no subcutaneous tissue underneath. You need to use releasing incisions and all sorts of undermining techniques to even get the skin loose enough to close without tearing itself apart afterwards. Also horses like to get this thing called proud flesh where scar tissue just builds up into this giant ugly mass that restricts movement. If a horse severely lacerated a leg it will take months to heal and the prognosis is not great.

Let's look at the bones. You know how if a horse breaks a leg you usually have to euthanize it? There's a reason for that. Some fractures can be repaired but others can't. A horse weighs thousands of pounds and is literally carrying all that weight on the middle toes of their legs. They are simply incapable of bearing weight on three legs. And a lot of that is because of...

Laminitis. This killed Barbaro and Secretariat. Barbaro would have made it through the broken leg but he got laminitis in his other legs. First, a quick anatomy lesson. The horse hoof is like our fingernails, except it covers the whole foot and is a lot thicker. And to make sure it stays on their food, which again is carrying all that weight on one middle toe per leg, the hoof interdigitates with the skin underneath. And these interdigitations have interdigitations. Think of it as Velcro, and the Velcro also has Velcro. When the horse is healthy, this system works great. But let's make something go wrong. Maybe there's too much weight on the hoof. Maybe the horse is septic. Maybe there's too much sugar, or insulin resistance. Whatever happens, the tissues in the hoof get inflamed and swell up. And because the hoof itself is there, there's nowhere for the swollen soft tissues to go. So the laminae get crushed, and you lose the support system that's holding the entire foot up. This is incredibly painful, and has to be caught early. Because if you let it go on too long, their toe bone will start to rotate because there's nothing holding it in place anymore (this is founder). And in some cases, the toe bone can actually fall through the bottom of the hoof.

TL;DR: Horses are actively trying to die on us.

Source: I'm a veterinary student.

I'm more shocked that people DON'T know that many animals walk on their tippy toes. Cats, dogs, cows, deer, lions. There are few that actually stand on their heel. Bears do on their rear legs.

I guess, that's where a sensible language helps. I'll compare the English word to the one in my language translated literally:

Digitigrade = toe-walker
Ungulate = toe-tip-walker
Artiodactyl = pair-hoofer
Perissodactyl = un-pair-hoofer

well they arent fingers. they are still anatomical legs.

they are ungulates. meaning they walk on a developed digit, yes, but the legs above that are still legs as a whole and are not without tendons and muscles.

and their abilty for running is more from directional of the torso to hip and shoulder girdle to how the legs are angled down. the digit is evolved for speed and less shock absorbtion from taking away from the speed to travel faster in a particular direction.

that person callig their whole leg digits needs to read up on quadrapedal anatomy

people often think of evolution as this purely positive force. very "survival of the fittest" types. the horse is a great example that evolution sometimes ends up making very very silly creatures.

Don't forget that they can die of a tummy ache!

They have VERY precarious digestion and digestive anatomy. They can very easily colic (colic is a very generalized term here btw) and die. Almost saw a horse die this past spring because it had an empty stomach for just a little too long.

Colic is my biggest fear as a horse owner. My childhood horse died from it. We don't know what exactly happened with her. We found her exhibiting all the symptoms and we did what we could but by the time the vet got there, she'd been deteriorating for almost 10 hours. She couldn't stay standing at that point and had nearly crushed me and two other people trying to keep her on her feet. She was put down and the whole thing fucked me up real bad for a long time.

She put up one hell of a fight for being as old as she was. She was 33 and didn't act it at all.

I get this meme is funny but like, if horses really were that fragile then they would not have been domesticated into the work machines we had before combustion engines. They were our automobiles, they plowed our fields and fought in our wars. Yes evolution is a messy ordeal, but it can produce beings that have wild amounts of endurance and horses are near the top of that list.

#KillRacingNotHorses

California alone has already had 20+ horse deaths this year at only 3 tracks. No legitimate sport would accept the deaths of their athletes on a routine and consistent schedule, as just a fact of life.

When you tap your fingers around like a little prancing horse you are being scientifically accurate.

I have several horse riding people in my social circle.

Several horses have just randomly died for them. It's apparently a thing that sometimes happens.

Last time one had twisted intestines or something and had to be put down. Apparently that can happen if a horse moves wrong. It's what the vet said.

I imagine this as when you take a sudden move and pinch a nerve in your neck. But instead of some time of slight pain and discomfort, you just die.

They were wildly disturbed by walking on finger tips (like pretty much every four legged creature), but skipped right over lungs bleeding???

So... When I make a horse with one hand to run on the table, I'm not far off?

Re: why didn’t horses evolve better leg healing, if you’re a proto horse and injure your leg you’re probably not living to heal it, because you can no longer run. So there is no evolutionary pressure to spread those genes through the population, even if a horse did randomly get born with genes that let it heal its legs better than other horses, because no selection mechanism would exist.

Inb4 horses are ballet dancers on steroids. Finger running for miles.

There's a wonderful tumbler post that I saw a few year ago about why horses are a hot mess and it's all because they don't have enough toes:

IIRC they're giving the ground they walk on a perpetual middle finger, with its fingernail being the hoof.

Ballerinas have nothing on 'em horsies.

SomethingAwful forum goon Ruddha:

I don't know about anyone else, but I know for a fact that horses are stupider than shit and WILL kill themselves if you don't take an absurd amount of precautions and adorn them in the right silly accessories so that they don't scare themselves and fall over dead, and even then at best you can reduce the chances that they will do that, but they're still absolutely going to. Women who are obsessed with horses are just as bad as ones who are obsessed with anything else, but it may be dumber because it's a placeholder for animalistic male sexuality; however, in reality, it doesn't hold up because dominant male sexual energy is incompatible with horse personality and tendencies because, again, they're absolutely going to kill themselves by accident, whereas studs and straight power tops are highly unlikely to catch their reflection in a mirror then break their leg and get eaten by a mountain lioness

Of course, if you don't nail little metal rings onto them, they'll split open, and then they'll die.

I personally guarantee you a dog will never in this life hear a bee then have a heart attack out of fear, dying

My dad had a horse fall in a hole and almost die. They had to use a truck wench to get her out. She was too weak to walk so they tied ropes between two trees to hold her up. It took days of them hand feeding her before she could stand or walk on her own. Less than a month later, she fell in the same hole and died.

Babies grow up and that's okay, it's like, sometimes a great meal is worth a lot of prep, for example. Horses only get more likely to die from a stupid reason as they get older. Oh poor ol' Freckles, thought of ants and died

That's understandable, but in the scheme of things it's a fairly low chance. With horses, there is no such thing as a natural death at any point in existence: they've strictly only died from stupid shit. Saw water and passed away

As someone who grew up with a couple friends into horses and fucking dressage I can say that if anything you are being way too easy going on them. Its like their survival strategy is to break their legs or kill them selves at the slightest sign of danger, or a noise, or a change in humidity.

My friends barn had to install a big fence because they were next to a turkey farm and despite the horses seeing these birds every single fucking day, any time you'd ride past them most of the horses would briefly flip out and hurt them selves or throw their rider when the turkeys came into view. You could literally ride in a loop for an hour and every single time the horse would "scare" at the turkeys.

Maybe wilder horses are smarter but dressage horses are more fragile and stupid than a baby that just learned to crawl. They will jump onto fences and cut them selves in half, they will get stuck between buildings, they will randomly for no reason at all break their legs. If there is a way to kill or hurt them selves they will find it. And people drop 50k or more on these idiots.

Only the bottom third or so of the leg is a finger. The rest is a leg.

It’s impossible for a horse to pick its nose even though the boogers get large and big