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Description
Caramel Apple saw what Drop’s face looked like, and in an instant she knew what that was all about, so later she pushed him up to her. “Oh Drop. Quit being shy.” Butter Scotch was amused.
Edited
Yes, pregnant horses come in various shapes and sizes. But never in this form.
Time for a very short story.
Many years ago, one guy had two horses, carpathians iirc, stabled at my uncle and aunt’s ranch. He also rented a patch of pasture land that was fenced off and provided with a shelter. In addition to fresh grass, the horses also had a round bale of hay inside the pen to munch on. They spent most days and nights there and never did much work. Visitors would always come right up to the electric fence and marvel at the “pregnant” horsies. One of them was a gelding.
Time for a very long wall of text.
The point I’m trying to get to is that it’s a misconception that horses normally get incredibly large from pregnancy alone. The fetus can typically go up to 9% of the mare’s body in volume, and there are other structures/layers/fluids contributing 3% at most. This adds up to 12% (typ. 10%), which isn’t a whole lot, considering a horse’s weight/volume is mainly concentrated in the torso, unlike in humans. There are rare exceptions such as twins (born underdeveloped), and a single overdeveloped fetus (leading to a dystocial birth). These contribute to the belly’s size, but not a whole lot. Then there are pathologies such as prepubic tendon rupture and other ruptures, which can dramatically enlarge and deform the abdomen and ventral thorax but usually mean a death sentence for the mare.
If you visualise a horse from the side and draw a line from the point of hip to the elbow, the triangle above it is roughly where the rib cage is, and below is the abdomen – that’s where pregnancy happens. The fetus lies along the anteroposterior axis inside the abdominal cavity with a ventral (downward) incline towards the anterior (the fetus’s posterior) that’s where you can see the bulge from the foal’s butt (i.imgur.com/5gWrk.jpg) and where the foal ends. It causes a downward bulging more than lateral. Unlike in humans, the fetus has its torso extended rather than bunched up. It also has a small cross-section area in order to fit through the birth canal. Therefore it alone doesn’t cause a considerable lateral tissue and organ displacement in the abdomen. Other abdominal organs, mainly the intestines, their content, and the visceral fat can cause a much more noticeable abdominal distension.
Now the rib cage is not a completely rigid structure. It can expand somewhat from abdominal pressure, but not to an arbitrary extent. The dorsal and dorso-anterior areas are pretty rigid, and that’s what’s not right with this image in terms of realism. The area around the scapula and humerus (shoulder) can never bulge out like this unless either the skeletal structure is gone or her bones are perfect rubber. Something like this can never happen in reality, not to a fat horse, not to a pregnant one.
additional remarks:
If you can put a saddle on a mare before she becomes pregnant, you can put the same saddle on her when she’s in the 10th month and probably even tighten the girth. This is true for at least the dressage variety.
A poor diet and lack of exercise can cause a lot more bulkiness–the kind people in this community actually associate with pregnancy–due to visceral fat, a hypertrophied intestinal tract, and high volume mass moving through it. Note that a mare can be both fat and pregnant at the same time, but it’s never a good combination due to a higher risk of miscarriage and dystocia.
But why does this even matter? Why can’t people be happy with bizarrely inflated cartoon ponies without needing to have their fantasies validated in reality?
You have never seen a pregnant mare before, have you? Each pregnancy is different.
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSYD9T4sH292YDBlu8MMmY-zmp7aeUFETQEv3mE4iIHcaVSw6NzyMyVchTW
You were saying?
Exactly.
I’m pretty sure he was just making a joke about the unrealistic depiction of pregnancy in this post. I doubt he really thinks that.
This has nothing to do with horses by the way. It’s a cartoon character, so everything’s possible. If a living horse looked like this, it’d be a medical emergency.
If that’s the case, then I he’s taking the perspective of the picture that wrong way.
What? The issue is how far up the chest the baby bump goes, and the background pony pointed that out with the lungs joke.
No, I’m just saying that he thinks that the uterus away every organ in their body, if that were the case, horses would’ve been extinct for millions of years
Are you implying horses don’t have lungs?
You don’t understand horse anatomy, do you?
I think the background pony is refering to how far up the chest the baby bump is. And now that it’s pointed out, she really does look like her lungs and other essential organs were overtaken by the fetus.
Edited
The fetuses take over her essential bodily functions, so even though the organs are gone, she still lives.
?