A Gift from Celestia: Chapters 3 and 4 · 2:18am Jun 3rd, 2014
First, a huge thanks to my pre-readers!
Metallusionismagic, AShadowOfCygnus, Punintended Consequences, and Yrfoxtaur.
Crescent Moon is the official name of a frequently appearing background pony, although I took the liberty of making him a Las Pegasus resident, even though based on appearances, he's almost certainly a Cloudsdale pony. I had a compelling reason to choose him as a stallion Ditzy had had a crush on.
Fun fact about IRL horses—the mare has a window of time in which she can give birth. Much to the frustration of horse owners, they prefer to do it alone, at night, since that's when the mother and foal are most vulnerable. In wild horses, the mother will usually leave the herd one night, and come back the next morning with a new foal in tow.
Depending on one's headcanon, this could be a reason why newborn non-pegasi don't rain from the sky in early spring—perhaps even pegasi land on the ground when the time is near.
In the show, nearly all the wagons we see are single-axle wagons, where part of the load is carried by the pony's back. Such wagons do exist, of course, but understandably they have a far lesser load capacity than a four-wheeled wagon.
I like to think that most farmer ponies have both four-wheeled and two-wheeled wagons. The single axle wagon is easy to hook up quickly and manoveur around town, but when they've got to carry a bunch of stuff, they take the big wagon. And in real life, a lot of farmers have multiple tractors, pickups, and so forth, and they use the right one for the job they're doing.
Probably ponies who don't use wagons very often only have the single-axle ones, since they're simpler, and by extension, probably cheaper.
If you haven't guessed by now, I think it's fairly likely that Carrot (Cake) is related to Golden Harvest. Given the size of the carrot farm that we often see behind Sweet Apple Acres, I think that the Carrot family is another large family around Ponyville.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Stone Soup folk tale, a traveler comes to a hostile town and instead of begging for food, takes out a stone and says that he cane make soup with it. He borrows a pot, adds some water, and begins heating it over a fire. As it's warming up, he keeps mentioning how much better it would be with some carrots, or turnips, or beef, or whatever, and the villagers keep bringing him those ingredients, apparently not realizing that they're providing the soup ingredients, and the stone has no magical powers whatsoever. At the end of it, the traveler shares the soup with everyone, and then takes his stone back.
I've sort of twisted the tale around . . . but here's a thought to ponder: in a world as rife with magic as Equestria, who's to say there isn't an actual soup stone?
After much research, I have come to the conclusion that nearly all the parts of a traditional horse harness—minus, of course, the traces and/or reins, bridle, bit, and blinders—are required for a pony to tow a wagon. Some types are simpler than others, and that just depends on what kind of load the pony is towing. On top of that, there's a lot of decorative stuff that goes in some of them.
Regardless, the harness needs to transfer the load of the wagon and its shafts to the pony in such a way that the pony can control the load and move and breathe freely. The crupper is needed to support the breeching strap, and to keep the girth strap and saddle from sliding forward when the pony slows. The crupper dock keeps it from sliding side-to-side. In the front, there has to be either a yoke and hames (like Big Mac wears) or a breastband to keep the saddle and girth from sliding backwards whenever the pony starts pulling.
I think that the quality of harness would vary, as well as the ease of one pony putting it on and taking it off. Yes, there would be differences between their harnesses and ours (for starters, they probably wouldn't make theirs out of leather, unless that's why AJ keeps cows). Still, it might require two ponies to make the appropriate adjustments, especially if a growing mare or stallion is using the equipment. Again, there are parallels in real life with human gear—some stunt gear, for example, requires a second person to help the first into it; armor is another example. A knight could not dress himself in plate armor—that's why he had a squire.
Incidentally, Cherry's right about the difference between an orchard and a carrot farm, too. Golden Harvest can start planting right after the snow's gone (heck, she can begin growing her carrots in a greenhouse mid-winter, if she wants), and keep planting fresh carrots until very late in the year, and they'll just keep on coming up. Cherry's got to wait years before her seedlings are producing fruit, and she only gets one harvest. Carrots can be planted 3-5 weeks before the last frost date, and can be kept in the ground for as long as it doesn't freeze . . . and if you put compost over your carrots, you can keep them in the ground all winter long. That's right, even without good old fashioned earth pony magic, you can be picking fresh carrots out of the ground in February.
We've seen that there are other fields planted with other crops around Sweet Apple Acres; one assumes that other orchard ponies do the same, planting at least enough food for themselves.
Applejack—the drink—is a particular type of hard cider. Since both alcohol and water have different boiling and freezing points, the two ways to distill are to heat the liquid and recapture the alcohol vapors, or freeze it, and remove and discard the ice. Jacking is the second method. If you do it in the winter, you've got no investment but time.
EDIT: DISCLAIMER
Kids, don't go putting bottles of Thunderbird in the freezer in the hopes it'll turn into something drinkable. The biggest drawback to jacking is that it concentrates the methanol, which can make you go blind, kill you, or both.
I remember stone soup! That was in a childrens book my mom used to read to me when I was a wee little Red. Good story.
You know, I wasn't familiar with 'Jacking.' Though I knew it was technically possible, I never put any thought into whether alcohol distillers would ever do it. I am pretty familiar with distillation. But as for jacking, I'd wager it would create a different taste, as different parts of the mash would be left in/taken out than in a traditional distillation process. I'd also imagine you wouldn't get a clear liquor from jacking unless you filtered the mash very well.
Also, I still think a pony harness could simply be slipped-into. Yeah, there's a lotta shit there, but given that it's all pre-adjusted to the wearer. All they'd have to do it crawl under the harness and poke their head through the yoke. The rest of it essentially sits on the back and against the ass. There's only one strap that need be under the pony, and a forwardly-balanced cart would probably never need it.
If anyone knows of it, it's the Pie family. How else would they have survived on a rock farm?
th05.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/i/2011/246/9/0/mr__turnip_by_ironfruit-d48qk7l.png
Before you ask: "No mister Biscuit, turnips are friends, not food!"
2169634 My great uncle used to jack scuppernong wine. By all accounts it tasted pretty good but was cloudy as hell and gave horrible, suicide inspiring hangovers. His wife finally broke down and bought a still for him, said she'd rather deal with revenue men than listen to him bitch about his head.
2169798 See? I knew it was cloudy! #calledit. The hangovers undoubtedly came from all the trace methanol in the mash. As with any mash, there's always some of that shit in it. Because it has a lower boiling temperature than ethanol (by about 5 degrees) it comes out of the still first. The normal, and smart, thing to do when distilling, is to throw away the first pint or so that comes out of the still. Depending on how much you're distilling anyway.
Methanol is extremely poisonous, and that little tiny bit that's sometimes left in poorly distilled - or in this case, properly jacked - alcohol is a major contributor to hangovers.
Fun fact, when drinking moonshine, employ the 'spoon test' before drinking it. Pour the alcohol into an ordinary spoon. Light it on fire. Is the flame clear blue? It's good shit. Is the flame yellow? Oh god don't drink it!
Pregnant mares are also able to delay their births up to a week (or maybe two if I'm remembering right) for conditions to be just right. Farmers would say that those conditions include rain, hail, mud, darkness....
2169827 Yeah, they used to call the first run 'popskull' and sell it for 15 cents a jar. Terrible stuff. At 12-ish I made the mistake of drinking some my grandfather kept on hand for cleaning tractor parts. Twenty years later, I still can't tolerate alcohol.
2169634
2169798
First: not an expert in brewing or distilling, so take what I say next with a grain of salt.
I did know about the methanol. I don't know if it has the same effects on a horse or pony as it does a human, but then I hadn't included the bit about jacking alcohol as a how-to guide. I think some of the cloudiness can be addressed by letting your initial beverage settle (like you would with wine), or even filtering it before you jack it.
I also seem to recall that there are chemical processes which can take out the methanol, or barring that, I suppose you could run it through a normal still after you got done jacking it, to get the methanol out. Maybe there are unicorns who know a spell that takes care of the methanol, I dunno.
2169634
I bet if you leave the girth strap off, the saddle moves from side to side with the cart, and leaves bald patches and a very uncomfortable pony. Also, if for whatever reason the weight shifted to the back of the cart, it's goodbye cart.
As for the putting it on and taking it off, I get the idea from the pictures that the whole harness is attached like a horizontal loop around the horse--to deal with fore-and-aft movement, and a vertical loop around the belly, which has load-carrying properties--and that's why it's on the strong part of the horse's back. My own headcanon is that some ponies have harnesses specifically made for them and for one particular wagon (or type of wagon), while others make due with used harnesses, hand-me-downs, or ones that are designed for both rigid shafts and traces.
FWIW, I did look up instructions on putting on a horse harness, and then figured that removal is the opposite of installation, so the way that Cherry gets out of her harness is and IRL way it's done.
2170627 Man, I love your blog posts- they go all over the place,
butAND I love the emphasis on transferring practical considerations to the pony world, as done here.Jacking is similar to how beers like Labatt's Ice are 'fortified,' by lowering the temp until microscopic crystals form and filtering them out. As long as you don't try to bump up the concentration of the alcohol too much, you won't get to much methanol and other byproducts in there.
Distilling in a pot still, the heads (distillate collected prior to about 170 or so) are usually discarded- lots of methanol, some acetate and acetone. The main run (assuming you've got good temp control and are drawing off slooooowly) will happen between 170 and 180, depending on the concentration of the ethanol (hearts). Above 180 and you start drawing rubbing alcohol, so that's about when the tails are cut. The temps are also hazy because you might draw a little early or late to get certain flavors in.
Some folks will collect in a series of pint jars, and discard the first one (heads), then sample the rest of them. When it starts to taste bad, they make the tails cut, and then take the heart of the run and blend it together to get a consistent product. Sometimes they'll even add a little of the heads or tails to get a particular flavor note.
That's for a pot still. If you have a column (continuous) still, that gets done by the equipment, and you can fine-tune the temp to draw the good hearts off continuously, and re-distill the heads and tails to extract any lost ethanol or congeners (flavor compounds). It's much more efficient, and it's how almost all commercial distilleries work anymore.
2169737
Is that the one they call the Pielosopher's Stone?
2170627 I'm pretty sure alcohol has the same effect on every animal. Except that humans are one of the very very few animals that actually have a liver strong enough to process and remove the poison - because that's exactly what alcohol is - and so most animals would simply die from alcohol poisoning before they'd get much of a buzz. Reminds me of an anti-joke, something like, a penguin walks into a bar, he drinks a beer, and then he dies because small animals' livers can't handle alcohol. Anyway, methanol just so happens to be way more poisonous than ethanol. Humans still die from ethanol poisoning.
But I'm fairly certain our ponies would get buzzed and drunk just like we do.
2170272 Heh, yeah when you're 12 a lot of things seem like a good idea.
2172034
One of the primary enzymes you need to break down alcohol is alcohol dehydrogenase (LADH for short), and it's an enzyme horses have as well. Like many herbivores, part of a horses's normal digestion involves partially fermenting its food to get out nutrients it can't get otherwise. As an aside, when a llama spits, it's not saliva, it's partially digested, partially fermented grasses. I have heard it's horrible, and stinks. I have also heard--but have not verified--that if a dog drinks windshield washer fluid, as long as it isn't showing any other symptoms than being drunk, there is nothing to worry about. Also, in humans, since the same enzyme breaks down both methanol and ethanol, the general treatment for methanol poisoning involves putting ethanol in the bloodstream, so that the methanol passes through the kidneys unprocessed. In fact, MSDSs for windshield washer solvent often say to give the victim vodka, and then seek medical help.
For what it's worth, the reason methanol is toxic to humans is not from the drink itself, it's what the LADH turns it into: formaldehyde and formic acid. Interestingly, apparently the LADH is also what metabolizes ethylene glycol (which become glycolic and oxalic acids, also bad news).
My go-to vet did not know if methanol was toxic for horses; ethanol is probably not. DISCLAIMER AGAIN: in my research, I have yet to find a credible source about what happens biologically when a horse drinks alcohol; like most things that aren't proper food, the horse can succomb to all sorts of gastrointestional ills. If you do feel the need to feed beer to your horse, make sure you get the carbonation out, since horses cannot belch (or vomit). Some horse owners have found that putting dark beer on the horse's feed promotes eating it, although to my knowledge, few or no studies have been done on this.
In short: a horse has the LADH enzyme, and a horse has ways of extracting useful energy from partially-fermented food. Given its body mass, a beer or two probably won't kill it. Methanol may or may not.
2171409
Thanks!
I see them partially as a tool for other writers, who may benefit from my research, and partially as a compendium of fun facts.
On top of that, they often spark intellectual discussion, and reveal experts on particular topics. In this case, you know much more about the process of distillation than I do. In the last chapter of Onto the Pony Planet, one of my readers commented with a long discussion of substitution cryptography--so I benefit, too, because I learn things I didn't know before! It's a win-win.
2171409
Oh, also, you may find the (sorta inactive) group Coalition for More Horse-Like Ponies worth a visit. My only useful contribution is the blog post Science!, but it also contains a link to ocalhoun's Horses: the QA thread
2172709 Fortunately, Equestrians can belch. And vomit.
2172913
Yes, quite true--we've seen canon examples of both. They also have a very different diet than IRL horses. At this point, as an author, I can put my hand on my chest and say, "They're ponies, not horses," and most of my readers will accept it.
But dammit, I want to know if methanol is toxic to horses . . . just because I don't know.
Also also, I meant to mention in the earlier harness discussion (but forgot) that I think it's much like mechanics and their tools--some of us make money hand over fist, and buy everything the Snap-On truck has to offer in the event it might be useful one day. The rest of us make do with the essentials, and deal with creative solutions for the rest. On that topic, someday I'll have to post pictures of our homemade Ford IPR socket.
2172928 Hehehe yeah, lol. I need to start making bank like that.
As for methanol... I hope you do realize that humans aren't really more than a hop skip and a jump away from equines, anatomically/biologically speaking. (You wanna get technical, we're like 85% the same as a banana plant, but that's beside the point.) My point is that, as you said, horses posess the same enzyme that breaks down alcohol. It's gonna do the exact same thing in a horse as it would in a human, there's no reason to expect otherwise. Therefore, methanol is just as toxic to horses as it is to humans.
Naturally this'll vary by body weight, liver capability, general health, amount ingested, and all sorts of shit, but you get my point. Gonna be roughly the same.
2173597
See, here's where the difference might lie. The enzyme in humans (who have it to deal with partially spoiled fruit, IIRC) breaks ethanol into useful nutrition in a several step process. It tries to do the same with methanol (although I'm not sure that our ancestors could have encountered that in the wild), and while the end product is useful, the intermediate steps to get there are highly toxic to us. A horse, on the other hand, has a digestive system which, in part, ferments its food to break down the cellulose (which IIRC produces methanol), which means that it might either go through different reaction stages, or it might have enzymes that handle the secondary and tertiary reactions. I just don't know.
2173947 basically what you're saying is that they have a way to naturally put ethanol in their digestive system. -> aka consume ethanol. Yeah, maybe they have some other systems to handle the byproduct, but I'd imagine it'd just enter the bloodstream and get liver'd out like usual.
And cellulose breaks down into methanol? If it does, and you made alcohol out of grass, it'd be mostly methanol. I doubt it, but I really don't know the complexities of the chemistry behind all this.
Besides, I think you're overthinking it. I rather doubt a horse's digestive system would create any significant amount of any alcohol, because if it did, they'd either have monstrous livers or be drunk all the time.
Also, if all this thinking is just to figure out whether or not a horse would get a hangover from drinking cheap booze, it's still booze either way, you can still get hangovers from good, pure stuff.
2176285
How horses get some of their nutrition is to use bacteria in their digestive system to ferment their food, so yes, they basically turn grass to alcohol. Vertebrates lack the ability to directly digest cellulose, so they have ways around it.
One of the common names for methanol is "wood alcohol," since it was initially produced by the destructive distillation of wood.
Beyond that, I'm lost. The microbiological complexities are far beyond what I know. I'm fairly sure that given the right yeast or bacteria, you can ferment pretty much anything that has sugar or starch in it, but whether or not the finished product is drinkable or poison, I don't know. I did find on one methanol information site that usually only primates experience blindness as a result of methanol poisoning; again, I don't know why.
2176439 That's how pretty much any animal digests shit. Bacteria breaks it down, and shits out something, like ethanol, or methane.
It's all just bacteria, and any given bacterium can only shit out one thing when it eats one thing. The complexities here are more chemistry-ical.
Anyway. I admire your commitment to accuracy, but just gloss over this thing, damn.
2176686
Heh. For the sake of the story, they have to know what methanol is, and how to remove it, since we're in the same universe as Onto the Pony Planet, and I don't want them to kill Dale or Kate by offering them a drink (although that would be an unexpected end to the story, eh?).
Right now it's just my own morbid curiosity.