Talkin' 'bout Locomotion

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A couple of cool words about walking

Digitigrade: walking on the toes, as most predators do - cats, for example, and dogs, are both digitigrade - their "feet" are actually their toes and the ball of the foot (if you look at the back legs you can see that what we think of as an elbow or knee is actually the heel/ankle joint)

Hooved animals take digitigrade walking one step further -- they walk not just on their toes, but on the tip of their toenails! (hooves are enlarged toenails) 

Plantigrade: walking on the flat of the foot - as do apes and, alone of all the large mammal predators, bears. Their peculiar "shuffling" gait is because they walk plantigrade, like us. Plantigrade walking provides power and stability, but at the cost of speed and manuverability.

Most prey animals are hooved, having given up claws (for defense) in exchange for speed (to escape) in the evolutionary matrix. In order to hunt, predators have retained the claws to kill the prey with, but have leaned upward as far as they can on their toes to gain speed. The cheetah, the fastest land animal in a short sprint, is leaned so far forward onto his toes that his claws are no longer retractable (as other cats' claws are) so that he can use that extra fraction of an inch of claw for distance and traction.

Bears are an exception for many reasons, primarily having to do with diet and geography. Bears are the least carnivorous of all the great mammal predators, being quite happy with veggies, fruits, berries, slugs, fish and such (with the exception of the polar bear, the only fully carnivorous bear). In areas where they live, they can get by quite contendedly without ever having to chase down larger prey in the way that large canids or felids do. Even the polar bear doesn't usually chase down prey - the environment provides them with an ideal food-catching technique: they lie around outside the holes in the ice that seals use to breath through, and when a seal surfaces they just grab it. It's a bear buffet! When a bear does have a need to hunt down larger prey, their amazing muscle mass gives them emough power for a short charge, and the ability to take down very large prey.