An Informed Guide to the Reality of Ponies · 2:57am Jun 3rd, 2018
An Informed Guide to the Reality of Ponies
In My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, most people who have tried to estimate pony heights have chosen apples as the only constant between our world and theirs. They seem to all agree that an apple is about four-inches (10.1 cm) tall, based on nice juicy apples in our world -- and Applejack only grows nice juicy apples, right?
The only problem with this is that the animators tend to be rather inconsistent in the sizes of the ponies in different episodes. But, usually, when apples are shown they are consistently the same size in relation to the ponies.
I’ve seen other measurements attempted, but they choose items that are arbitrary in height, such as a candy cane that Twilight said was eight feet tall (243 cm), but we have no way of knowing if her definition of a foot is the same as ours, and thus it is unreliable. ( And where did they come up with that? They all have hooves! Griffons have paws and claws. Just, why is that word even in their vocabulary!) Or assuming that a doorway is six-feet six inches (198 cm) high when there is NO standard for door heights in the our world (doorways in Japan are notably shorter than in Denmark). Or using other self-referential measurements that cannot be reliably assigned to human equivalents.
Apples, at least, on average, appear to have a fairly uniform size on earth and do not vary widely in size in the same types when properly cared for.
However, before we can measure their height, we have to have a definition of what we’re measuring. People are measured from the top of their head to the floor, with their shoulders back and back straight. However, ponies and horses can move their head forward and back, changing their height, and making their height impossible to measure accurately. As a result, horses and ponies in our world are measured from the root of the lowest, last hair of their mane to the ground.
The people equivalent is standing up straight, with your shoulders level. Place a stick across your shoulders and place your hand across your neck on the stick. The last root-hair of your head-hair is about two fingers above the stick. Hairs below this point do not grow longer than an inch or so. Hairs above this point grow up to several feet in length. Thus, that’s where horses are measured for height.
In the show, we can estimate that measuring point on the ponies as the shoulder, as seen from a side profile, as the artists seem to use the ponies shoulders as the cut off point for most manes. Using this method yields an average height for the Mane Six of about six apples, twenty-four inches (61 cm), according to the ones I’ve seen here and here.
This makes the average pony about knee-height for most adult people. And remember, we're talking about the height of the ponies' backs.
For traditionally short peoples, like the Indonesians (male: five-feet two-inches, 158 cm; female: four-feet ten-inches, 147 cm), the ponies would be above knee-height. For traditionally tall people, like the Danes and Dutch (male: six-feet zero-inches, 183.2 cm; female: five-feet seven-inches, 169.9 cm), the ponies would be below their knees.
Still, about knee height.
And, from Equestria girls, Fervidor was kind enough to make this comparison, using Fluttershy's beloved rabbits. From this, if we assume that the rabbits are the same size here as there, then, again, we see that the ponies are about knee-high.
But what does that mean in terms of weight, though?
Here we see those intrepid pioneers in pony measurements again resorting to apples, their volume, and quite a lot of hand-waving and guessing. Or just plain saying they weigh the same as people.
There is a better way, however.
In our world there is a breed of horse known as miniature horses. A miniature horse is defined as any horse that is under thirty-four inches (88 cm) tall. A miniature horse is not a pony, although ponies are defined simply as horses smaller than 4-feet 10-inches (147 cm).
The miniature horse definition excludes dwarfism afflicted horses, such as the tiny horse Thumbalina (1-foot, 5-in, 43 cm tall, weight: 57 lb, 26 kg), which is very small indeed. Miniature horses, by definition, are fully formed duplicates of a normal horse, only smaller, with all the features proportioned properly for their size. Not a part of that definition, though, is that unlike many ponies, miniature horses contain the horse phenotype as part of their genetic code.
From Equi-Analytical Labs I pulled a chart of “Weight and Height Ranges for Common Breeds.” In that chart is this entry:
.
Miniature Horse, American, 198-496 pounds (90-225 kg), 24-35 inches (60-90 cm) tall.
.
A nearly perfect match of a twenty-four inch tall miniature horse to Twilight and company in MLP!
So, if Twilight teleported to Earth she would weight around 198 pounds (90 kg) as a pony. And if she stood on her rear legs she could look you in the eyes if you were an average-height girl!
But, for a human girl of about eighteen to weigh 198 pounds would make her very big, even though all that extra weight is muscle (remember, the Mane Six walk almost EVERYWHERE). In fact, from an “Ideal Height/Weight” chart she would have to be six feet three inches (190.5 cm) tall to avoid looking like an over-muscled freak! And this even accounts for the fact that the extra weight is muscle and not fat (which takes up three times the space that muscle does). If you make that extra mass fat, well, all the Mane Six look obese and not just over-weight.
Now, I wouldn’t mind Twilight or Rainbow Dash being that tall (though thinking of Fluttershy being that tall and trying to hide all the time is hilarious), but they certainly wouldn’t be those cute little girls shown in Equestria Girls! The mirror portal must have trimmed a few pounds off. Or compressed their mass to fit the smaller package.
You could, of course, say that the girls are taller than average, say five-feet ten-inches (177 cm), and that the extra mass came out as rather large “DD” cup chests for the Mane Six (“DD” breasts are about twenty-three pounds (10.45 kg) total for an average height and weight adult woman). That would still give them slim figures.
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What are the implications for If Wishes were Ponies?
First, I’m assuming that the ponies and fillies are all average in height for their ages (except Harry), and that the extra mass is just extra-dense muscle, so they don’t appear freakishly tall to everyone. Or freakishly over-muscled.
Second, the fillies are eleven years old, same as Harry. Or perhaps a bit older by half-a-dozen months. Harry is under-sized from his nutrition at the hands of the Dursleys, so his height and weight are about two years behind the fillies. (In real life, based on what Harry said regarding his meals and how skimpy/few they were in the books, he would have been behind in physical growth by at least one, if not two, years.)
From New Parent via Quora, the average weight for an eleven-year-old girl is about ninety-three pounds (40 kg). Given that the ponies appear to have forty percent more mass, as adults, than humans, the fillies should weigh somewhere between ninety-three pounds (40 kg) and one-hundred-thirty pounds (59 kg) each. Heavy, but certainly well with range for cuddling when in pony form.
Picking them up, however, would require much more than a little strength. It would be well out of the ability of most high-school-aged girls, given that the ponies probably would weigh more than the girls trying to pick them up!
For comparison, Einstein, the smallest miniature horse in the world, measures twenty-inches tall and just over one hundred pounds (45.5kg), meaning the fillies, being taller as ponies, would weigh more (see below). Which fits in with my estimates on the weight differences between humans and ponies.
Naturally, this extra-dense muscle makes them stronger and have more stamina than the other students.
Using the same chart, the fillies would be around four-feet ten-inches (147 cm) tall as children their age. Using the same sizing proportions of girls-to-adults from the charts on the fillies-to-adult ponies gives us a filly height of twenty-one inches (53 cm). Notice this is just an inch (2.54 cm) taller than Einstein, so the greater volume of their larger size as ponies would indeed make them heavier than a normal girl of the same age. I doubt it would be a full forty-percent, however.
Twenty percent additional would be more likely, which is what I decided to use. (That is, if you assume a barrel diameter (a horse's torso is called a barrel) of ten inches (25.4 cm) and leg length of ten inches (25.4 cm), for a total height of twenty (50.8 cm), and then increase the barrel to eleven inches (28 cm), you get a difference in volume of about eighteen percent. A horse's barrel, of course, is not a perfect circle, so that number is very approximate. But it gets us on the football field, at least.)
Thus, the three fillies in my story weigh around one-hundred twelve pounds (50.7 kg), and are about twenty-percent heavier than the average student their age. They are four-feet ten-inches (147 cm) tall as students, which is average for their ages, and twenty-one inches (53 cm) tall as ponies, also average for fillies in Equestria about their ages).
Harry (remember he’s about two years behind everyone else in physical development) is four-feet five-inches (109 cm) tall and weighs seventy-nine pounds (36 kg) as a person (remember, he weighs twenty-percent more — coming from what Equestria would consider normal weight for his height — and he’s had a whole year to put on the extra mass). He is nineteen inches (48.2 cm) tall as a pony-colt.
So, as ponies, Harry’s and the fillies’ backs are at nineteen-inches (48.2 cm) and twenty-one inches (53 cm) tall, respectively, and are barely knee-high for most adults, and above knee-high for students close to their own ages. Their heads add about eight-inches (20.4 cm) to that height. Meaning that most tables would be just brushing their ears as they walked under them.
And the unicorns’ horns would be pointed at your belly button.
And with their overly large eyes and short stature, they would be irresistibly adorable and cute to any girl under the age of eighteen.
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But what if a human went to Equestria through the portal and became a pony, as Harry did?
That’s fairly simple. If an average height adult went through they would look like an anorexic pony as their age and weight would make them severely underweight (remember that 40% more mass issue a pony has). So, this would be like seeing a one hundred fifty-five pound (70.5 kg) male at five-feet ten-inches (178 cm) height (average height/weight adult) compared to a man of the same height but weighing just ninety-three pounds (42.7 kg) — ribs are easily visible, joints stick out markedly from muscles, muscles look as if they are barely covering the bones, and their face is thin and gaunt.
However, their coat, mane, and tail would look nice and shiny — like healthy hair should. That’s because he/she would be perfectly healthy, or at least as healthy as they were back on Earth, and wouldn’t notice anything different other than the obvious change in form.
The first thing a pony would do is start stuffing them with food!
Of course, you could make your protagonist forty pounds (18 kg) or so overweight. Not exactly a stretch of the imagination if you’re a lazy, out-of-shape American who spends all his/her free time parked in front of a computer or console game! And has a sedentary indoor job (like me).
Or, if you want, make them a couple of inches shorter than the other ponies at about twenty-to-twenty-one inches (50.8-53.3 cm). This would allow their weight to remain the same as back home.
Naturally, everypony would mistake them for a colt or filly at first sight, which would lead to quite a few problems for the hero/ine.
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Age! How Long do they live?
Aging is another issue. Miniature horses live about twenty-five to thirty-five years, with one, Angel, a dwarf miniature horse who lived with the Horse Protection Society of North Carolina, among the oldest living miniature horses at an age of over fifty.
Humans, by contrast have an average lifespan of eighty to eighty-five years for females and seventy-five to eighty years for males -- from Global Burden of Disease 2010 study (I sorted by highest and took the highs and lows of the top thirty-six countries. Countries below those have poor healthcare systems and disease is a major influence, not lifestyle). Indonesian Saparman Sodimejo, known more commonly as Mbah Gothoongest, was claimed to be 146 at his death on April 30, 2017. The longest verified human lifespan is Jeanne Calment of France (1875–1997), who lived to the age of 122.
So, humans live about two-and-a-half times longer than miniature ponies.
However, in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, we have Granny Apple stating she remembers the founding of Ponyville (and enough jokes about how silly that is as a town/village name. Have you plebeians never heard of The Isle of Man off the coast of Britain? Or how about the three different towns across the USA named Mannville? And then there’s the village of Buen Hombre — Friendly Man — in the Dominican Republic. There is even a Humansville in Polk County, Missouri! Not to mention the tremendous number of people whose names are derivatives or translations of the word "Man").
Remembering the founding should make her almost three hundred years old.
On the other hand, in Harry Potter, we have wizards and witches who appear to live twice as long as the average person.
So, perhaps magic goes a long way in extending your lifespan!
Because my story involves the Harry Potter world, I’m just gonna say that magic is the solution, and that Equestrian ponies, in their much more magically intense environment, live longer than wizards and witches on Earth.
Thus, ponies who immigrate to Earth will see a decrease in life-span longevity, and wizards and witches who move to Equestria will see longer lifespans. Visiting for an extended period of time, say a decade or so, will have little to no effect.
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Food! Glorious Food!
Ponies and horses, contrary to popular opinion, can eat meat. Meat is a high-protein food source, and all animals require protein. First, check this out:
Herbivores have special digestive bacteria in their stomachs that process the plant material ingested and produce proteins. The proteins are then digested in the lower intestinal tracts. However, it takes a great deal of plant-eating, and time, to get that protein.
Carnivores lack those plant-specific bacteria, but instead get their protein directly from the animals they eat. To carnivores, herbivores have done all the hard work of converting lots of plant material into proteins, saving them a significant amount of time and energy.
Which is why we see carnivores lazing around in the background of all those Wild Africa films while the herbivores are busy spending the entire day filling their stomachs with plant material. The carnivores can afford to lazy around and do nothing for the entire day because herbivores are such high protein packages!
Normally, herbivores are defined as an animal that eats only plant material. However, herbivores can eat meat (i.e., mad-cow disease is spread by cattle eating meat by-products — lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, etc. — from slaughter houses that are recycled into protein pellets for resale to cattle-ranchers — which is spread to people who then eat the steaks from the cows that ate contaminated pellets).
A horse or pony can be given meat, they can digest it. This doesn't mean that a regular diet of meat in the long-term is a good thing. Deadly Equines, The Shocking True Story of Meat-Eating & Murderous Horses, by CuChullaine O'Reilly, the Founder of the Long Riders’ Guild, explores the fact that horses can and do eat meat (and can behave in quite violent manners to get it).
As The Spruce Pet puts it, “However, that they can and do eat meat does not mean that they should. A horse may be trained to eat meat, or it may be driven to it by need. This doesn’t mean that a regular diet of meat in the long-term is a good thing. Your horse may like an occasional bite of your hamburger or tuna sandwich and can eat it without harm. However, since we don’t know the long-term effects on most horses, a diet high in meat would be inadvisable (along with expensive). Horses have the teeth and digestive system of a highly specialized herbivore. Few of us are going to take our horses on Antarctic expeditions and our horses will likely be healthiest eating the diet their digestive system evolved to digest.” (The reference to Antarctic expeditions refers to many extremely cold-weather climates where shipping meat as a source of protein for horses and ponies is much cheaper than shipping many more tons of hay. Or, for example, in Tibet, where the mountain ponies are fed blood-soaked hay and grass to provide them the protein they need to survive the long winters when normal feed is limited.)
Thus, for a pony-civilization, eating meat might be considered unusual, or restricted to those who are rich enough to afford buying meat. Considering that most of the animals we consider food (buffaloes, cows, sheep, rabbits, birds, etc.) are intelligent in MLP, their sources for meat are rather restricted — primarily fish, I would guess. And maybe snakes.
It is easy to imagine the ultra-rich unicorn or earth ponies throwing parties where they show off their wealth by serving tuna casseroles, baked stuffed shrimp, or caviar. And that there are a few very expensive restaurants in Canterlot and Manehattan that have meat dishes for their more “refined” clientele. Cloudsdale, on the other hand, would have many restaurants and grocers where fish are readily available.
Pegasi would be partial to eating meat on a semi-regular basis, especially fish, because flying undoubtedly takes more energy than walking or standing behind a counter. And that higher energy requirement would also explain their penchant for napping — conserving their energy reserves. Either for their strenuous activities just completed or for later on. In both cases, high-energy food packets would be a regular necessity.
Their greater mobility would make it possible for them to fly to lakes or nearby seas and do a bit of “dive fishing” for tasty bits of protein packages, instead of stalking their dinner in difficult-to-manoeuvre-in forests. Or groups of them could drag nets through the waters to catch larger numbers of fish.
Unicorns wouldn’t need nearly as much protein unless they are casting large amounts of magic on a regular basis, or are about to or have just completed magically exhausting activities.
So, for If Wishes were Ponies, ponies eat meat. Most unicorns and earth ponies are appalled at the thought, or even repulsed, but high-energy-users such as pegasi, and very powerful unicorns like Twilight and Shining Armour, do so on a regular or semi-regular basis, and especially before or after exceptionally-taxing activities.
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Family Units
All mammals have babies in equal male/female ratios. That is, there are just as many male as female babies born, on average. Humans, for example, have more boys born than girls, ~ 1.07:1.00. With onset of puberty it begins to fall until there are more females than males. The fall in male numbers is attributed to “risky behaviour” by adolescent males. (Otherwise known as "Hey, guys, watch this!")
Horses and ponies raised on ranches reflect that fact. There are just as many fillies born as colts. And, under the protection of the rancher, the ratio of adult stallions to adult mares is roughly equal.
Horses and ponies in the wild, however, have an average of one adult stallion for every three adult mares. What happened to the other two stallions?
Nature happened. Once a colt becomes a stallion, he leaves the herd. Because the stallion is no longer in a herd, he has to survive without the benefit of other ponies keeping watch while he eats or sleeps. This increases the stress on the pony’s body and reduces his stamina. These facts make lone stallions easier prey for predators, hence reducing their numbers.
Stallions do form small groups for mutual protection, but they also frequently fight, leading to injuries which, again, makes them more susceptible to ending up as a predator’s meal.
My Little Pony is a show for little girls by Hasbro and intended to assist Hasbro in the selling of products aimed at little girls. The emphasis of the animation is going to be on figures and situations the little girls can put themselves into, that they can pretend they are the character portrayed in a particular situation.
This means that the emphasis is going to be on female protagonists and female antagonists. The in-show ponies are made old enough so that they can “appear” to be living without parental involvement, or interference.
And that means that you simply are not going to see many male characters interacting with the female heroines and villains.
But let’s see what the show actually gives us. From the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic wikia , which has a list of all the in-show ponies seen (including background ponies) we get:
◾ Mare: 1270 (42.52%)
◾ Stallion: 1008 (33.75%)
◾ Filly: 276 (9.24%)
◾ Colt: 106 (3.55%)
That makes a male-to-female ratio of 3:4. Not a bad match to what one would expect for mammals. Given the show’s focus on female characters, it shouldn’t be a surprise that most of the characters seen are female. After all, if this were G.I Joe, which is aimed at boys, we should expect to see mostly male characters, right? The skewed numbers for colts and fillies is simply a reflection of their age group interactions (girls at that age primarily play with other little girls, ditto for boys), and that the show is focused on female characters. Male characters are little more than plot devices.
So, Equestrian ponies, just like ponies here on Earth, have a gender ratio of 1:1.
However, because ponies in the wild have a ratio of one stallion for every three mares, we can play with those numbers in any way we desire.
Given the fact that there are three sub-species (earth, pegasus, and unicorn) that have genetics that can pass over generations (the Cakes, both Earth ponies, having unicorn and pegaus children indicates that their genetic code is a lot more complex than ours), it’s not a small jump to argue that the gender ratio is likewise skewed from what other mammals on their world might experience.
Meaning the gender of a foal is not simply a single gene donated by the father, but a part of a set of the six genes from both parents that determine the foals sub-species.
Furthermore, if the parental ancestral lineage for several generations on both sides is one particular sub-species, then the foal will very likely match its parents. The closer to the parents an ancestor is that was a different species, the higher the possibility that the foal will not be the same sub-species as the parents. Assuming, of course, that both parents are the same sub-species.
For If Wishes were Ponies that is the direction I chose. The complexity of the sub-species genetics means that there is a gender ratio of one colt for every three fillies.
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This is must better as a blog post then a story....
This matters more for you as the writer then us as the reader.. For those inte4restted they can find it easily enough and if not they can keep trucking along in the story and not deal with a sudden stop full on infodump.
An impressive amount of reasoning. But a well defined system is always appreciated.
I do have to point out one potential flaw with your reasoning about size, musculature and weight.
AJ and Dash are shown to be exceptionally strong but they have the exact same build as Fluttershy, a pony who is known to be physically weak.
4875466
Muscle density?
4875482
Yes, that is the simple explanation, pony muscles just get denser and not bigger when you exercise them.
But it would still mess with the height-weight-muscle ratio if some ponies were heavier while being the same size and shape. Then there's Bulk Biceps.
Also,imagine that rainbow Dash would be much heavier than the average pegasi, and still she is one of the most agile flyers in Equestria.
4875524
Well then you have the complications (as he started making things up) of magic. Ponies might have something, let's call them "mana channels", that allows magic to flow through them, to empower them beyond their otherwise physical limits.
But, as I said, I'm just making things up.
4875466
Very true, but the show itself has many contradictions in that regards -- for example, Bulk has SMALLER wings than both Fluttershy and Scootaloo, yet has more "strength" for flying than both. And if his wings are smaller than Scootaloos, why can't she fly?
For AJ and Dash I can cop-out and say she draws that extra strength from the earth, just as Dash is using her pegasus abilities to pull more magic from the air. That's why their races are so close -- both are using their magical abilities to boost their stamina and speed. Other ponies aren't as powerful or fast because they haven't improved their innate ability to use magic in such a manner. Like muscles, the more you use your magic, the more you can use your magic.
Bulk Bicep, by comparison, has not bothered to use his magic to improve his strength, but instead chose to concentrate on his actual muscles (not his flight strength, like Dash, or he would probably beat her as the fastest flyer). Hence his over muscled appearance yet poor performance as a pegasus flyer.
4875482
Just to throw this out, chimpanzees are seven times stronger than humans even though their muscles are roughly the same size.
Geez this is alot of information. Personally, based on Equestria Girls, I've always placed ponies at about waste height, course this varies from person to person. The basic idea being that when standing on their hind legs a pony would be as tall as their human counterpart. I'm also a fan of cat sized ponies so I'm not too picky about it.
4882413
Ah, yes, but if you look at animals that are waist height (their backs to our waist) for people they are incredibly heavy. A 34" tall miniature pony hits the scale at between 400 and 500 pounds, depending on exact breed. Tigers and other felines are the similar. At waist height to a human, their weight easily passes 600-800 pounds. I had a friend who had two St. Bernards, both were about waist height to me, both topped the scales at 450 pounds. For the St. Bernards, both TOWERED over me when they stood on their hind legs, and I'm five-foot eleven inches, ~ 180 cm.
We used to have German Shepards, all three were between knee and waist high on me (my little sister used to ride them when she was a toddler). When they stood on their hind legs, they were easily my height, and weighted more than I did (my weight was 135 pounds, 61 kg, at the time).
So, I'm very comfortable with my numbers.
4882438
No no I get what your reasoning is, I'm just saying the animators didn't put as much thought into it so neither do I. I just prefer to keep things simple, it is a cartoon after all.
There's no clear answer so people are generally free to come up with their own ideas and to me waist height makes the most sense.
4882440
Oh, yeah. It's a kids cartoon. It's not like they have scientists on staff proof-reading their scripts and critiquing their artwork for accuracy. Heck, they don't even bother to keep a proper Show Bible to keep things consistent between the episodes, comic issues, and movies.
The ponies in MLP:FiM are vegetarians, but aren't explicitly vegan. They have a preference for an herbivorous diet, and FiM avoids the G3 gaffe of Carnivore Confusion that happened a few times The fact that they consume milk and that eggs are also a component of many recipes, shows that they're omnivorous, though heavily preferential towards an herbivorous diet.
Your reasoning for meat being a part of the diets of pegasi and magically powerful unicorns makes sense as well. They burn a lot of energy for what the do, but it is otherwise a luxury food. The use of fish makes sense due to the commonality of fish and the fact that chickens are more useful for their eggs, giving a renewable source of protein.
As for pony genetics, you're a little off there. Gender is determined by the father, while the type of pony can be determined from up to six sources, three from the mother, three from the father (if they have ancestors who were other pony types than their own). Even then, if both parents are only type of pony, then it is likely that that the foals will be that type. The Pumpkin and Pound Cake came as a surprise to everyone, though their parents knew about how it came about, so it was a possibility.
And that doesn't answer whether each type of pony is a separate species.
If they're separate species, then the separation is recent enough for the degree of speciation to not be significant enough to make fertile offspring a rarity (there are fertile mules which produce offspring, after all), or preclude it altogether. Consider humanity. Homo Sapiens might be the only extant species of human around, but there were three separate species that intermixed as recently as twenty-five thousand years ago until the other two, Neanderthals and Denisovans, went extinct. Modern Homo Sapiens has some genes from those two species which weren't present when Homo Sapiens first left Africa, showing the admixture.
Wow, your sizing ended up being pretty much what I was thinking. Though mine was for headcanon and story convenience, not math, I still had the ponies heads reaching about waist level and standing on their rear hooves putting them at head level.
And same with the weight thing, too. It makes me wonder what sort of math my brain does in the background. (I, too, used apples subconsciously as measurements.)
It might be late, but I just found out about the story a couple days ago.
4875591
Their strength comes from different anchoring points for their muscles. We are build for precision in detriment of strength, they aren't. As far as I know "muscle density" is not a thing that varies between species, only their arrangement. The strength of the actual muscle is given by it's lateral section, with the effective motor strength depending on that and on how said muscles and bones are connected.
Not that your reason for weight is bad, but really is a bit more complex.
On the meat eating, I believe that the only reason you have to create pigs is for meat, and the apples raise them. Maybe unicorns have a taste for ham?
4904823
Lauren Faust said, and this has yet to be debunked by the current writers, that the pigs were used to get truffles. While I'm sure the older pigs were slaughtered for their meat, I'd think the younger pigs would be kept alive for manure and truffles.
4908236
Huh, I didn't know that, thanks
I do remember an author that caught ham in sandwiches in the series, but I can't remember the episode (nor the author), and then again it could depend on personal interpretation. Either way it's nice to know she thought of that.
Wow. That was really well thought out, color me impressed. 👍
4904823
That may be so, but I have read in several places where chimpanzees are two-to-five times stronger than humans on a pound-for-pound weight comparison. The difference appears to be in the actual muscle fiber -- chimpanzees' muscle fibers are longer, which provides for more contraction, and apparently, more strength -- not in the way the muscles are attached to the bones. Interesting stuff, no?
4917478
Indeed. That's curious though, gotta investigate that more, could've sworn it was all about anchoring.
4917478
A brief search seems to show that two, and not five, is the right number, which coincidentally works out to having a similar total strength at a smaller size. The larger claims are due to a study from about a century ago which was done apparently in good faith but whose findings have since been discredited. Seemingly this is due to a genetic difference that results in people having more endurance strength and less burst strength.
4917559
I would not be surprised if chimpanzees also had advantages (and disadvantages) doing certain movements due to their body shape etc.
I feel like you focus quite a bit too much on weight here. As in, that seems totally backwards from how those calculations should be done.
You say a normally weighted human transformed into a pony would seem severely anorexic, and make up a lot of justifications for why the Ponies would still be cute as human girls even though they're much heavier. Except, this is explicitly a magical phenomenon. Peter Pettigrew, by all appearances a rather corpulent middle aged man, certainly did not weigh multiple hundreds of pounds when young Ron held him out on a single hand at full extension age 11 without breaking his elbow in half.
Magic very clearly and bluntly disrespects conservation of mass. Minerva McGonagall turning into a cat is literally the very first piece of magic portrayed in the entire series, so the huge focus on ad-hoc justifying it in this world-building post seems more than a little strange.
4953352
However, animagus magic isn't necessarily the same as the portal altering you form. For my story, I assumed that the mass of the person going through the portal remains the same. That's where I got those numbers and sizes.
How about royal sit-in-a-castle-all-day alicorns? Would they eat meat?
Loved this blog and its content.
I'll be following you from now on for that. I hope to hear more from you in the future!
"there is a gender ratio of one colt for every three fillies."
So, does that mean these ponies practice herding?
Herding = 1 stallion, 2 or 3 mares.
For relationships/marriage/etc. between the ponies.
Not bad math! Attention to detail is always appreciated.
I've actually been struggling with the weight problem for quite a while, as it lends itself to some very unusual physics demonstrations (especially earlier on in the show). For example, when Fluttershy first visits the ground (as seen in The Cutie Mark Chronicles, she's carried by a horde of butterflies numbering somewhere in the hundreds, if not the low thousands. The average butterfly can produce a maximum lift (by carrying, not by supporting on back, but let's discard that for the moment) of 40 times its body weight, at roughly 30 grams of lifting capacity per butterfly. For Fluttershy to weigh an average of 90 kg, this would require somewhere on the order of 3,000 individual butterflies to carry her at a minimum - quite a bit more than what the show depicts. Were we to reverse-calculate this and assume between 100 and 1,000 butterflies are in the horde carrying her, her total weight is limited to 3.175 to 30 kg. This and similar situations occur quite often within the show due to the limitations of a cartoon and the lack of thought the show's writers put into these things (not that I blame them, it's really trivial).
One can do tricks to mess with that math, such as altering the value of gravity, messing with the scale of the butterflies to produce increased lift per butterfly, and so on, but the fact remains that real-world comparisons between Equestria and Earth are very difficult to manage without contradiction (hence the apple scale's popularity for height measurements, as apples are a widely seen and nearly homogenously-drawn item in the show). However, scales like gravity are also inconsistent in the show itself - Spike's fall into the pit of lava in Dragon Quest gives an approximate gravitational acceleration of 46 m/s^2 (revising this using a more precise height via the doorframe system and Twilight gives a gravitational value of closer to 40 m/s^2, or four times Earth's gravity. Were this true, other objects would fall at an equal rate - but several instances of objects falling in Ponyville or Canterlot contradict this. Barring an ovoid planet with the Dragonlands at or near the semi-minor axis (which in turn introduces some terrifying new problems), there's just no way for the math to add up sometimes.
This isn't really relevant to your specific application, but I just like discussing the physics of this show and trying to come up with a reasonable answer for some of the stuff I've seen. I've also written some documents on the gemology, distance/cartography and materials engineering (and plenty more) if you'd like to see them!
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Man I love all the thought y’all put into details. Really adds to it all:)
Well, THAT did give me a lot more info than fanfics I have read. Probably because those were in russian an the authors were negligent, but who cares?
I thank You for that peace of valuable information which I may (I hope) refer to if need arises.
I am so happy to see someone else come up with the same answers for height and weight that my napkin math did. It's still a bit odd to see that the ponies can be described as "roughly human sized" though
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But it makes sense if they stood on their hind hooves as ponies to be a normal human's height. A two hundred pound dog can easily stand as high as a normal person, but one four legs his head is barely waist-high.
On Earth, horses lack a gall bladder. This means they can eat lean meat but have trouble digesting fat.
Then again, people can't fully digest celery. They still eat it.