ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]

20,000 years of this, 7 4 more to go

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • There are wild populations descended from the same ancestors as horses and dogs, those are not the same thing as wild horses and dogs. They have fundamental biological and behavioral differences.

    Yes, domesticated horses and dogs can interbreed with their wild counterparts, but at that point you’re getting into the “What is a species?” question. Polar bears and grizzly bears can interbreed just fine if they’re in the same place, same for chimps and bonobos.

    And for horses there aren’t even really still wild horses. There’s Przewalski’s horse, but they separated from the ancestors of domestic horses long before domestication. They have a different number of chromosomes. Whatever wild horse populations we originally took the first horses from are long extinct.


  • Fine maybe fetch was a bad example, although it’s not like wolves are all about picking stuff up with a soft mouth and giving it to others.

    Closer example: Sled dogs. Have you ever seen a sled dog? They love pulling sleds. It’s their favorite thing in the world. You put them in their harness and they get antsy they’re so excited.

    Over thousands of years, generations of humans used a wolf base to create an organism whose favorite thing to do is pull a sled. Which is pretty fucking cool imo.

    Horses are not wild animals. In exactly the same way as dogs and sheep and cows, horses were created by humans. The normal rules about what they would reasonably want are different than wild animals.

    Obviously not every horse enjoys being ridden, or any other job a horse does. But you can’t say there’s no reason a horse would enjoy riding with a human. There’s a big reason they might enjoy that, thousands of years of human-guided evolution where “rideability” was the main trait being selected for.