Or maybe even... furries?In Borneo and Sumatra, the long tailed macaque lives up trees, while the closely related pig-tailed macaque lives on the ground and has a short tail. Monkeys that are active in trees usually have long tails. They run along the branches on all four, using the tail for balance. They leap from branch to branch with the body in a horizontal position and the tail held out as a balancing rudder behind. Why, then, do gibbons, who are as active in trees as any monkey, have no tail? Maybe the answer lies in the very different way in which they move. All apes, as we have seen, are occasionally bipedal, and gibbons, when not brachiating, run along branches on their hind legs, using their long arms to steady themselves. It is easy to imagine a tail being a nuisance for a bipedal walker. My colleague Desmond Morris tells me that spider monkeys sometimes walk bipedally, and the long tail is obviously a major encumbrance. And when a gibbon projects itself to a distant branch it does so from a vertically hanging position, unlike the monkey's horizontal leaping posture. Far from being a steady rudder streaming out behind, a tail would be a positive drag for a vertical brachiator like a gibbon...
I know that most furries who have avatars of themselves in anthro form do it because they want one and the anatomical difficulties (apparently) posed by tails are the least of their worries.
I'm not telling them to change but this paragraph made me think of them. What if this actually was true for furries, their tails being a hindrance? It may look cute and cuddly but it may also impend their walking.
