Of course, any male who saw Disney’s Fantasia in his adolescence has a bit of a centaur filly fetish.
It may be a sign of my geekiness, however, that even as a besotted teenager, I had a bit of literal “refrigerator logic”. To wit, “How do they eat?”
Today, with the Webz and all, I had the opportunity to work out some rough calculations.
To start with, A 1000 pound horse requires about 15,000 Calories a day, that’s big-C Calories. Horse digestive tracts are very inefficient, and require about 25 pounds a day of mixed fodder, that is, forage (hay) and concentrate (oats, molasses, corn, and the like). Obviously, there’s no way for a human mouth, with human teeth, to chew through 25 pounds a day of horse feed.
And let’s not talk about grazing with a flat face.
Of course, the far more efficient human digestive tract can eat much more concentrated foods, like meat. Maybe that helps. Accordingly, the following numbers are based on scaled-up human internals.
A pound of sugar is 1760 Calories. That means that a centaur eating pure sugar needs about 8-1/2 pounds of sugar every single goddamn day.
A pound of fried bacon is 2448 Calories; a carnivorous centaur would want about 6 pounds a day. (I choose bacon because a] it’s tasty and b] it’s a nice mix of protein and fat.)
Then there’s fiber. A human on a 2000 C/day diet needs about 25 g/day. Converting to pounds and scaling up to 15,000 C/day yields about 1/2 lb/day of pure, indigestible fiber. “I buy ‘er books and buy ‘er books and she just eats the cov… uhp, nope, just swallowed the whole damn thing. ”
Hah, hah, nobody eats books! So let’s look into apples…. Holy, uh, crap. There’s about 0.7 g of fiber in an apple. Converting to pounds, that’s in excess of 320 apples a day to keep the vet away.
But at least you now have an excellent excuse to wash down your meals with, yes:
…A bacon beer mug, which will help a little with the 8 or 10 gallons a day of water a lightly worked horse will need. Or, hey, splurge, and have a candied bacon ice cream float for dessert.
Of course, no body eats exclusively any one kind of food.
A Big Mac is about 540 Calories. Now, a Big Mac contributes to nutrition in several different ways, but going by calories alone, my hooved belooved would not be a cheap date: she’d need about 27 a day, at a cost of around a hundred bucks.
If she wants fries with that, she’d need about 13 Big Mac meals with medium fries and Coke. That’s a bit of a savings, only $80.
The dietary math is a little easier if your centaur chassis has a pony form-factor. Multiply everything by about 0.7, but remember, equines can only carry about a fifth of their weight. I’m too heavy for a 1000-lb horse; only a very lean young man, weighing at most 125 lbs, could ride his 700 lb pony girlfriend.
Then there’s breathing. The breath-to-breath measurement is called tidal volume.
For humans, tidal volume is about 0.5 liters.
For horses? About 6.0 liters, twelve times what a human needs. That means nostrils, and a windpipe, about four times the diameter of a human’s. And those are resting values.
So, conclusion?
No. Hell, no. You can’t eat like a horse, or even breath like a horse, through a human mouth.
Update:
Heh. I’m pointed to this episode of The Wotch. The young lady is a centaur who hides her equine body with an invisibility spell; we, of course, are not affected.
