rowantheexplorer:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

Guys do centaurs have to eat both horse food and human food?

Centaur, eating out of a burlap sack of hay like it’s potato chips: So do you guys wanna get Chipotle later?

Centaur: *kneeling on the ground, ripping up bits of grass and eating it*

Nearby horse: *neighs*

Centaur: Well it’s easy for you to bend over, isn’t it?

Horse: *snorts*

Centaur: *through a mouthful of grass* Well goody goody for you, but some of us have two spines.

Human: Hey does somebody want the rest of my burger?

Centaur: Oh I’ll have it. I am starving.

Human: Didn’t you just eat like an entire barrel of hay?

Centaur: *snatches the burger* That was for the horse stomach not the human one. Don’t be racist, Carl.

Centaur: *eating a carrot*

Human: So does stuff like that go through both stomachs or…

Centaur: *pauses mid chew* *swallows hard* Well that’s something else to keep me up at night.

Centaur digestion might not be all that much different than what horses already do. Horse digestion is already divided into two, the foregut and hindgut. The foregut is like a more traditional GI tract like a human or dog, with an esophagus, stomach, and small intestine, and works pretty much the same way. Because horses are not ruminants and don’t have the multichambered fermentation stomach a cow does, only the easier-to-digest surface nutrients are digested in the foregut. (This also means that a horse ends up with more direct protein and fat absorption than a cow, because the symbiotic bacteria in a cow’s multichambered stomach usually ferments and consumes a lot of the proteins and fats from incoming food before the cow’s body has a chance to absorb. And proteins and fats are vital to brain development.)

However, a horse’s hindgut is different from most mammals. After otherwise indigestible cellulose passes through the small intestine, it enters a specialized section of the large intestine called a caecum, and that’s where the horse’s symbiotic fermentation bacteria live. Feed stays in the caecum for about 7 hours, where it ferments and the nutrients are eventually absorbed. The caecum is a very odd digestive organ; both its entrance and exit are at the top, presumably to allow a horse to better pass any gasses generated by the fermentation process, but because the exit is at the top, it is very easily blocked by any solids that the caecum failed to digest, and gravity does not help. The bacteria mix in the caecum is very specialized, usually only capable of digesting very specific foods, and it can take several days or weeks of slowly introducing new foods so that the caecum grows the bacteria needed to be able to digest it. That’s where you get most colic in horses, when the caecum is blocked by solids that the bacteria weren’t adapted to digest. Colic is extremely painful and can be quite deadly for a horse. After fermentation in the caecum, food travels on through the large intestine like most other mammals.

So, in regards to centaurs, I doubt the digestive tract would change all that much. Whether a centaur has one stomach or two, they would probably have a caecum in addition, since fermentation has a much higher energy yield than digestion alone, and they’d need that energy to run. But if they do have a caecum, a centaur would have to be extremely careful about what they ate, and they’d probably be very averse to trying new foods. They’d probably try to eat the same thing all the time, with maybe one or two variations to keep it a little interesting, but nothing terribly extreme. A traveling or adventuring centaur would probably keep a supply of food they know they can eat with them at any time, because adapting to a new food is extremely slow. If they were moving to a new region, they’d probably bring a couple hundred pounds of their old food with them so they could mix in the new region’s food a little at a time.