Do animals get injuries from physical activity like humans? If no, why not?
In: Biology
They do, but to a lesser extent than humans for four reasons.
Firstly, they usually live less long. As a human, once born you are likely to live into old age. In animals a much larger proportion die before their equivalent of old age. Younger bodies are less prone to stress related injuries.
Secondly, their bodies are usually more adapted to their lifestyle. If you are a gazelle, essentially your life involves eating, not being eaten, and having sex. It’s much easier to evolve a body adept at doing that than the multiple trade offs in the human body to allow a wider range of tasks.
Thirdly, if you are an animal you usually have scarce food and so do the minimum amount of activity to sustain your life. Animals don’t go to the gym, go jogging etc.
Fourthly, exceptional intelligence means that we do activities like team sports, invent bicycles, and essentially have a multitude of ways to push our bodies to the limit, sustain impacts at greater velocities, etc. At the same time we have greater awareness of injuries, and so a greater reaction to the pain. Mostly this is a survival mechanism. If animal injures it’s leg it will likely hobble around because otherwise it will likely be eaten or not have sex. If a human gets injured we know to rest, seek sympathy on Whatsapp, even attend hospital, knowing that our chances of starving or not reproducing will not be affected.
Of course technological progress has also meant the chance of an injury being lifelong or fatal have also greatly reduced.
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