Shower Thoughts #58: herbivore vs carnivore appearances, in relation to pony reactions to HiE. · 1:08am Mar 17th, 2018
I don't remember why I felt like searching this up. I think it was in reflection of some edits that gave a horse the giant mouths one usually associates with carnivores, like a dog. It made me wonder why herbivores tended to have small mouths, and carnivores have large mouths. Then I ended up looking at even more anatomical differences. Long story short, small mouths are due to needing lips to pull plant matter in, while in carnivores they needed to wrap their jaws around large limbs and crush.
Now consider other externals that a pony might see that could imply meat eating. Small mouths are already a point against it.
Binocular vision .... it seems that pretty much all sapients on horseland have binocular vision. Goddamn angel bunny is drawn with forward eyes because art style.
Then there's what seems to come up a lot: Canines (the teeth). I looked in the mirror this morning and they're barely visible among all the other teeth, which coincidentally (hee) are also herbivore style, with a lot of flat, close together slicing teeth at the front and grinding molars in the back. Welp.
If one could see teeth, there's also a good chance one can see the tongue, and for the most part, carnivores seem to have flatter tongues since their only job is to push the food into the back of the throat. Herbivores need to push the food around the mouth to help them grind the plants better.
And finally, there's our fingers, and you know, Spike has more dangerous fingertips than we do, since they're actually pointy.
Really, the only way a pony would know would be if you told them, and I'm pretty sure at least some know that griffons exist.
Interesting factoid: Humans (and herbivores in general) have at most a stomach pH level of 4-5. Carnivores regularly go down to 1-2 in order to vaporize raw meat. Instead of cleansing acid, we use cleansing fire (heat) to prevent infection.
Interesting.