Herbivores (ungulates, horses, etc.) have hooves; predators (felids and canids) have paws. That seems to be a general rule when it comes to medium and large land mammals that either run from predators or run to chase down prey.
So I get why big cats and bears evolved paws - they use their claws as weapons. But why did wolves and dogs keep their paws? They don’t use their claws as weapons. They do dig - is that the only reason? I wonder if a hooved wolf could run even faster, and thus have a higher likelihood of catching prey.
Thoughts? Were there ever hooved predators, or prey animals with paws?
Kangaroos bring up an interesting point – in my understanding, all marsupials crawl through the pouch after birth to find the nipple, using hands, and thus all marsupials have some sort of modified hands in their upper limbs. If that’s accurate, then maybe that explains why kangaroos evolved their unique method of travel – they couldn’t evolve hooves, but still needed to move quickly and over distance, and their hopping is more efficient than running on modified hands.
I don’t think aardvarks run much at all, and elephants might occasionally move fast, but I don’t think running is their main defense from predators. But those are good examples for the discussion. Interestingly, wikipedia just calls them “feet” for elephants and for aardvarks. Neither hooves nor paws.
Camels are even better. But wikipedia refers to “hooves” multiple times, so it seems their feet are still considered hooves rather than paws.
Aardvarks aren’t herbivores, though.
And elephants have feet, not paws (no claws, for one thing, which is IMO the defining feature of a paw) And their fast gait isn’t technically running.
Heh. Half of those references to hooves are from Leviticus, which states that camels are unclean because they do not have a cloven hoof. One is to an ancestral hoofed camelid. But I take your point; camels are even-toed ungulates. Almost all of the land-dwelling even-toed ungulates have hooves, so we might safely refer to the foot-things of ungulates as hooves in general. Still, a proper hoof is a hard or rubbery sole with a hard wall formed by a thick nail, with weight borne by both the sole and wall. A camel’s foot is more like that of an elephant - digitigrade, with a weight-bearing pad under the toe bones, and toenails at the front.
This paperdiscusses nail tumors in camels, and describes the structures as toes and toenails.
I think your point still stands, though; the big running herbivorous animal niche seems to be almost exclusively filled with hoofed ungulates. Do human feet count as paws? We might not get preyed upon too much anymore, but that hasn’t always been the case. And running for longer than other animals is kind of our thing…
Not sure I understand your (seemingly) derisive “heh” here. Leviticus says camels do not have CLOVEN hooves, not that they don’t have hooves at all. Camels’ hooves are partially cloven - but the Leviticus doesn’t consider hooves “cloven” unless fully so.
Tapirs kind of fit the idea of paws in that they have pads and their toes are hoofed, like claws in reverse. Wouldn’t birds fit in both catagories of prey/predator as well? They all have claws of some kind.
I suspect it has to do with maneuverability and in the case of pack animals like wolves, hunting strategies.
According to this list, the to 12 fastest land mammals are nearly evenly split between hooved (5) vs pawed (7) animals. With four of the seven pawed animals, predators. However, speed isn’t everything. You’ve seen it on a nature program, hooved animal outruns a pawed predator, tries to take a turn, stumbles and falls. Predator turns on a dime and pounces.
On the other hand, I once saw a bird swoop down on a fluttering butterfly, I thought the butterfly was done for, but it made a slow graceful turn (almost a sidestep) and the bird missed!
