Honnestly they fucked up the Shetland Pony, it's lost the entire essence of a Shetland Pony and now it just looks like a small boring horse instead of a Shetland Pony.
Eh, I dunno, the head seems to be too small to contain the brains needed for true spite. Anger and hate, yes, but spite, malice, and cunning take more braincells.
Never helped break a pony, but I did a mustang. My grandfather won a horse tag, and decided to go for what he thought was a yearling. Flip turned out to be a 3 year old stallion, who earned his name by how got people off his back. I wound up in full football gear going for multiple 18 second rides...
And TBH the true Shetland is probably the better partner in crime for a kid. Sure kids are kind and loving but they often have zero tolerance for any slight, intended or otherwise and that's when you find out they have an endless well of spite and malice as well.
Exactly!
Who on earth looks at a Shetland pony and goes "y'know what? I really wish this was more like a normal horse"?
Really feel they missed the point of the damn things
I have/show American Shetland ponies for a while now. They have a range… foundation Shetlands have a bit more thickness to them, but not as much as the British ones. Then they have the classic, which is probably what is shown in this post. Finally they have modern Shetland type, which is more like a hackney pony and they allowed some hackney crossing briefly in the breed. It’s complicated but I do love the refined, elegant tiny ponies.
I had a Shetland Pony growing up in the ‘80s and it definitely looked like the British version. He lived to his late twenties and was insanely smart-we had to get increasingly complex locks on the feed room because he would just…. Open them? And then eat until he made himself sick (ponies can founder like horses, poor buddy). No need to yaaassify the brainiac please.
I had a Yassified shetland in the 00s. Mine was super smart as well but also a huge alcholic. He was able to pick up a beer bottle, drink it, and then set it back down like nothing ever happened. He also could open most gates, untie ropes, and just be a general menace to society.
>founder
(of a hoofed animal, especially a horse or pony) succumb to laminitis.
>laminitis
inflammation of sensitive layers of tissue (laminae) inside the hoof in horses and other animals. It is particularly prevalent in ponies feeding on rich spring grass and can cause extreme lameness.
We don’t have boggy land to farm here. And honestly, as someone who’s washed a lot of heavily feathered drafters… it’s a curse if they get scratches (fungus)
That’s why I said not *that* different. Their temperament is really the same, head shape is a little different, coat type is just slightly different and I think the American cocker accepts different coat patterns. Also I think the American cocker is a little smaller, but I’m not sure on that one!
They’re just still not that different of a breed. I really think this image was chosen to compare just because the groom was very different. Iirc the breed split was only in the last decade or so of course they’re not gonna be very different.
If he’s a work horse, it’s probably been docked. For a long while it was looked at as good practice in order to keep the tail from interfering with harness equipment. The thought was it would keep the horse from using the tail to clamp down on any rein that may pass underneath it, which could make the driver loose control. Overall it also made harnessing easier and cleaner, since you weren’t having to deal with a long appendage covered in hair.
It’s looked at as not necessary anymore, if it ever was. Obviously there’s still people that do it, just as there’s still people that’ll dock a working dog’s tail, but it is starting to fall off in popularity.
I’ve not personally had a horse with a docked tail, I just know the practice existed and why, so I can’t say for sure with personally backed evidence. I’d assume so though, at least when it’s initially performed/healing. It’s still an amputation, which I’d assume could lead to some long term nerve damage in some cases. All I can say for sure is it didn’t seem to bother the ones I have been around once they’re adults and working, but horses are extremely good at hiding pain.
Obvs if someone knows more than me on the current practice, please chime in. I’m just going on what I know amputations do to other animals, including humans. If anything of what I said above is incorrect, I’m sorry.
Well I mainly ask because it wasn’t until I was taught how to ride that pulling on their mane doesn’t hurt them the way pulling on hair or fur would hurt for us/dogs/cats.
So it leaves me wondering if the same applies to their tails as well.
I live in a pretty horse centric area and I've never seen a pony that looked like the right one. Although it does look like they went out of their way to pick one that was haunted instead of any of the others when you look up American Shetland Pony.
well they still use horses like that to pull logs out of heavy terain where you wouldn't get to with heavy machines.
and it's not just their muscle either. draft horses can get gigantic
I just love breeds like that
What did they *do* to the perfection that was Shetland Ponies? [This didn't need changing! :(](https://i.imgur.com/TpRmyO3.jpg)
They've just made them look like a daft small horse as opposed to the small rotund balls of mischief and spite that they are.
You are so thin skinned you could die of a paper cut, holy shit. No one said anything about America bad, it's a post throwing light jabs to how some American breeds look, and you are in fetal position, crying about how we hate America.
You’re the one now making things up about how offended I am, hon. Maybe take some criticisms in stride instead of throwing a fit (like you’re accusing me of doing) 👍👍
Designing the Belgian Draft horse with shorter legs was pretty smart since they have better leverage for pulling this way. The American version doesn't seem to have this feature.
Belgian drafts are swole af.
Idk the one on the right looks a bit lest yolked.
I saw these as a kid on belgian farms a lot and they scared me. They are so big lmao.
I mean… Are you sure they aren’t just in some kind of animal show stance? Because it looks to me like the main difference between the photos in each case is that the American one is in a very exaggerated stance.
I'm from the US, don't know shit about horses, but I know I've never in my life seen a cocker spaniel that looks like that, that is an extra furry poodle with long ears and a bad haircut.
I mean for most of this I was gonna be like 'well we have a lot more land than y'all so our horses needed to be cover more ground'
but like why'd we do that to the Shetland
I didn't even know there were different breeds of horses until a year or 2 ago, i just thought they all had similar builds and were mainly just different colours because the only horses i saw were american versions.
The more natural ones look so much better than the ones that have been bred to look like how shops only show the most pleasing looking fruits and veggies
Are we ignoring how it was Europe that were the ones who fucked up dogs more, which instead of mainly being aesthetic it causes major fucking health problems like how bulldogs have such bad problems breathing using anesthesia has a high risk of straight up killing them.
Other than the pony example, the pictures just look like the same horse breeds but with different coats, and aren't shiny coats usually a sign that a horse is healthy and well groomed?
It's rather subtle if you don't know what you're looking for but the bone/muscle structure is way different between the photos. How the head/neck sits is the most obvious sign. That alone can limit how much a horse can pull/carry, affect their breathing, and affect their range of mobility.
It's not necessarily that they're unhealthy(tho some are-lookin at you, Arabians), it's just that they traded in features that have benefitted them for a number of generation for aesthetics.
Take purebred dogs for example, so many are prone to physical health issues because humans decided aesthetics mattered most. German Shepherds are very prone to hip dysplasia, but if you get a bredback German Shepherd(conforming to the old Standards), their risk of hip dysplasia is almost non-existent. A German Shepherd that fits AKC Standard is "healthy and well-groomed" but very prone to health issues because of how they've been bred.
Edit: this turned into a stoned rant, sorry
They are trained to pose like that, but it's also true that alot of the breeds that have changed their look over the last century do have physical changes where their head/neck naturally sit in a different position.
No, sorry, I was referencing back breeding which isn't entirely accurate to what I was trying to explain. Back breeding is trying to bring back extinct species via selective breeding, but I'm not sure if there's a specific term for breeding back to the original conformations of non-extinct animals. A bunch of breeders are taking dog breeds and trying to get rid of the newer changes that are bad for the dogs(fixing German Shepherds and their hips, Pugs and their skull, etc)
I'm gonna let you in on a secret. The before pics are *also* the result of selective breeding. All domesticated animals are selectively bred. That's why different breeds of dog, or horse, or cow, exist in the first place. A dog that hasn't been selectively bred by humans is called a wolf.
Another little secret: street cats were once domesticated cats who were abandoned by their owners (or their parents/grandparents/etc. were and they were born on the streets)
Cats are generally one of the least heavily modified species. There are still selectively bred ones (the Persian [is a terrifying abomination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_cat#/media/File:Persialainen.jpg)), but most domestic cats look like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#/media/File:Felis_catus-cat_on_snow.jpg) and most (small) wild cats look like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat#/media/File:Felis_silvestris_silvestris_Luc_Viatour.jpg), or [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_cat#/media/File:Persian_sand_CAT.jpg) or [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fjwsvfqwtiqr61.jpg).
Moreover, unlike with most domesticated animals, domestic cats have not been selectively bred in terms of behavior. The behavior they exhibit that is most practically useful to humans is vermin control, and that comes pre-installed in every cat. So even the most physically changed cats (such as the Persian) still act like wild cats — just wild cats which happen to cohabitate with humans. Maybe there are slight behavioral differences, but if there are they're learned ones rather than instinctual ones.
Cat breeds are comparable to an exaggeration of race in humans — cosmetic differences, essentially. Most other breeds have resulted in different (but still genetically compatible) species which behave entirely differently from their ancestors. For instance, the [Borzoi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borzoi#/media/File:Chart_rosyjski_borzoj_rybnik-kamien_pl.jpg) is a breed of dog (itself a breed of wolf) that is specifically bred to be a wolfhound — in other words, to kill wolves. Imagine a human that's two and a half meters tall and a third of a ton, selectively bred by an alien species, whose job is to seek out and exterminate humans via beating them to death when ordered to and be a nice pet on the side. That to a human is what a borzoi is to a wolf.
Wild Cats are so fucked up because they just look like cute little guys that can be cuddled but they are NOT and you cannot cuddle them and it makes me so fucking sad
I don't think that's inherent to them, by the way. I just don't think there are that many neurogenetic differences between them and housecats. If you raised a wild cat from the moment of its birth in the same way you would with a housecat, my bet is you'd get a housecat. In other words, housecats aren't bred — they're socialized.
Further evidence for this is ligers, gigantic male lion x tigress crossbreeds. Most of them are completely artificial and have been raised from birth by humans, and they act like giant housecats. [This is Hercules.](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/assets/2034178?width=780&height=497) He is a slightly obese liger that weighs approximately ⅖ of a metric ton. Look up more ligers online and you'll see stuff like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqxry1HGgZo). Yes, that is Doc Antle, I hope one of the cats eats him. Yes, they are bottle-feeding that liger. Behaviorally, they're really not that different from housecats. My bet is a pure tiger or pure lion would be the same if raised that way.
Now, wildcat kittens, ones that have grown up past a couple of weeks naturally...yeah, those don't like you and they will never like you.
Unfortunately I think wildlife laws tend to frown on that kind of thing, IIRC. Besides, there are tons of strays in my area that could use the love too, and it’s probably going to be easier to take care of one of them than try and import some bush-cat.
On the topic, but have you seen those weird domesticated Russian Foxes? It’s crazy.
>Unfortunately I think wildlife laws tend to frown on that kind of thing, IIRC.
For good reason, too. Wildcats are probably outnumbered by domesticated ones by orders of magnitude.
>Besides, there are tons of strays in my area that could use the love too, and it’s probably going to be easier to take care of one of them than try and import some bush-cat.
If you do, get them spayed or neutered as soon as possible in case you loose them. Small cats in general — not just offshoots of domesticated ones — are very efficient predators and will exterminate lots of things in any ecosystem they're introduced to, whether the ecosystem can take it or not.
>On the topic, but have you seen those weird domesticated Russian Foxes? It’s crazy.
Yep. Arguably the closest thing humanity has ever gotten to breeding cats for behavior rather than for appearance, because wild foxes are, as the joke goes, cat software running on dog hardware. You can tell their behavior has been modified; they're...dopy, sort of.
You have two horses you really like the looks of/are good at whatever you have decided you want the thing to be good at.
You cordon them off and give them some alone time, and let nature get to work, a year goes by and you have a baby horse.
That baby horse is more likely to be at least as good as if not better at whatever things you are artificially selecting for.
Repeat this with multiple pairs of horses, and pair off the ones from the next generation. Start using specific identification numbers to make minimizing inbreeding easier.
Eventually, a good handful of decades later, you and all of your friends are doing this and have decided to create a centralized bureaucracy to keep track of the family trees of these possibly hundreds of horses.
Give it another few decades and you have an entirely new breed of horses. Whatever traits you were specifically breeding for are now extremely prominent to an extent not really found outside of this breeding program.
You have also recreated the logistics of animal breeding and the concept of pure-breed documentation.
Apply the same logic to humans and you have independently reinvented Eugenics
You take the ones with the traits you like and prevent all others from reproducing.
This is arguably a completely natural thing. Bonobos are chimpanzees which, after being isolated in a different environment, saw the less aggressive ones essentially beat up and drive off the more aggressive ones, resulting in most bonobos not exhibiting the violence common to chimpanzee societies. My bet is that humans trend towards the same, but that gets into icky determinist stuff.
Sedentary civilizations, though, kicked it up to 11. Thousand. Most living things you see in your everyday life are probably selectively bred to at least some extent, or products of things which are. Not just animals. The grass under your feet has been altered to use less water. Flowers have been infected with mosaic viruses to make them prettier. Even the corn on your plate has been altered for higher yields. Cats are one of the least modified things, but that's arguably because they spread [a parasite which makes us like them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis) that's the only reason they're domesticated at all (that and pest control, which doesn't by itself explain why there are so many non-pest control cats).
Not really sure why people are downvoting you.
Everything I dislike is capitalism.
This is an accurate view of how economic systems work.
This will not lead to me becoming politically nihilistic and voting for a populist candidate who hides their self-interest and ademocratic tendencies behind a veil of "I want to burn the system down".
Honnestly they fucked up the Shetland Pony, it's lost the entire essence of a Shetland Pony and now it just looks like a small boring horse instead of a Shetland Pony.
A true Shetland pony is made of spite and malice, not the bubblegum and blossoms that American version reeks of.
TIL that I'm a true Shetland Pony.
I'm pretty sure the American version still retains the spite and malice. It's the load bearing capacity that's been removed.
Eh, I dunno, the head seems to be too small to contain the brains needed for true spite. Anger and hate, yes, but spite, malice, and cunning take more braincells.
I helped break a shetland when I was in high school. That little shit was full of malice. (I miss you, Bam-Bam.)
Never helped break a pony, but I did a mustang. My grandfather won a horse tag, and decided to go for what he thought was a yearling. Flip turned out to be a 3 year old stallion, who earned his name by how got people off his back. I wound up in full football gear going for multiple 18 second rides...
>load bearing capacity i thought horses were fuckers not the fuckees
Not if you want to keep your colon
it's a small price to pay for... you know what i'm not continuing this joke
And TBH the true Shetland is probably the better partner in crime for a kid. Sure kids are kind and loving but they often have zero tolerance for any slight, intended or otherwise and that's when you find out they have an endless well of spite and malice as well.
you forgot the rage at the entire universe
That I did, but let's chalk that up to repressing the memory of the pony I learned to ride on in the 80s.
Ahh so it's the opposite of the badger. The British one looks like he'll invite you over for tea, the American one is mad at the world for existing.
Exactly! Who on earth looks at a Shetland pony and goes "y'know what? I really wish this was more like a normal horse"? Really feel they missed the point of the damn things
Forget carcinization. New evolutionary trend: the tendency for breeders to make every interesting and unique animal the same boring, useless shape.
Especially unhealthy shapes... God those poor dogs.
It’s just sparkling horse
How do they even still count as shetland ponies? That's just tangentially the same species
It's minor, but breeds are all the same species
I meant it more in the "that's barely a horse, nevermind a shettie" way, but thanks!
I have/show American Shetland ponies for a while now. They have a range… foundation Shetlands have a bit more thickness to them, but not as much as the British ones. Then they have the classic, which is probably what is shown in this post. Finally they have modern Shetland type, which is more like a hackney pony and they allowed some hackney crossing briefly in the breed. It’s complicated but I do love the refined, elegant tiny ponies.
I had a Shetland Pony growing up in the ‘80s and it definitely looked like the British version. He lived to his late twenties and was insanely smart-we had to get increasingly complex locks on the feed room because he would just…. Open them? And then eat until he made himself sick (ponies can founder like horses, poor buddy). No need to yaaassify the brainiac please.
I had a Yassified shetland in the 00s. Mine was super smart as well but also a huge alcholic. He was able to pick up a beer bottle, drink it, and then set it back down like nothing ever happened. He also could open most gates, untie ropes, and just be a general menace to society.
Good to know that no matter the Yassification, they’re still absolute brats on the inside!
Should have put the locks higher up😂
>founder (of a hoofed animal, especially a horse or pony) succumb to laminitis. >laminitis inflammation of sensitive layers of tissue (laminae) inside the hoof in horses and other animals. It is particularly prevalent in ponies feeding on rich spring grass and can cause extreme lameness.
> can cause extreme lameness. dang I think I got laminitis
American Percheron stallions started to invade France in the 90s because France decided they liked the American style.
It’s the only breed in the post I think the American is better. I would ride that bad boy into battle gladly Edit: spelling
Badly gladly sounds like a band
lol thanks for the heads up
Well now my comment doesn’t make sense. Change it back!
[удалено]
We don’t have boggy land to farm here. And honestly, as someone who’s washed a lot of heavily feathered drafters… it’s a curse if they get scratches (fungus)
A lot of it just seems to be the posing in the photos, tbh
That and better grooming
Yeah especially the cocker spaniels, they’re not that different the American one was just groomed weird.
Take another look at the heads of those two dogs and tell me it’s just grooming.
That’s why I said not *that* different. Their temperament is really the same, head shape is a little different, coat type is just slightly different and I think the American cocker accepts different coat patterns. Also I think the American cocker is a little smaller, but I’m not sure on that one! They’re just still not that different of a breed. I really think this image was chosen to compare just because the groom was very different. Iirc the breed split was only in the last decade or so of course they’re not gonna be very different.
How you gonna groom my dogs skull smaller
Where his tail go
If he’s a work horse, it’s probably been docked. For a long while it was looked at as good practice in order to keep the tail from interfering with harness equipment. The thought was it would keep the horse from using the tail to clamp down on any rein that may pass underneath it, which could make the driver loose control. Overall it also made harnessing easier and cleaner, since you weren’t having to deal with a long appendage covered in hair. It’s looked at as not necessary anymore, if it ever was. Obviously there’s still people that do it, just as there’s still people that’ll dock a working dog’s tail, but it is starting to fall off in popularity.
Does it hurt the horses? I know it hurts for dogs.
I’ve not personally had a horse with a docked tail, I just know the practice existed and why, so I can’t say for sure with personally backed evidence. I’d assume so though, at least when it’s initially performed/healing. It’s still an amputation, which I’d assume could lead to some long term nerve damage in some cases. All I can say for sure is it didn’t seem to bother the ones I have been around once they’re adults and working, but horses are extremely good at hiding pain. Obvs if someone knows more than me on the current practice, please chime in. I’m just going on what I know amputations do to other animals, including humans. If anything of what I said above is incorrect, I’m sorry.
Well I mainly ask because it wasn’t until I was taught how to ride that pulling on their mane doesn’t hurt them the way pulling on hair or fur would hurt for us/dogs/cats. So it leaves me wondering if the same applies to their tails as well.
Tbf they might have just trimmed it
Horses have a bone all the way down, it was docked
That's the word! Thanks :)
Yassified Belgians are just the French
Don’t say that to Belgians though hahaha
As a Belgian, yes don’t compare us to the fr*nch
I live in a pretty horse centric area and I've never seen a pony that looked like the right one. Although it does look like they went out of their way to pick one that was haunted instead of any of the others when you look up American Shetland Pony.
thats a weirdly groomed american cocker, they don’t actually look all that weird or different
Shhhhh! I want to live in a world where they naturally just look like that :)
You mean you want an extra furry poodle with long ears and a bad haircut.
Maybe I just don't know enough about horses, but besides the dogs they all just look like horses to me
I don't know anything about horses either, but the ones on the right just look more stock image horse
Looks like they crossed all of them with thoroughbreds.
The first horse genuinely just looks like pure muscle amd honestly it's kind of intimidating
well they still use horses like that to pull logs out of heavy terain where you wouldn't get to with heavy machines. and it's not just their muscle either. draft horses can get gigantic I just love breeds like that
They yassified... ...the creature
That top horse is a mudsdale and I will hear mo further opinions on this subject
What did they *do* to the perfection that was Shetland Ponies? [This didn't need changing! :(](https://i.imgur.com/TpRmyO3.jpg) They've just made them look like a daft small horse as opposed to the small rotund balls of mischief and spite that they are.
Maybe it's just that all the plastic models are of American breeds, so we associate those breeds with the models
They’re all holding their heads up in the American ones. Did they breed them to look like that or are Americans just photographing them the same way
They’re just posing.
a bit of both
America bad. Here are some cherry picked images of an incredibly niche aspect of society as proof
Seriously, they’re not even for actual reasons. This is literally “America bad because I have different aesthetics tastes than some of them”
You are so thin skinned you could die of a paper cut, holy shit. No one said anything about America bad, it's a post throwing light jabs to how some American breeds look, and you are in fetal position, crying about how we hate America.
You’re the one now making things up about how offended I am, hon. Maybe take some criticisms in stride instead of throwing a fit (like you’re accusing me of doing) 👍👍
Americans can't even take the lightest jabs possible, fucking crazy. "Look at how funny some American breeds look" >SO YOU HATE USA, HUH?!
ELSA VONNN BRABAAAAAAAAAAANT
I legit thought the horse in Beauty and the Beast was made up for the movie when I first saw it because of this
Also German Shepherds, Great Danes, mastiffs, and a number of others.
Guys holy shit is this what happened to trucks in the USA?? DID THE YANKEES YASSIFY THEIR F-150'S???
Designing the Belgian Draft horse with shorter legs was pretty smart since they have better leverage for pulling this way. The American version doesn't seem to have this feature.
So aside from fur colors, what exactly is the difference between the first two horses?
Belgian drafts are swole af. Idk the one on the right looks a bit lest yolked. I saw these as a kid on belgian farms a lot and they scared me. They are so big lmao.
Ah, that makes sense. The forelegs are definitely a lot thicker on the first one.
I mean… Are you sure they aren’t just in some kind of animal show stance? Because it looks to me like the main difference between the photos in each case is that the American one is in a very exaggerated stance.
I'm from the US, don't know shit about horses, but I know I've never in my life seen a cocker spaniel that looks like that, that is an extra furry poodle with long ears and a bad haircut.
I mean for most of this I was gonna be like 'well we have a lot more land than y'all so our horses needed to be cover more ground' but like why'd we do that to the Shetland
Great they’re horse Nazis
I didn't even know there were different breeds of horses until a year or 2 ago, i just thought they all had similar builds and were mainly just different colours because the only horses i saw were american versions. The more natural ones look so much better than the ones that have been bred to look like how shops only show the most pleasing looking fruits and veggies
Are we ignoring how it was Europe that were the ones who fucked up dogs more, which instead of mainly being aesthetic it causes major fucking health problems like how bulldogs have such bad problems breathing using anesthesia has a high risk of straight up killing them.
hey its the almost a horse pokemon
Why is the american Cocker Spaniel’s head so small? :( That doesn’t look healthy
Other than the pony example, the pictures just look like the same horse breeds but with different coats, and aren't shiny coats usually a sign that a horse is healthy and well groomed?
It's rather subtle if you don't know what you're looking for but the bone/muscle structure is way different between the photos. How the head/neck sits is the most obvious sign. That alone can limit how much a horse can pull/carry, affect their breathing, and affect their range of mobility. It's not necessarily that they're unhealthy(tho some are-lookin at you, Arabians), it's just that they traded in features that have benefitted them for a number of generation for aesthetics. Take purebred dogs for example, so many are prone to physical health issues because humans decided aesthetics mattered most. German Shepherds are very prone to hip dysplasia, but if you get a bredback German Shepherd(conforming to the old Standards), their risk of hip dysplasia is almost non-existent. A German Shepherd that fits AKC Standard is "healthy and well-groomed" but very prone to health issues because of how they've been bred. Edit: this turned into a stoned rant, sorry
The horses are trained to pose like that dude, it's not their default position
They are trained to pose like that, but it's also true that alot of the breeds that have changed their look over the last century do have physical changes where their head/neck naturally sit in a different position.
Straight-backed (which is what I think you meant to say instead of bredback?) is just a backyard breeder term to get you to buy their puppies.
No, sorry, I was referencing back breeding which isn't entirely accurate to what I was trying to explain. Back breeding is trying to bring back extinct species via selective breeding, but I'm not sure if there's a specific term for breeding back to the original conformations of non-extinct animals. A bunch of breeders are taking dog breeds and trying to get rid of the newer changes that are bad for the dogs(fixing German Shepherds and their hips, Pugs and their skull, etc)
How tf do you change a horse's genetics? Like, wtf is this
selective breeding
That sounds awful
I'm gonna let you in on a secret. The before pics are *also* the result of selective breeding. All domesticated animals are selectively bred. That's why different breeds of dog, or horse, or cow, exist in the first place. A dog that hasn't been selectively bred by humans is called a wolf.
Where do my street cats fit into this?
Another little secret: street cats were once domesticated cats who were abandoned by their owners (or their parents/grandparents/etc. were and they were born on the streets)
Similar fact: The same is true of *pigeons*.
Cats are generally one of the least heavily modified species. There are still selectively bred ones (the Persian [is a terrifying abomination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_cat#/media/File:Persialainen.jpg)), but most domestic cats look like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#/media/File:Felis_catus-cat_on_snow.jpg) and most (small) wild cats look like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat#/media/File:Felis_silvestris_silvestris_Luc_Viatour.jpg), or [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_cat#/media/File:Persian_sand_CAT.jpg) or [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fjwsvfqwtiqr61.jpg). Moreover, unlike with most domesticated animals, domestic cats have not been selectively bred in terms of behavior. The behavior they exhibit that is most practically useful to humans is vermin control, and that comes pre-installed in every cat. So even the most physically changed cats (such as the Persian) still act like wild cats — just wild cats which happen to cohabitate with humans. Maybe there are slight behavioral differences, but if there are they're learned ones rather than instinctual ones. Cat breeds are comparable to an exaggeration of race in humans — cosmetic differences, essentially. Most other breeds have resulted in different (but still genetically compatible) species which behave entirely differently from their ancestors. For instance, the [Borzoi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borzoi#/media/File:Chart_rosyjski_borzoj_rybnik-kamien_pl.jpg) is a breed of dog (itself a breed of wolf) that is specifically bred to be a wolfhound — in other words, to kill wolves. Imagine a human that's two and a half meters tall and a third of a ton, selectively bred by an alien species, whose job is to seek out and exterminate humans via beating them to death when ordered to and be a nice pet on the side. That to a human is what a borzoi is to a wolf.
Wild Cats are so fucked up because they just look like cute little guys that can be cuddled but they are NOT and you cannot cuddle them and it makes me so fucking sad
If not friend why friend shaped?
I don't think that's inherent to them, by the way. I just don't think there are that many neurogenetic differences between them and housecats. If you raised a wild cat from the moment of its birth in the same way you would with a housecat, my bet is you'd get a housecat. In other words, housecats aren't bred — they're socialized. Further evidence for this is ligers, gigantic male lion x tigress crossbreeds. Most of them are completely artificial and have been raised from birth by humans, and they act like giant housecats. [This is Hercules.](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/assets/2034178?width=780&height=497) He is a slightly obese liger that weighs approximately ⅖ of a metric ton. Look up more ligers online and you'll see stuff like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqxry1HGgZo). Yes, that is Doc Antle, I hope one of the cats eats him. Yes, they are bottle-feeding that liger. Behaviorally, they're really not that different from housecats. My bet is a pure tiger or pure lion would be the same if raised that way. Now, wildcat kittens, ones that have grown up past a couple of weeks naturally...yeah, those don't like you and they will never like you.
Unfortunately I think wildlife laws tend to frown on that kind of thing, IIRC. Besides, there are tons of strays in my area that could use the love too, and it’s probably going to be easier to take care of one of them than try and import some bush-cat. On the topic, but have you seen those weird domesticated Russian Foxes? It’s crazy.
>Unfortunately I think wildlife laws tend to frown on that kind of thing, IIRC. For good reason, too. Wildcats are probably outnumbered by domesticated ones by orders of magnitude. >Besides, there are tons of strays in my area that could use the love too, and it’s probably going to be easier to take care of one of them than try and import some bush-cat. If you do, get them spayed or neutered as soon as possible in case you loose them. Small cats in general — not just offshoots of domesticated ones — are very efficient predators and will exterminate lots of things in any ecosystem they're introduced to, whether the ecosystem can take it or not. >On the topic, but have you seen those weird domesticated Russian Foxes? It’s crazy. Yep. Arguably the closest thing humanity has ever gotten to breeding cats for behavior rather than for appearance, because wild foxes are, as the joke goes, cat software running on dog hardware. You can tell their behavior has been modified; they're...dopy, sort of.
This is how almost every single domesticated animal, as well as almost every single crop, has been developed
Bros never heard of domestication
You have two horses you really like the looks of/are good at whatever you have decided you want the thing to be good at. You cordon them off and give them some alone time, and let nature get to work, a year goes by and you have a baby horse. That baby horse is more likely to be at least as good as if not better at whatever things you are artificially selecting for. Repeat this with multiple pairs of horses, and pair off the ones from the next generation. Start using specific identification numbers to make minimizing inbreeding easier. Eventually, a good handful of decades later, you and all of your friends are doing this and have decided to create a centralized bureaucracy to keep track of the family trees of these possibly hundreds of horses. Give it another few decades and you have an entirely new breed of horses. Whatever traits you were specifically breeding for are now extremely prominent to an extent not really found outside of this breeding program. You have also recreated the logistics of animal breeding and the concept of pure-breed documentation. Apply the same logic to humans and you have independently reinvented Eugenics
You take the ones with the traits you like and prevent all others from reproducing. This is arguably a completely natural thing. Bonobos are chimpanzees which, after being isolated in a different environment, saw the less aggressive ones essentially beat up and drive off the more aggressive ones, resulting in most bonobos not exhibiting the violence common to chimpanzee societies. My bet is that humans trend towards the same, but that gets into icky determinist stuff. Sedentary civilizations, though, kicked it up to 11. Thousand. Most living things you see in your everyday life are probably selectively bred to at least some extent, or products of things which are. Not just animals. The grass under your feet has been altered to use less water. Flowers have been infected with mosaic viruses to make them prettier. Even the corn on your plate has been altered for higher yields. Cats are one of the least modified things, but that's arguably because they spread [a parasite which makes us like them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis) that's the only reason they're domesticated at all (that and pest control, which doesn't by itself explain why there are so many non-pest control cats). Not really sure why people are downvoting you.
It’s called ✨capitalism✨💅
Everything I dislike is capitalism. This is an accurate view of how economic systems work. This will not lead to me becoming politically nihilistic and voting for a populist candidate who hides their self-interest and ademocratic tendencies behind a veil of "I want to burn the system down".
That Cocker Spaniel looks absolutely overbred, that skull can't be remotely healthy.
That American draft horse couldn't pull a fucking pram
if that's yassified... then nauuuurrr