Dogs do love a good jog though. Give that good boi a bit of kibble and then see how he feels.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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I mean, the ability to run long distances without tiring is kind of what makes humans an apex predator. We can out-endurance just about every other creature. Most ancient human hunting techniques involved just wounding an animal, and then literally chasing it until it got too tired to keep going.
Wolves are very similar, which is what made us such natural hunting companions. The co-evolution of humans and dogs is an extremely interesting rabbit hole, if anyone is looking for one.
All that to say, the wolf would understand the need to run more than just about any other animal. A bear would work better here. A wolf would just see us running and think 'game recognizes game', just like they already did eons ago :3
involved just wounding an animal
not even wounding. Just persistent tracking and following. Most prey animals can run away quickly, but need lots of rest.
Humans can just keep going. And going. And going. Until the prey just is too exhausted to run.
Got it.
I am prey.
It's why the trope of an enemy that never stops/is endless is so terrifying, and thus common in media.
Yes, very true! I almost added that when writing my comment, but didn't want to blather on too long in a comment about a meme haha
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So this is pretty neat:
Humans aren't good at running fast, but we are good at running for a long time for long distances, so it's thought that we would just run after things until they got tired.
So like you know how people in horror movies would run and then look over their shoulder and Jason is somehow still there?
Funny enough there is another animal I know that can sweat, have more endurance than humans, and much faster than humans. Horses.
Imagine you fear getting caught by a horse or a human and then suddenly a human riding a horse shows up.
humans can beat a horse in a marathon!
That's pretty cool. However, no human has ever won by more than 15min, and every horse has a 15min delay built into their times. So even the biggest winning margin of nearly 11 minutes would have lost to the horse if they had started at the same time.
The horses also all had humans on their backs. To my knowledge, none of the humans had horses on their backs.
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Back in my reddit days I wrote a long comment about the fact that zombies are scary because they are the ultimate persistence hunters.
Zombies aren't scary. They're popular movie monsters because, while looking vaguely human, they're sufficiently "othered" that you can kill them without remorse (thus acting as a convenient stand-in for other groups that the audience wishes they could do that to) and because they represent an apocalypse that kills most of the people but leaves the stuff behind, meaning that you don't have to deal with society anymore but you'll still easily have a roof over your head and food on your table (albeit mostly canned food.)
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I mean, them being walking corpses might also have something to do with it...
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It’s a consequence of bipedalism, less energy consumption to run but also slower
It's a few things that stem from bipedalism:
- We can run and breathe entirely separately. Most quadrupeds lack the ability to run and take breaths independently of the pace of each step. Watching cheetahs sprint, for example, show that they have no choice but to exhale every time their legs come together and inhale every time their legs push apart.
- Running on our hind legs only frees up our hands to be able to use tools and weapons, maybe even water containers for drinking on the go.
- We can see further by standing up, and can make tactical decisions based on terrain, while still running pretty much full speed.
Combined with our unusual ability to cool ourselves by sweating, this gives us an advantage over pretty much any animal in the heat. Wolves and horses can still outrun humans in the cold, but lack the cooling mechanisms to maintain pace in the same heat that we can.
We also have by far the best throwing game in the world. Some animals can spit with reasonable accuracy, some apes can kind of lob shit in a general direction, and there's that one lizard that can spray blood from its eye, but nothing in the animal kingdom past or present has a human's innate ability for ranged attack. The average man can throw a fist sized rock hard and accurate enough to crack a skull from 20 yards with his bare hand. And we've spent the last 10,000 years inventing newer and more impressive ways of throwing stuff.
Humans domesticated dogs for their ability to hunt by scent. Dogs domesticated humans for their ability to throw a tennis ball.
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Other animals get zoomies too.
Jogging is practice for how humans killed pretty much all the megafauna in the world: exhaustion hunting.
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Jogging from the perspective of non-human animals
FTFY
🤓☝️
Yeah, some humans also wonder why jogging is a thing.
“I don’t know why they’re running, but let’s chase them!”
Whoever made this has never met a dog
Yeah, this post shows a tragic lack of familiarity with the concept of zoomies.
So apex that most of us outsource our hunting and farming, which makes us fat and slow unless we purposefully burn energy for no other purpose than to burn it.
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One time, I was in the arctic doing some research. On a snowmobile, in winter, we crest a hill and see a couple of wolves pigging out on a caribou. I'm riding in the toboggan, and I start telling at the driver: "go go go!" They proceeded to chase our snowmobile for like a mile, with no hope at all of catching us, but running anyway. Like dogs chasing tires, I think they had no choice. Instincts are strong.
I say this to myself when I see people jogging and I really just want to yell "what are you running from!?"
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I know it's a joke. But would a wolf consider a human an apex predator? What about bears? Do these animals fear humans? I can't say I'm familiar with them. I figured they wouldn't, in most circumstances. I would think their default stance towards us is that we're their prey
We are certainly not their prey and without modern urban sprawl forcing animals into urbanized areas they would avoid humans as much as possible and this has been true for thousands of years.
Humans are the ones wielding fire after all.
The bears and coyotes around here hide from me! Even if I try and creep on 'em, they still usually sense me and run.
"ah shit, it's that weird human again. Better hide or it will get awkward"
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If an apex predator is running, maybe keep up.
Let's say it's part of a mating ritual. I know this is not true, but I believe it gets the point across.
Conserving energy is not really our thing.
The thing is, humans are astonishingly good at conserving energy when running. We can literally run prey to death by just keeping on going when most animals run out of energy.
Sweat offers cooling bonuses.
Something about being upright too but I don't recall.
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If I need more energy I'll just set something on fire
I cannot stop laughing 😂
Personally I think humans run because they are a species with enough cognitive abilities to be masochists
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They are running from existential dread.
So we are the prey?
Always have been.