Edit: I mean, why animals with broken or cut off tails, don’t have any problems balancing?
In: Biology
Your arms are used when you walk to offset the side-to-side swing made by your feet. People without arms can still walk though
my kit was born with a nub of a tail and she balances herself using her entire body and has an extremely adorable way that she runs where she bends her entire body and sways back and forth…calico/manx hybrids tend to do that
Why animals without tails or short tails don’t fall off…..
what?
Tail is like legacy feature. We also were supposed to have tails in the past but evolution cope with it.
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My cat had her tail broken somehow (before I adopted her) and she’s falls off things all the time. She’s incredibly clumsy
**Some** animals use their tails for balance.
That doesn’t imply animals without tails are incapable of balancing. They just do it in different ways.
Tails assist animals like dogs and cats in high speed chases. They help them turn faster. They do not need them for walking. The best example of a tail assisting in a chase is to watch a cheetah chasing its prey. Here is a video. https://youtu.be/qukcc8wCxJo
Fall off what? Different animals evolved different anatomies to meet the requirements of their environment – humans (tailless primates) would certainly be less apt to swing from branch to branch than say gibbons or rhesus monkeys because humans spent ~2MM years evolving to walk upright on hard ground and the other two didn’t.
I’m no expert, but I think most animals with no tails or really short tails tend to have really stocky, stable legs, and do not tend to be fast runners or agile jumpers that put themselves in situations where they often lose their balance. Bears, tortoises, badgers, etc do not have the same sort of lifestyle as cats, monkeys, rats etc
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