Reader of Entrails: 🧪 Ruminants (yaks, goats, giraffes, camels) have a giant fermentation vat at the start of their digestive system. It’s great at working *with* gravity but super terrible at keeping things down when gravity is not in their favor. For this reason, I do not recommend taking yaks to space.

🧪 Ruminants (yaks, goats, giraffes, camels) have a giant fermentation vat at the start of their digestive system. It’s great at working *with* gravity but super terrible at keeping things down when gravity is not in their favor. For this reason, I do not recommend taking yaks to space.

🧪 Horses are terrible at a lot of things, but they cannot vomit, so they are digestively more suited to null-G than a ruminant. Obviously, they are still giant toothpick-leggèd panic machines, so I still can’t recommend them for a space voyage.

I'm still thinking those extra loops of ascending colon with no mesentery to hold them in place could become a major volvulus kind of problem

I was thinking colic. Same tack?

You’re not wrong, I would definitely recommend prophylactic enteropexy for any equid going through zero G. They do love to tie their guts into balloon animals.

Also... no Great Danes. Apparently they flip their stomachs similarly, too often.

Definitely. It’s standard recommendation to tack the stomach to the body wall if you’re going into the abdomen for any reason on a healthy Dane (like a spay), and to offer it prophylactically.

How about ponys? Or donkeys? Not as panicky as horses. But maybe too stubborn 🤔

Excellent questions. Ponies are better than horses for being more sturdy, but they have an excess of mischief. Also, they WILL break into the galley and eat all the things. Donkeys, now, that might just work. You do run the risk of mutiny and ending up with a donkey space pirate captain. 🤔

To whatever streaming service picks up the series about the space pirate donkey captain: Fry-take-my-money.jpg

That was no break in, they HAD to inspect the food quality!

Any Intel on how Cats would fare in null-G?

They do love a good puke and enjoy perforating things that should not be perforated. Psychologically and anatomically, though, they would probably be solid. Just keep them away from your space suits. And figure out how to handle cat fur in every filter, duct, and intake.

So, shaving the cat that uses her scratch pole and proceed from there. Got it.

Credit goes to the excellent @ass.golf for inspiring this bonkers fact-sharing.

The number of times I’ve had to explain to researchers that no, we can’t put the bovid in dorsal recumbancy, is definitely more than zero.

Ahhhhh, nooooo. That way lies aspiration pneumonia! In my world, it’s more, “Please do not leave me dead ruminants whose heads aren’t enclosed in a bag. They leak all over the cooler.”

"Doctor, we'll either do this with the due gravity - or I WILL vomit all over your stuff!"

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