We’re used to seeing/talking about horses walking/trotting/cantering/galloping. How about all the rest of the tetrapods?
If you take a dog that is well-trained to the leash out for a “walk” and gradually increase your speed, will the dog naturally shift its way up those gaits to stay best suited to your speed? I’m wondering, because I’ve never noticed that a dog was cantering. Walking, all the time. Trotting, sure thing. Galloping? Happily. But cantering?
And what about all the rest of them? Do hippos ever break into a trot? Do giraffes canter?
Apparently, elephants can only walk or walk quickly,
As the largest extant terrestrial animals, elephants do not trot or gallop but can move smoothly to faster speeds without markedly changing their kinematics, yet with a shift from vaulting to bouncing kinetics
Most horses don’t do either, and I don’t know whether any other species does; but they’re also quadruped gaits. Maybe the OP meant specifically to exclude them by saying “basic” gaits, however.
– some dogs also stott. I had one who routinely did that if running in tall grass; though it turned out after some years that her joints weren’t up to it, probably due to the part of her parentage that left her with a body that was heavy for her legs.
Icelandic horses have a unique basic gait called the tölt that looks like this. The ability to tölt is caused by a mutation that most horses don’t have. If gait can change within a single species like this, I would assume that entirely different species could have entirely different gaits.
Hares stott frequently when someone’s after them. It is a patently obvious signal of “I’ve seen you and you don’t have a chance, so don’t bother, pal [but I’m still kinda scared].”
Yeah, my little whippet/terrier cross used to pronk when she was younger, often to show off - one time she flew right past someone’s face at eye level, with all 4 legs pointing stiffly downwards.
The other gait I’ve seen (in long grass) was almost a bipedal movement - leaping on the hind legs only for two or three leaps, stepping down on all fours in one leap out of three or four, mainly because the gait wasn’t very stable.
I like ‘stot’ particularly because in the north-east of England it is used to mean ‘bouncing up and down in anger’. “Ya should’a seen him man - he was stott’n”. Also used for heavy rain, “It’s stott’n doon”. Geordies may offer us more examples.
Also in Scotland, ‘stot’ is a synonym for a ‘steer’: a castrated male calf. Perhaps they are prone to stotting?
