On polyamory and ponies

Last night I got to thinking about the polyamory group and how humans can't into relationships like that, not properly. And the guys over there understand that. So what would make ponies the exception? Most writers dress up humans in pony suits and call them ponies, so how could a species such as that develop the capacity for polyamory? Well, I've realised almost all intelligent species are, to a degree, social. Cats are social, wolves are social, elephants and dolphins are social; intelligent species are more likely to arise from social creatures. Thus whatever makes us concious, must be largely due to social centres within the brain.

What does this have to do with ponies? Well, humans live in reasonably large groups. Why the vague "reasonably"? Because in your head you hold the genetic predetermination of how sociable your offshoot of humanity should be, of course the variance is very small, the change over generations of isolation or eugenics would start to show a remarkable difference. Now horses and other herd animals live in what we could consider much larger groups, with ancient buffalo herds of America reaching millions of herbivores mingling. Therefore herd animals, in order to survive herd life, adapt better social centres to deal with the pressures of it all. In contrast, we never developed them because we never needed them - imagine an army of cavemen coexisting for generations! They'd end up tearing eachother apart in no-time. And it's not a fault, not really. It's actually a pretty nifty survival mechanism - it prevents us growing too numerous. We are hunter-gatherers by natures, therefore we hunt and gather. Both of these methods of nourishment are actually easy to deplete, unlike grass, berries grow fewer, and unlike shrubs, animals take far longer to mature. The Native Americans are a great example of this, through their warring and selective hunting, they were able to keep a massive stockpile of buffalo, at the cost of a social group consisting of only some hundreds.

In contrast, ponies would have superior social centres. But what does that mean? It would mean greater morality; more social creatures are shown to have morality - for instance studies on monkeys and apes have shown they exhibit all the basics for morality. And I'm pretty sure they found dolphins had a similar sense of morality too, and elephants exhibit a lot of "good Samaritan" traits. This greater morality would probably reduce jealousy complexes and thus allow the sharing nature required for herd animals to function. Therefore polyamory and the wonderful exemplars of friendship that exist in our speculative species would be quite natural. Now, whether things would turn out like Xenophilia is an argument for more knowledgeable people than I.

So there it is, just a bunch of rambling speculation - but I couldn't help but want to post it.