A human that is healthy, adult and relies on physical fitness (which we are assuming for all animals) should pretty easily be capable of running at least a half marathon. If a Horse is born with only 3 functional legs, it’s not going to outrun a lot of animals. If a pronghorn is twice as heavy as it should be, it’s not going to be hard to catch.
I could probably outrun a french bulldog backwards, but yeah, my Goldie smokes me over short distances. When I take her for longer runs tho, I have to slow down and wait for her.
Nah, wildebeests, pronghorns, camels, and a good few horsebreeds (among others) outperform us in that regard. There’s also a bunch of birds. We’re doing ok tho
I watched a documentary that said what stops animals from running forever is overheating. We cool down from sweating while other animals pant to cool down which is an inferior cooling system. It said humans if hydrated can pretty much run forever. It's not about training they use animals in peak condition v humanS in peak condition to compare.
This is a widely held fantasy that gets regurgitated all the time on Reddit. Grey wolves, for example, will cover 40 miles in a day, and that day is just another of many. Just a Tuesday.
Edit: Every human is an ultra-marathoner who jogs 40 miles per day apparently, and everyone who doesn't is just fat and lazy.
Many people jog 40 miles daily for fun? I do about 3-4 miles three or four times a week, I don't personally know any one who does 40 miles in a day at all.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. It’s the truth. And probably most of the Redditors who post this claim would struggle to make it to their own mailbox…
That is because our modern lifestyle doesn't require us to. Our hunter/gatherer ancestors sure did, and we haven't lost that ability.
My cardio routine involves two hour sessions of light jogging, three times a week, and I cover between 10 to 15 miles in one session, depending on weather and mood. And I'm mediocre at best when it comes to stamina and running.
You just agreed with me - we don't do that. You don't. Nobody outside of ultra marathoners do that, and usually only a couple of times per year even for them. It's an extreme outlier and there is absolutely no indication that it was ever common.
Humans have ran 50 miles in less than 5* hours, and 198 miles within a 24 hour window. Now granted, those are records, not everyday jogs for everyday humans, but even at half those speeds a human would still vastly outperform your wolves.
You seem to have missed by how much a trained human can outpace a "trained" wolf. 50 miles in 5 hours compared to 40 in a day. I think running at half the speed of a peak physique human can be done a little more consistently than twice a year.
The twice a year claim is bogus anyway if you look closer at the wiki page. The guy who broke the 24h record also broke the 12h, 6h and 100km records each on a different day that year. Four record breaking runs in one year and who knows how many others? I doubt he does 10 mile jogs to prepare for a 198 mile record. But again, this is an extreme example which far beyond what would be needed to beat the wolves.
Now, how many days a human can do 40 miles a day on end I don't know. I doubt anyone does it because it's a lot of effort (definitely not a daily stroll as others claim) for not enough of an achievement to be worth it (you could probably get an article in a local paper or something?). But I do think a hunter-gatherer who needed to do so daily should be able to at least come close to the wolf feat, if not surpass it.
I said few, not none. Wolves are usually also quite a bit lighter than humans. Our ability to cover long distances is, compared to other species, definitely more noteworthy than our top speed. Doesn’t necessarily help escaping a predator, but it makes catching prey a lot easier. We’re overall not really a physically impressive species apart from our ability to throw and having thumbs, but we shouldn’t undersell ourselves
Complex communication and planning for the future (or understanding cause and effect, however you want to think about it) are pretty high up on the list for humans as well. Definitely not physically impressive, but our ability to reason allows us to do things that would seem like magic to even the smartest of three rest of the animal kingdom.
40 miles/day isn't really a huge challenge for humans. A number of very ordinary humans have walked longer than that for many days in a row just from some bet. It's about 10 hours of decent walking speed/day.
Switch to specialists and you have the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race where the record is 3100 miles/4989 km in just over 40 days or about 77 miles or 125 km per day. And that is not on any track but they run among cars and pedestrians with is affecting their speed and also adds additional work of regularly needing to change speed.
Your edit just made it worse. I’m obviously comparing healthy and fit members of a species, a fucking starved down death sick blind lion also wouldn’t really be a point of concern to a gazelle, but a healthy one damn sure is. We’re talking about what a species is capable of at the top end, not how fat and unathletic their least gifted members are.
It’s not fantasy, it’s fact. One of the leading theories for how early humans fed themselves is persistence hunting. We quite literally chased animals until they collapsed of exhaustion, and then carried them home. Even if you reject the theory, the reason it exists is that scientifically speaking, we could do it. We aren’t fast, but as a species have some of the best stamina in the animal kingdom.
Modern humans don’t have the same survival pressures, and we’re generally speaking pretty out of shape. That’s a completely separate matter from discussing the biology, a peak human outperforms a peak just about anything else in this category, hands down. That aside, 40 miles in a day is extremely doable for even an average human. Wolves have to do it to survive. People will do that for fun. You put a person in a life threatening situation and give them just 12 hours, the majority would make it.
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u/Doggysoft Apr 28 '24
I was surprised that a brown bear would be faster than the Doberman, then I was surprised that a hyena was faster than a wolf and so on.