I’m wondering: is the reason a horse gets put down from a broken leg because there’s no decent way to keep them from trying to walk on it to allow it to heal properly? So, an intelligent centaur might be able to recover from one? Or, is there just something about a horses legs that makes it nearly impossible for a broken leg to heal properly regardless?
Just in case any horse people happen to look in these comments…
Yes, in addition to what others have said here, depending on the horse’s personality (horseonality?) some go completely bonkers when kept on “stable rest,” such as you’d need to do with a sling. And by bonkers I mean throwing themselves at walls, biting themselves, and gnawing just about anything to try to escape. They’re likely to hurt themselves worse before being able to heal, and even if they do heal (I have a friend who did this against the vet’s advice), they may have become so neurotic that you can never ride them again.
This.
It’s Far Side, but if Centaurs were IRL they’d be able to understand and obey instructing instructions and not have to be put down. With today’s technology, they might even be able to return to a mostly normal life, although modern domestic horses are remarkable fragile and we ask a lot of them given the structure we’ve bred them to for their size.
Ponies, OTOH, are tough little bastards and will fuck you up.
I used to have a barn with 6 horses and two ponies, yep, the ponies were the playground bullies!
Ok, so get this: we had a 17 hand Percheron gelding - for those who don’t know horses, this a horse that literally weighs over a ton - and we borrowed an older pony mare from a neighbor to keep him company. I don’t know how big she was, but her head barely came up the the bottom of his belly. And she utterly dominated him. We had a barn with a single - Percheron size - run-in stall, and if it rained she’d get in there and keep him out, and we’d have to go bring him into one of the other stalls.
She was actually pretty sweet to people; not bitey like some can be. But she took no shit from our boy.
Ponies are bad-ass.
I remember a very in depth reddit comment from a while back about how much horses suck. One of the points was horse are too big for their legs, so having one down is very bad. I remember them saying shooting is viewed as merciful because breaking a leg is a huge drop in quality of life.
Not a horse person, but I did look this up once. My understanding is basically what you were assuming.
There’s no way to tell the horse to not walk on the foot and the options they have to keep a horse off the leg can only be used for a limited time without causing death anyway. (You can’t put a horse in a suspension sling long enough to heal the leg as it supposedly does bad things to their organs)
So it’s feasible a centaur could recover as they’re smart enough to take things easy without needing to be physically restrained the whole time.
If you had to have sex with a centaur, would you rather the front or the back half were human?
