Science II · 11:05am Aug 4th, 2017
Source: Dead Link
Read on, if you dare.
Once upon a time, when I was young and idealistic, I set out to answer a question that everybody had, but nobody had properly answered: How Much do Ponies Weigh?
As you will recall, I employed rigorous scientific method to my experiments, and then like a proper researcher I managed to sucker someone else into doing the math for me.
This time around, I'm going to try and do my own math; that's to make up for the (fortunate) lack of experimentation involved in this blog post.
Someone, and I don't remember who, once asked me how much ponies pooped every day. And, I'll admit, while that's an odd question, it's a natural extension to the question of whether or not ponies poop.
Now, we know that they do. Not only do we have word of Faust and her troll-y tweets, but of course there's also canon images of an outhouse, as well as a normal-looking toilet with a rather startled Bon Bon next to it.
Furthermore, this is a thing you can buy on Amazon:
[They could be using their toilets as convenient dead pet fish disposal units, but that's unlikely.]
Therefore, we can conclude that its very likely that ponies do poop.
My personal headcanon is that outhouses are commonplace, although there are places that have flush toilets and a sewer system. I'd say that in Ponyville, ponies towards the center of the town almost certainly have indoor plumbing, along with the hospital. Further out, they probably don't--we know from canon that Applejack's house has a pump faucet on the sink, and although I'm almost positive we've never seen it, they almost certainly have an outhouse.
I have no idea what cloudhouses and cloudominiums have. Feel free to speculate wildly in the comments.
This, of course, leads us to the obvious question: how much?
It's fairly easy to google how much manure a normal horse produces.
We come up with the alarming answer of 50 pounds/day (that's 22.7kg for people living in the civilized parts of the world) for your average 1,000 pound (450kg) horse. Conveniently, that's 5% of its total body weight . . . that's a nice, easy number to work with.
Obviously, ponies are smaller than horses, and they weigh less. Based on my earlier experimentation, Applejack weighs somewhere between 106-152 pounds (48-69kg). Using the above formula, we inevitably conclude that Applejack produces between 5.3-7.6 pounds (2.4-3.4kg) of horseapples/day.
That's a lot!
Incidentally, it's not as much as an actual bushel of apples (40 pounds [18kg] by law),
although based on my research of how much an actual bushel of apples weighs, you'll be happy to know that our thousand pound IRL horse produces more than a bushel of road apples each and every day.
Of course, just numbers by themselves are meaningless--we need something to compare to.
By comparison, your average human, according to Google, produces one ounce/12 pounds of body weight, meaning that an average 160 pound person (72.5kg) produces 1 pound per day (.5kg). I have no idea who figured that out, and perhaps it's better not to know.*
[My brother works in flight testing, and one of the specialists he's worked with is the guy who makes sure that the airplane toilets flush properly in all conditions. He apparently has a self-invented mixture which he uses to test them. I've been told that two of the ingredients are peanut butter and raw oats, and I didn't ask for any further details.
I guess the moral is that if you're an expert in poop, there are career opportunities for you.]
By this simple math, it's obvious that ponies poop five to seven times as much per day as the average person. This suggests three things:
1. Pony plumbing systems are quite robust. They have to handle a substantial volume of fibrous nuggets.*
2. Ponies with outhouse cleaning or sewer cleaning cutie marks would never be wanting for a job, and anypony (or anyperson) who wanted to earn a few extra bits could probably easily find a job shoveling ... cornhusks and taters.**
3. Toilet paper would be a perpetual best-seller. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the first recorded mention of toilet paper is from the 6th century AD by Yan Zhitui. It's well within the means of ponies to produce it, and in fact there may well be ponies with toilet paper cutie marks. Oh, also it's show canon (s5e21).
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*You're welcome, PP.
**major props if you get that reference.
"But wait," I can hear you all saying.
"Real life ponies are grazing herbivores. Our little ponies aren't!"
Yes, they are, or at least were. And like many herbivores, they have to eat a lot to keep going.
IRL horses graze for around 17 hours/day [they don't sleep much], and they need to eat 1.5% of their body weight every day in order to be healthy. So for our thousand pound horse, it's got to eat 15 pounds (6.8kg) of grass per day just to survive.
Now, if I'm doing my math right here, if a pony were to eat the exact same diet as our proverbial horse, they'd have to eat 1.6-2.3 pounds (.72-1kg) of food per day. But that's only if they're eating the same thing that their feral ancestors did.
Since they're eating human-style foods, it stands to reason that they'd likely eat roughly the same amount of food as a human, or maybe just a little bit less, right?
To someone who's not terribly good at math, I find it quite fortunate that the high end of Applejack's weight fits so neatly with what the internet tells me the average human weighs. Because all I've got to do is google how much the average person eats per day, and that gives me the high end of what the average pony eats.
. . .
Turns out it's four pounds (1.8kg).
And that makes it worse. If their digestive systems still work like IRL equines and they eat four pounds per day, that bumps us all the way up to 14 pounds (6.3kg) of night soil per day. That's fourteen times as much as an average human.
They'd better be building their sewer systems out of boilerplate, and the pipes had better be riveted together. Anything less would be a disaster for Ponyville.
On the plus side, they'd never run out of fertilizer for their fields. Even if the cows go on strike.
Now, some of y'all are probably wondering where all that extra came from. After all, while our ponies might be able to create something out of nothing, it's a pretty safe bet that IRL horses can't.
I'm going to have to disappoint you, because I don't have an exact answer. I'm not an expert in equine digestive systems by any means. I've done a bit of googling here and there when I need to answer a question, but believe me, if you've got a sick horse I'm about the last person you want to call.
I can guess, though.
See, we learn that what goes up must come down; but it's also true what goes in must come out.
An IRL horse drinks about 5-10 gallons (19-38L) per day. Obviously, our little equines wouldn't drink as much. Rough math suggests that they drink about half a percent of their body weight in gallons (yes, we've gotten to the point where we're throwing in non-weight measurements but the math was easier this way). In the case of Applejack, that means that she likely drinks half a gallon to three quarters of a gallon (2-3L) per day, presumably more if she's working hard.
But even here we run into difficulties.
Even if all the water is devoted to poop production, that's only about 5 pounds of water, tops. Add that to the four pounds of food she's eating if she's eating human-style, and you get nine, which I'm pretty confident is less than fourteen.
We haven't got this problem for a full-size horse. 15 pounds of pasture grasses + 83 pounds of water = 50 pounds of poop, as well as the obligatory ability to REDACTED like a racehorse.
I am absolutely certain that I ran afoul of the square cube law up there when I was trying to do math. Curse you, square cube law.
EDIT: More information has come to light; specifically, theRedBrony suggested I look into what miniature horses eat, since they're close to the size and weight of our ponies. [I don't know why I didn't think of that.]
According to MSU, a 200 pound mini-horse should eat between 2-4 pounds a day, and a minimum of 1% of their body weight in forage. It also says that 12-14% protein content is ideal; much more than that and you run the risk of digestive issues.
The article also says how much water they need, and says that you should provide at least 5 gallons/day.
This puts us right where we need to be in terms of poop output: if only one gallon of that water is going to generate poop, that's about eight pounds on top of the food they're eating, and it leaves plenty more to exit the body other ways. So the place where my numbers were off were the amount of water needed to keep things going.
Which I guess means that big horses use their water a lot more efficiently than little horses, because while .5% of body weight might be good enough for a thousand pound horse, those little guys might be drinking 20% of their body weight in water every day.
I had less luck finding a weight number for poop from a mini horse; however, one forum said that a mini donkey (looks to be about the same size) produced between 5 and 8 gallons of poop/day, depending on what it was eating.
Okay, we've got earth ponies sort of covered here. But what about other ponies? After all, there are three tribes. (There are alicorns, too, but it's well known that Princesses Don't Potty).
I don't have an answer for that. Try as I might, I was unable to find any authoritative source that could tell me what the dietary requirements of a pegasus or a unicorn are, nor could I find any good sources of what type of poop, if any, they produce. Squatty Potty is the only source I've found that suggests what a unicorn's output might be, and I'll be honest, if it's really sparkly rainbow soft-serve ice cream, however much they produce isn't enough. The world needs more sparkly rainbow soft-serve ice cream.
Conclusion:
By my rough and ready calculations, assuming that earth ponies are the general fanon size, and Equestria's gravity is about the same as Earth's, really any number between 1 pound and 14 pounds is possible. Probably 1-4 pounds (.5-1.9kg) is the most likely--it's very unlikely to be less than a human.
I'd say that if you happen to need this fact for a story and someone complains about using a number between 1 and 4 pounds, you're welcome to point them right here. This is a service I'm doing for y'all.
Should there happen to be someone who really likes playing with math that wants to apply the square cube rules to this in order to get more uncontestable numbers, you're more than welcome to.* I don't feel like trying to figure it out; it's my birthday, and I shouldn't have to do complicated math on my birthday.
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*following the above link to 'How Much do Ponies Weigh' will give you all the measurements of Applejack vs. Haflinger, as well as the math in the comments.
Yeah, it's my birthday. And I was going to write a nice blog reflection on my forty years of life which would both be inspirational to those younger than myself, and perhaps a touch nostalgic for those who are older.
I was going to do that.
But then I remembered what the great Titanium Dragon said (slightly paraphrased):
I had been wondering what I’d do ... I can’t possibly think of a less respectful use than this.
So there you are. Celebrating 40 years of life by talking about poop.
Its 4 am and I'm reading a blog post on a My Little Pony Fanfiction website on how much cartoon horses shit per day.
What is my life?
Canterlot: every pound of that has to go up the mountain and back down again. Busy, busy train.
harp birt, but you have addressed the first footnote to the wrong person, motherfucker! >:B I will rectify (heh) this oversight.
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You seemed overly excited with the word, so I put it in for you.
There's also a link to Pascoite's story up in the blog post.
My mom grew up in a house without indoor plumbing. Her mother rationed everyone to four squares of toilet paper per day.
My grandparents still lived in that house when I was a little kid. In the middle of town. A very small town, I think about 600 population at that time, though it was up to 900 when I graduated high school and left.
I remember using the outhouse. There was always a nest of paper wasps somewhere in it, and you just knew there were black widows somewhere under the wooden seat. You brought your own TP with you.
I think one of the issues isn't the square-cube law. It's nutrient density. Grass is a really poor source of nutrition, which is part of why horses need to spend so much time eating. With ready access to more efficient sources of nutrients and calories, ponies might need to eat as much or less food by mass than if they grazed. (On the other hand, there aren't any studies on the metabolic demands of magic...)
In any case, I've actually been considering writing a blog or even a story about the possible supernatural properties of alicorn stool. This might be the last bit of encouragement I needed.
Oh, and happy birthday!
Fortunately, if you're still relying on an outhouse, Silver Spanner is more than capable of installing new indoor plumbing in your house.
Dammit PP! Damn you and your nuggets!
Happy B-day!
I can't believe I'd never seen Lauren's string of poop tweets. That's friggin' amazing.
And Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday!!
Happy Birthday!
Happy Biscuitday! I wish I'd known earlier, else I would have gotten you something. But, y'know, at least I feel this is relevant:
pre02.deviantart.net/be5c/th/pre/f/2012/047/d/0/a_mlp_poop_joke_by_shachza-d4py25n.jpg
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Amazing? I mean, it is Biscuit after all.
Happy birthday!
Composting toilets. Farm ponies would love these.
Maybe aerobic treatment plants.
Sewers are to much work/expensive, especially in Ponyville. It wouldnt survive a typical Tuesday.
I would assume Pegasus and Unicorns would have a higher calorie need compared to earth ponies. Unicorns more so if there heavy magic users otherwise prolly not that much. Pegasus because flight.
I would say Pegasus toilets either just rain it on whatever's below them. Or there incinerating it with lightning.
Also Happy Hatching Day !!
Calling it now: Pegasus cloud homes that have to coexist with poor unfortunate ground-bound settlements use a- not quite a cesspool- hmm- ah yes, a cessballoon.
This is the best thing I've read all year.
Admiral...
Wat R U Doing
Admiral...
Stahp
(happy birthday)
Happy Birthday, Biscuit! Hope you don't have a crappy day! (Snrk)
I loved ever minute of this and it just proves what a genius you truly are!
Also, happy birthday, Biscuit! Have a good cake?
Are you a bit tipsy from birthday stuff, by any chance?
You had to link to that story.
And I had to click on this blog entry while eating.
All that said, remember important headcanon (which the show confirms in many places): earth ponies weigh, and eat, many times over what other pony types do.
Happy Biscuit Day!
And I want more people to develop extensive research to this because it's hilarious to me.
Also given the size of the alicorns this produces several hilariously bad potential story ideas just germinating in it.
I both love and hate you for that.
Happy Biscuit day, and congratulations on taking more time than anyone ever reasonably should to think about magical friendship horse poop.
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At least you're not the one who wrote it.
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Maybe what we don't see on the other side of the Canterhorn or whatever that mountain is called is the dumping grounds of all their waste. Which by now has got to be a respectable mountain as well.
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I think that I remember some of the students that I went to high school with didn't have indoor plumbing, although maybe I'm remembering. I know a lot of people around where I live that are a generation older than me still had outhouses on their farms.
Oh, yeah, wasps. Little bastards. We don't have black widows in Michigan, which is nice. That's one thing we don't have to worry about.
No really poisonous snakes, either. There's the Mississauga rattler, but he's not very poisonous.
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She is indeed, and you can be sure it won't leak.
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It is for sure. I'd guess that a thousand pound horse that grazes would eat much more than a thousand pound human who eats Happy Meals. But it's not a simple ratio, because when I downscaled it, ponies wound up eating less weight of food than humans, and also drink less water, and I very much doubt that would actually be the case.
The square cube law probably isn't the one that I actually want, but I think the idea of some kind of ratio like that is what I need. I suspect that food intake requirements don't size in the same way as bodyweight does. I'm not sure, though--not a biologist.
What's really needed is more research. If I can find good numbers on how much a Shetland pony poops, and how much a draft horse poops, I can probably work out a rough curve from that and see what happens.
Oh, you totally should.
Thank you!
Pheobe and Her Unicorn has Todd the Candy Dragon
assets.amuniversal.com/a37bc3e0be830130e74e001dd8b71c47
4623690 Dont stand under the brown clouds when it's raining. That's not chocolate milk.
"Applejack's house has a pump faucet on the sink, and although I'm almost positive we've never seen it, they almost certainly have an outhouse."
Perfect Pair episode has Granny going out to the outhouse to 'wash up'
4623550 ... or even a story about the possible supernatural properties of alicorn stool.
"Twilight." Spike nudged his roommate/adopted mother/sister/hatch-er with one shoulder until she looked up from the book she was reading. "I was thinking. We've been living in this library tree for over a year now, right?"
"One year, three weeks, and a day," said Twilight, placing a wing over her book so she would not lose her place. "Since it's been just over three weeks since Pinkie Pie threw us that anniversary party. Why do you ask?"
"It's just something Applejack mentioned to me while we were at the party." Spike bit his bottom lip and put his comic book to one side. "She said every other house and business in Ponyville is attached to the town septic system except for the library."
"Oh, really?" Twilight thought about it for a moment. "The sinks, toilets, and bathtub must drain into the library root system, keeping it watered and fertilized in exchange for the tree providing storage and shelter for the library. It would seem like a very advantageous system for a tree."
"Uh-huh. And that means for the last year, the tree has been getting fertilized with dragon poop, and now with alicorn poop too, right?"
"Spike, don't use the word poop." Twilight frowned. "But yes, the tree would have been using our... waste for that amount of time. Why are you bringing that up now?"
"Well, for the last few months, I've been finding evidence that somepony else has been reading my comic books." Spike picked up a dry oak leaf out of his comic and held it up. "Or sometree."
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/7b/9d/6c/7b9d6c012d20cc1bac03f92f23da3e8d--pinkie-pie-pony.jpg
So like, yeah, there's a bit of a deficit if a horse eats 1.5% of their body weight per day, and shits 5%. If an average horse drinks about 5-10 gallons a day, and a quick google indicates they piss about 4 gallons a day, there is a difference but still a large deficit! I think the real problem here is that we're taking numbers from all sorts of different studies, and there's sadly not one study that actually measures the inputs and outputs of average horses...
You mentioned it, but really, we have little evidence of the typical pony diet. Hay seems to be considered a crappy food for greasy burgers and fries, though they do have greasy ass oat burgers, too. Flowers seem to be for salads and occasional fancy sandwiches. Grass has only been mentioned once as a base for grass pancakes, but very early in the show when things like that were still kind of throw-away jokes. They have staples like potatoes, corn, and bread. Fruit and vegetables, eggs, milk, and they seem to be fond of desserts. What we do have evidence of, is that we know for sure that they're not grazing all the time... or nibbling might be a more appropriate human term. They seem to like eating, like anybody, but they appear to have the same 3 meals a day, with the occasional brunch just like we do.
And the main reason a horse shits so much is because they eat so much. As you said, they have to eat a lot to stay alive, and the reason for that is because the plant matter they eat is so damn hard to extract nutrients from. Hay and grass is one of the hardest things for any animal to digest - the reason why cows have 4 stomachs and have to vomit up their food to chew it again. What happens is that a lot of the input goes straight to output without having been digested at all, especially in a horse, which is not a ruminant animal. With a much more rich and diverse diet, this shouldn't be a thing.
In short: we know too little!
That was weirdly intersting. Thank you for sharing your work with us. I would like to see a peer review of it by another poopologist.
By the way, happy birthday Biscuit.
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Add some more exposure, and...
Tirek blinked, stunned long enough to get blindsided by the alicorn's next blast. Even as he fought back, he found himself struggling not to go over the event in his mind.
For all the times he'd launched devastating spells at buildings, that was the first time one had dodged.
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Nopony ever goes into the Canterlot Caverns...
Took me a minute, but I got it. Would've gone right over my head if you hadn't said anything
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Present loves his fibrous nuggets.
Thank you!
I have not had a cake yet, and unless people at the gathering I'm going to tonight remember it's my birthday, I probably won't. That's all right, though.
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Thank you!
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Isn't it just? The question still remains about how canon an answer that is . . . I mean, it is word of Faust. . . .
Thank you!
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Thanks!
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I did strongly consider including it.
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Thank you!
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In a way, a traditional, well-designed outhouse is basically a composting toilet. And I've got to figure lots of farm ponies shovel those things out every now and then and add it to their compost heaps in order to spread on next year's crops . . . it only makes sense. And I think if done right, there's little to no chance of actually transmitting disease that way (although I'm not 100% sure)
Maybe they bury the pipes really deep.
We know that they have running water to at least some homes in town, which suggests a functioning sewer system of some type. Technically, though, you could certainly have one without the other.
That's hard to say. If we assume that earth ponies have some sort of earth-based magic (growing crops, for example), than all three tribes might use magic at about the same rate. Plus, we don't know if they get the energy for magic through food or some other way. [I do think that in general, earth ponies are the heaviest and pegasi are the lightest.]
It's one of those things where I think there isn't really a wrong answer, and arguments could be made for many different theories. By your idea, I'd say that either Pinkie Pie or Twilight Sparkle eat the most, and Fluttershy the least (given that she hardly ever flies).
I could see them just letting it fly out in the wilderness, but they'd have to come up with a different solution when they live near town. Rainbow isn't going to get a very good price on food at the market after some poor farmer suffered through a chocolate rain, no matter who actually did it.
I do like the lightning idea; I've heard that the US Navy at one point had some sort of electrical incinerating toilets on some of their ships. I don't know any more details than that.
Thank you!
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The biggest problem I can see with a cessballoon is that you need some kind of a burner to keep the hot air hot and keep the balloon aloft. Combine that with the methane coming off the cessballoon holding tank, and you've got the potential for a rather spectacular, smelly disaster.
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I aims to please.
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It's a public service for y'all.
Thanks!
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I had a pretty good day, actually. Easy day at work, left early, and then had some beers with fellow authors and a couple of moderators. Wanderer D said, right when I walked up, that he was thinking of banning that guy who'd just written a blog post about poop, and we all had a good laugh at that.
Not a genius when it comes to math, I'll admit that much. Glad you enjoyed it, though. It's the kind of thing that lots of people speculate on, but nobody's ever written a blog post on the subject as far as I know.
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Nope! Didn't start drinking until well after this was published.
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There's no wrong time for Science!
Especially Pinkie Pie. I bet she's a champion pooper.
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Thank you!
I know, right? They really ought to. I do have a vet who says she's going to go over this and maybe she can provide more information . . . I might have to do a follow-up blog!
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Thank you! For both things.
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I really, really need to catch up on that comic. Like, devote a whole day to just reading it.
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This is why I totally need to catch up on episodes. Plus, I've heard Perfect Pair is really, really good.
I would read the heck out of something like that. You should turn it into a whole story.
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You're quite welcome!
My ex girlfriend, who's a vet, said she wants to read through it. So if she does, I think that counts as a peer review. Especially since she's got a doctorate.
Thank you!
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Maybe this is how Whomping Willows get made. Or Ents. Or both.
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It started out as a crystal mine, and now it's just a convenient place to put . . . things. Maybe the mine cart in there is for servicing the sewer system.
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I've only ever known one other person who knew the whole ditty, although it had to have come from somewhere. My friend isn't smart enough to have made it up himself.
I did some looking online, and found a version of it collected in kids songs and rhymes.
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With guilt, though. She hates to be a party pooper.
Happy Birthday Admiral Biscuit.
After the 40th birthday a man doesn’t get old, he only gets more interesting, there is a life after. I know what I am talking about.
As always, when you are writing about math, it gives a math noob like me a nasty headache but thank you for that.
So, this makes me think of an earth pony nurse on a ward with many bedridden patients and the bedpan, pony nurses would need really strong neck muscles and no bedpan washer far and wide, poor pony.
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Well, unless she's having a poop party. Also, related:
camo.derpicdn.net/c74ecdc6abc2ec58afc0034c718efb1d3df39325?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpre02.deviantart.net%2Fbe5c%2Fth%2Fpre%2Ff%2F2012%2F047%2Fd%2F0%2Fa_mlp_poop_joke_by_shachza-d4py25n.jpg
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Thank you!
That's what I'm hoping for.
It gives me headaches, too. I'm not very good at math.
Honestly, of all the ponies we've seen in the show, Redheart and company probably put up with about the worst of everything.
There's probably not much that fazes them anymore. And I can't help but think that some days they're probably wishing that the worst thing to happen is carrying full bedpans.
For what it's worth, in one of my stories, the farm repair pony is pretty pragmatic about poop.
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What I suspect is that their food requirements aren't on a linear scale. My guess would be that smaller horses eat a proportionately larger amount of food . . . just the water seems to indicate that--half a percent of their body weight per day might work okay for a full-grown horse, but there's no way a human-sized horse could survive on only .5L/day, not unless they're getting tons of water in their food.
I think if I could find numbers for a draft horse and a shetland pony, I could get a better idea of the curve.
I do know from Dirty Jobs that there is a research facility in Kentucky that does study the inputs and outputs of horses--they develop feeds and other things for racehorses, so it's important to know. (That's also the first place I saw a video of a full-size horse treadmill in action.) Odds are I could do a lot of digging and maybe come up with some usable numbers from one of their studies.
Yeah, the show isn't exactly consistent with their typical diet. I guess that's not really the kind of thing that they'd really focus on anyways. Show evidence suggests to me that food baked from grains or pasture grasses is pretty common (bread, pancakes, stuff like that), and that they probably eat a lot of raw fruit and vegetables as their typical diet. They also eat flowers, and I seem to recall in one episode, Twilight was snacking on them right out of a vase. I think we've seen ponies eating out of flowerbeds before, too, but I could be wrong about that.
Obviously, they have desserts, and equally obviously they're popular enough to support a store which mostly sells sweet goods.
I tend to assume that the typical diet varies from tribe to tribe, with rural pegasi tending to have the most 'traditional' diet, since I tend to think that most pegasi are terrible cooks, if for no other reason than putting a stove in a cloudhouse is an exercise in stupidity.
Yeah, they do deviate from normal horse behavior in that they only eat three meals a day (and sleep during the night instead of the day). Then again, we don't have the same diet as our monkey ancestors (or even our cavemen ancestors), so. . . .
Agreed. There are some herbivores which give the output a second run-through to extract more nutrients from it. I think that's why horses have the cecum--it's sort of a holding and processing facility for partially-digested food.
What I do find interesting is that by my simple (probably biologically incorrect) food scaling is that people eat more weight in food than the math (which is probably wrong) suggests a human-sized pony would. Based on the nutrition density of the different foods, that shouldn't be the case at all.
Agreed!
What I'd assume--what my gut is telling me is correct--is that ponies probably eat and drink about twice as much as a human of the same weight, and that they also therefore poop about twice as much. I think the biggest variable, and one I don't have the answer to, is how much more efficient are ponies at getting nutrients out of plants than humans? I mean, supposedly celery is a net loss food; it takes more calories to digest raw celery than you get from it, since it's not something our digestive system is designed to survive on. Obviously, we can't digest grass at all (or very, very little). A horse--and by extension, a pony--can, which makes me wonder if something like celery would be a good source of calories for them?
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Can't say I'm terribly familiar with that version, to be honest. I grew up with similar songs, like Miss Suzy, and Vito Petroccitto Jr. did his own version some years back, though it switches out "cornhusks and taters" for "refuse and litter", among other changes. This seems to be closest to the version you're thinking of