creature heart

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.”

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.

They have no concept of the human idea of "freedom" no matter how much you keep saying it. No concept of laws or right and wrong. No, that animal isn't "evil" you're just ascribing morals to a creature that has no idea what evil even is.

Projecting any of this onto an animal is just anthropomorphism, which is dangerous in so many ways.

And don't get me started on so called "animal rights activists", projecting their own wants onto the animals, deciding they know what they need. Because of course they do. "If I want it it's something this animal wants as well." Can you not hear yourself? God just stop.

Firstly, the concept of the term Zoanthrope being universal because of grammar is incorrect - the history of words is very important in how they are used and why you should not take or use some words. Lycanthropy has historical widespread use. Zoanthrope is however really limited to solely clinical zoanthropes. You can use almost any [noun]-thrope or were-[noun] without issue. Zoanthrope though specifically is used as shorthand by the clinical zoanthrope community as a means of rejecting the psychiatrisation we experience and it is through that means that it has been primarily used. Taking the word for yourself and seperating yourself entirely from that experience only serves to damage and - given the tendency of language to drift and soften - destroy our community and the limited means we have to find each other.

What you are doing is sanist, and amounts to the same behaviour engaged by therian communities to essentially cut us as seperate and it fails to understand our community, history, experiences, and why we word things certain ways. There has always been an understanding within the zoanthrope community that there is no requirement of specific diagnosis - just reasonable suspicion, psychiatrisation, or the understanding that psychiatrisation would be applied. Almost all zoanthropes reject the humans understanding of our experiences as psychosis or madness. The problem comes in trying to define yourself as "non-clinical" zoanthrope in opposition to "clinical" zoanthrope. There is no means to seperate the concept of "clinical" from "non-clinical" within the space which does not have sanist outcomes as it inherently frames one as mad and the other not. This plays out in your writing, and that of others that have replied, framing your experience in opposition to ours - with ours as a psychotic affect. This is not an analysis almost any zoanthrope accepts for themselves, but in placing it on others you inherently devalue our experiences and identity as genuine, while at the same time claiming yours as genuine affect of your existance.

Your background of being physical nonhuman and the treatment from therian community does not preclude you from engaging in sanism or mistreating further marginalised communities or further marginalising segments of that community. Genuinely, if you actually care about our experiences, and view yourselves as meaningfully different from us, please stop appropriating our terms. They are the only way we have to find others and to be able to express our experiences without bowing to the psychiatrisation and reality checking demanded by the human world and therian communities. Not every term is for you and you are not entitled to every word. Or, if you do view yourself as like us, you must stop creating this dichotomy which sets one experience of greater validity against anothers madness as this only serves to marginalise those already most marginalised within the community. You may not intend or consider this outcome, but intent is irrelevant, this is the outcome.

You have been part of a community long enough to make your mistakes, learn and gain the ability to recognise misinfo and toxic behaviour. Now you're seeing new people come in and make those same mistakes so they can learn and gain the same ability.

Nothing is ruined. This is the cycle that happens when a wave of new people enter a subculture. This is the mark of a healthy ecosystem.

the warped forest, and with that all nether biomes are done! (unless a new biome is annouced like in 4 months or something)