Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, my name is Robert Lam.

And I'm Joe McCormick and today we are going to begin a look at the animal hoof, specifically

the horse hoof.

Rob, how did you get interested in this?

Well, I was in New York last week with my family.

We went to the American Natural History Museum and was looking at fossils and bones and

I was captivated by some of the bones of the horse and started thinking about the hoof

and just how strange the hoof is.

Yet at the same time we kind of take it for granted because even if you are not a person

who lives among horses and cares for horses, horses are everywhere in our imagery and our

iconography and our entertainment, you can scarcely be a video game player at all without

having mounted a horse or lost a horse or accidentally driven a horse up a cliff or

up a wall at some point.

So I was really taken by this.

Like I had not really in my life set aside any time to just consider the utter weirdness

of the horse hoof.

I almost feel like the weirdness of the horse hoof is embodied in the sound of the horse

galloping and how different that is from the sound of the movement of most other animals

you'd think about.

Yeah, I mean it's like the drumming of fingers on a table, right?

That's a tempting direction to go in anyway.

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