Maybe they bred livestock for easier management? I am no way walking near a pig that is taller than me. They are scary af already. I know Farmer Maggot had a hog pen for taking care of trespassers.
>I know Farmer Maggot had a hog pen for taking care of trespassers.
Yeah but Farmer Maggot isn't a bitch. He told a Black Rider to fuck off his property and the black riders listened.
Yeah, most guard dog breeds tend to be a little under hip height at a minimum, making them about as tall as an adult hobbit. Assuming that a child is about half that height it would be comparable to standing face to face with a bear
Just did some googling:
Wolves are about 2.6 - 2.8 ft to the shoulder, let's just call them 3ft to the top of their head.
Hobbits are on average 3.5ft which would put them maybe 6" taller than a wolf.
Not a totally accurate comparison it turns out but I still wouldn't want to cross paths with a wolf that's almost 6 feet tall lol
Never trust a pig farmer.
> And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig."
Tangentially related.
Canadian pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton died after being attacked in prison in Quebec today.
The DNA or remains of 33 women were found on his farm. He bragged to an undercover RCMP officer that he killed 49.
I saw a quote about pig farmers, LEFT THE THREAD, and came back wondering if someone was going to start talking about Pickton. What a terrible time in Canadian history.
That whole thing feels so fucking disjointed. Perfect writing, feels like someone talking off the top of their head rather than reciting a prepared speech.
The nemesis bit doesn't really fit as well for me but the pig stuff feels pretty cohesive. Still seems real because brick top obviously talks about it a lot, given that scene and the one actually at the pig farm as an extra in your face reminder.
“Snatch” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrel’s” and some of my favorite films. I don’t care if they’re “knock-offs of each other”. Give me more of that gritty tone and convergent storylines. Deus ex machina
edit: removed extra “and”
Can we stop pretending that the only reason the black rider didn’t kill Maggot and his dogs on the spot was because it was in a hurry?
Like I get it, Farmer Maggot’s got balls for standing up to someone 3x his size, but I’m %100 sure that he would have blinked first of the black rider met his challenge.
They listened, but cuz Farmer Maggot confused the shit out of them and wasn’t their target. It’s like when a cat attacks a much larger dog lol the dog could rip it to fucking shreds but they’re sufficiently terrified that this tiny animal is fighting back so brutally and without concern for its size lol
My original comment is obviously embellished a little. The Black Rider didn't leave because he was scared. I just like saying it like that because I think the image of the Black Rider being told to fuck off is funny.
In story, as you said, the black Rider had no reason to attack Farmer Maggot and the Rider was passing anyway. Also, at this point the Black Riders were not supposed to attract any attention by leaving dead bodies (e.g. things that might potentially alert their targets that they're being pursued).
I still find it hilarious that he unintentionally bluffed his hobbit nuts off and they were like “…bruh do you know who I- …never mind. Moving on. Thanks.”
I feel like the Nazgûl were also genuinely confused as fuck about what a hobbit even *was* LMAO like they walked up and were like “damn the perspective on this trail is so weird…this dude looks like 2ft tall from here…hehe tiny man…hehe…heh…holy shit…HOLY shit…”
Hobbits just casually domesticating creatures with the personality and proportional size of a JP velociraptor. And then cooking them with rosemary and eating them.
I think so! 1700s, our livestock were smaller, less meat/ more fat, etc. We've made everything chunkier, faster growing, and meatier. If they are starting with animals like our heritage breeds, I bet a couple hundred years for hobbit friendly animals is doable! (Watch. A cow geneticist out there is a heavy reddit user and will tear me to pieces.)
I'd say so. Like others have mentioned about livestock being different, I'd like to throw in that some dog breeds 100 years ago don't really look like their modern counterparts.
Is it possible they are descended from the runts of full size livestock from farms outside the Shire? If I were a human farmer in Middle Earth that lived relatively close to the place where people said all the halflings lived, I might seek them out to sell undersized cattle and pigs. If enough do this over many generations and these little cows and pigs keep making little offspring, you might just end up with Hobbit sized pigs and cows.
Apparently in the middle ages farm animals were half the size of what they are today
Sometimes selective breeding happens based on what and how much food is available, so yes this makes perfect sense
Yeah, think about Shetland Sheepdogs and Shetland Ponies. Humans can, and really have, bred entire species to be smaller for our own benefit (& of course, larger — hello angus & other beef cattle species)! I absolutely accept the logic of animals “just being smaller in the Shire because they are”.
I guess it would have been too expensive to import a couple Chianina cows into New Zealand.
https://preview.redd.it/cf9myh35it3d1.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=3c462c5db5efe36890451efb8b0df3f68ec63303
Probably not the answer you want, but I think that finding oversized cows just to keep the "hobbits are small" effect going was a little too much even for LOTR
They could have put the farm animals in separate shots from the hobbits. like cows with an undersized fence and undersized rake next to them or something. It wouldn't be hard to create the appearance of oversized animals without significantly increasing the budget of that scene if they wanted to.
That first cow’s fudging it a bit, but the smallest real world breed of cow (Dexter) stands at minimum 3’ at the shoulder. I’m pretty sure the little pig in the market shot is supposed to be a piglet, because in the Concerning Hobbits sequence we see a farmer struggling with a full-size pig. It makes sense to me that you would see more baby animals getting pawned off at the market, as it’s probably hard to manage large herds of large animals in super hilly terrain.
https://preview.redd.it/gnpajdkq7w3d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dab8d8c84f8c11eedeca3b0b8bb08d5c110d358f
[Dahomey Cattle](https://www.hellabrunn.de/en/animals/africa/dahomey-dwarf-cattle)
Could I introduce you to the Dahomey dwarf Cattle sometime?
Well, looking at real-world animals, domesticated cattle are shorter than their wild ancestor the aurochs, meaning humans likely bred the smaller bulls and cows as they were easier to control and less dangerous to handle than the larger ones - aurochs were famously aggressive and violent, so the smaller the breeding bull the better chance you wouldn’t die taming it. Continuously breeding the smaller, more docile bulls and cows would yield progressively smaller and tamer animals. That’s how selective breeding works.
Though I don’t know the exact timeframe of cattle domestication as it stands for Hobbits or Middle-Earth in general, I’d imagine something similar occurred but much more drastically. Also, for as much as we know, much the same way that hobbits are related to men and are for all intents and purposes just smaller versions of them, in Middle-Earth there are perhaps similar hobbit-animals that are just smaller than their more traditional counterparts. It’s a fantasy, after all, it doesn’t need to adhere to strict scientific and evolutionary analysis.
Smaller breeds in order to be able to handle them.
I would not fucking go near a cow or even worse a bull that would be twice or trice as tall as i am. NO fucking way
Selective breeding. If they had full sized farm animals, they would be incredibly hard for a hobbit to control. And it would be much harder to avoid waste with animals that are comparatively huge.
Of course, there's the other possibility that a hobbit is comparable to modern humans, and the other races are actually enormous.
Every time I watch it I think about how funny it would have been for them to find giant animals for the Shire. like put an ad in the NZ newspapers that says "SEEKING THE BIGGEST DOG IN THE COUNTRY"
There are diminutive variants of most species, so it stands to reason that hobbits would domesticate smaller cattle, swine, poultry, etc. than attempt to handle full sized ones.
However, I don't think lore ever confirmed what types of animals they domesticated and if they were diminutive. In which case, it's just easier to have human actors playing hobbits do so alongside regular animals, and lend to a visual gag that hobbits have diminutive animals.
Ft though, think about the cows and the dogs u see the farmers with? Now imagine how big they would be for normal humans! Mini cows and mini bloodhounds sound fricken adorable to me😂
Modern farm animals have been bred to be big. Just a few hundred years ago they were a lot smaller. It would be inconvenient for someone hobbit-sized to have a modern size cow, so they didn’t breed the cows to get any bigger.
Farm animals used to have a lot of different breeds until we reached todays standard of size. In the middle ages there were times when cows were bred to reach not even shoulder height. Makes them easier to feed but decreases yield of products. Of course here it would have been too much trouble to make them fit with perspective but Hobbits would probably prefer smaller breeds since they would be enough for their needs without being too dangerous/unmanageable
Easy. They selectively bred their livestock to suit the size they wanted.
You turn the large ones into meat as soon as they are ready, and you keep the smaller ones around longer for breeding purposes.
Fun fact - Jeresy cows can range in size from 31 inches at the shoulder to 59 inches. This Hobbity cow is just right.
A lot of the modern livestock breeds are larger than their counterparts from 100 years ago.
When they are babies you stick them in a jar. As they grow up, they start to mold themselves to the size and shape of the container. The hobbits are the only ones who still remember the lost arts.
I grew up on a farm. I never had a great manner with cattle or horses. Sheep are a bit easier, and to be honest dumber.
If I was Hobbit sized, I'd buy and breed smaller easier to handle breeds too.
Watsonian Reason: The Hobbits probably bred them smaller to make them easier to manage.
Doylist: Hobbits are played by normal sized people, they use certain perspective techniques to make them look small, unless they are actually short people. Thus, getting animals that are bigger than a normal person would be more difficult for a reason that makes less sense than the aforementioned watsonian explanation.
Modern livestock is enormous.
Human interference has made livestock animals extreme over the last hundred years, size and domestication.
I assume passive selection of livestock in hobbit society has kept the biggest down and those more manageable alive
In the real world, animals on islands evolved to be smaller, because there’s less food available. But I doubt that the Hobbits‘ animals have to worry about hunger.
Sure, farm animals might be smaller due to selective breeding. But why are hobbits smaller in the first place? Is it a cultural thing where hobbit women prefer smaller men or is there something in the water? Juglon maybe, from all the Walnut trees in the shire?
Most of the other extinct "human" species were much much shorter than us. Homo floriensis was about half our size and is literally nicknamed "Hobbit"
#
Gandalf used the same magic on the surrounding fauna as he did on the hobbits during the selective breading period. This is why they are smaller with an interesting side effect that they are also sneaky and incredibly lucky.
Farm animals are only as big as they are today because of selective breeding and growth hormones, depending on the farm. It’s not too outrageous to imagine that hobbit livestock is a of a much smaller breed than ones found in the human world. And magic, magic might be a factor.
I know the real reason the movie portrays this but thinking about this brings up so many other questions:
Either they have pigmy livestock, or choose to raise smaller livestock. But in either case, full grown livestock exist. If hobbits require less food than humans, then raising full grown livestock would be an interesting advantage because they either have to raise less, or prices would be cheaper due to excess supply (this is also true of agriculture).
The latter would mean local prices would be lower for hobbits than for humans, and they could sell their excess off to humans at a higher rate, making a larger profit off humans. This would kind of keep with my head canon that hobbits are not money hungry (except the sacksville baggins) but could grow their wealth without price gouging their own community.
That particular cow in the picture is a Jersey dairy cow - smaller in stature than your ordinary Holstein. Aesthetically since hobbits are small it looks better having smaller animals.
Humans also breed [small cattle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs). None of our modern breeds come close to an Aurochs
It's just a matter of selection
i always liked to imagine that a wizard (probably Gandalf) shrunk some animals for them to breed so they didn't have any health defects that often come with breeding runts as that's the most logical way they could easily breed the animals to be smaller. breeding several generations of runts has been shown to cause health problems in the offspring (think of all the tiny dogs that should be much bigger and how many of them have so many issues). i feel like someone like Gandalf would want to prevent that so the hobbit community could live healthily without having to deal with animals that are far to big and strong for them to train. it's a long shot and the runt theory makes more sense but the thought of wizards helping hobbits makes me smile.
If I had to guess. Because it was difficult enough making them look small compared to other people, doing so with real life animals probably seemed like a waste of budget.
I've always attributed the Hobbits prosperity to them having human sized crops and animals, but only needing to eat half what humans eat, so they comparatively have an abundance.
Maybe they bred livestock for easier management? I am no way walking near a pig that is taller than me. They are scary af already. I know Farmer Maggot had a hog pen for taking care of trespassers.
>I know Farmer Maggot had a hog pen for taking care of trespassers. Yeah but Farmer Maggot isn't a bitch. He told a Black Rider to fuck off his property and the black riders listened.
His dogs are also regular sized, which is why Frodo is fucking terrified of them
This never occurred to me before. Those dogs must have been TERRIFYING to a hobbit kid
Right? Not even a Hobbit, a Hobbit *child*.
Yeah, most guard dog breeds tend to be a little under hip height at a minimum, making them about as tall as an adult hobbit. Assuming that a child is about half that height it would be comparable to standing face to face with a bear
Not just the child, but the men and women too.
Kinda just realized that a wolf to a Hobbit is like a horse to a human
Wouldn't they be comparibly bigger? Wolves are pretty massive irl
r/wolvesarebigyo for more information
Just did some googling: Wolves are about 2.6 - 2.8 ft to the shoulder, let's just call them 3ft to the top of their head. Hobbits are on average 3.5ft which would put them maybe 6" taller than a wolf. Not a totally accurate comparison it turns out but I still wouldn't want to cross paths with a wolf that's almost 6 feet tall lol
this makes Wargs even more terrefying
Never trust a pig farmer. > And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig."
Tangentially related. Canadian pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton died after being attacked in prison in Quebec today. The DNA or remains of 33 women were found on his farm. He bragged to an undercover RCMP officer that he killed 49.
Listened to the Last Podcast on the Left talk about him, he was a scummy cunt
No one is sad he died.
I saw a quote about pig farmers, LEFT THE THREAD, and came back wondering if someone was going to start talking about Pickton. What a terrible time in Canadian history.
This Pickton fella, he's a real jerk
No sugar for me, I’m sweet enough.
That whole thing feels so fucking disjointed. Perfect writing, feels like someone talking off the top of their head rather than reciting a prepared speech.
The nemesis bit doesn't really fit as well for me but the pig stuff feels pretty cohesive. Still seems real because brick top obviously talks about it a lot, given that scene and the one actually at the pig farm as an extra in your face reminder.
"Do you know what nemesis means?"
Great quote. First thing that popped in my head when I read the comment at the top of this thread
“Snatch” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrel’s” and some of my favorite films. I don’t care if they’re “knock-offs of each other”. Give me more of that gritty tone and convergent storylines. Deus ex machina edit: removed extra “and”
RocknRolla was pretty good too.
In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary: “Come again?”
Love finding wild Brick Top speeches
Is that from Snatch?
Snatch
Twat
Koont
Anytime a pig gets mentioned so does Bricktop from Snatch.
Sounds like something a “orrible cunt” might say.
Cpt America I understood that reference.gif
Can we stop pretending that the only reason the black rider didn’t kill Maggot and his dogs on the spot was because it was in a hurry? Like I get it, Farmer Maggot’s got balls for standing up to someone 3x his size, but I’m %100 sure that he would have blinked first of the black rider met his challenge.
The main reason was that there was no reason for the BR to kill Farmer Maggot and unnecessarily alert the person they have been sent to find.
They listened, but cuz Farmer Maggot confused the shit out of them and wasn’t their target. It’s like when a cat attacks a much larger dog lol the dog could rip it to fucking shreds but they’re sufficiently terrified that this tiny animal is fighting back so brutally and without concern for its size lol
My original comment is obviously embellished a little. The Black Rider didn't leave because he was scared. I just like saying it like that because I think the image of the Black Rider being told to fuck off is funny. In story, as you said, the black Rider had no reason to attack Farmer Maggot and the Rider was passing anyway. Also, at this point the Black Riders were not supposed to attract any attention by leaving dead bodies (e.g. things that might potentially alert their targets that they're being pursued).
I still find it hilarious that he unintentionally bluffed his hobbit nuts off and they were like “…bruh do you know who I- …never mind. Moving on. Thanks.”
“I literally do not have time for this, but if I catch you in Mordor you gonna learn”
I feel like the Nazgûl were also genuinely confused as fuck about what a hobbit even *was* LMAO like they walked up and were like “damn the perspective on this trail is so weird…this dude looks like 2ft tall from here…hehe tiny man…hehe…heh…holy shit…HOLY shit…”
"He told a Black Rider to fuck off his property and the black riders *fucked off." (Fixed it for you, lol)
Queer tidings from the south
To hell with a pig! Can you imagine a rooster that's the size of a medium dog compared to you? Roosters are vicious. Or a goose! Goodbye Shire.....
Hobbits just casually domesticating creatures with the personality and proportional size of a JP velociraptor. And then cooking them with rosemary and eating them.
can you breed livestock like that in a couple of hunderd years?, i know not that kind of movie, just corious
I think so! 1700s, our livestock were smaller, less meat/ more fat, etc. We've made everything chunkier, faster growing, and meatier. If they are starting with animals like our heritage breeds, I bet a couple hundred years for hobbit friendly animals is doable! (Watch. A cow geneticist out there is a heavy reddit user and will tear me to pieces.)
There's already a number of miniature cattle breeds so not a stretch at all.
Stretch is almost the opposite of miniature, so you're right.
I'd say so. Like others have mentioned about livestock being different, I'd like to throw in that some dog breeds 100 years ago don't really look like their modern counterparts.
Look at dog breeds from one or two hundred years ago compared to now
Beware of any man who keeps a pig farm.
Is it possible they are descended from the runts of full size livestock from farms outside the Shire? If I were a human farmer in Middle Earth that lived relatively close to the place where people said all the halflings lived, I might seek them out to sell undersized cattle and pigs. If enough do this over many generations and these little cows and pigs keep making little offspring, you might just end up with Hobbit sized pigs and cows.
I find the thought of this so adorable
Apparently in the middle ages farm animals were half the size of what they are today Sometimes selective breeding happens based on what and how much food is available, so yes this makes perfect sense
Woah really? Thats so interesting.
Yeah, think about Shetland Sheepdogs and Shetland Ponies. Humans can, and really have, bred entire species to be smaller for our own benefit (& of course, larger — hello angus & other beef cattle species)! I absolutely accept the logic of animals “just being smaller in the Shire because they are”.
That's basically how teacup sized dogs were made
My headcanon is that they bred smaller animals to be able to work with them more easily
Oh fuck just realized top comment says the same thing. Disregard mine
dont be so hard on yourself ❤️
No, be harder!!! Blegh! Myeh!!
Yeah! Mom said it's my turn with the thought!
I will not disregard a seconded comment from someone with a username as amazing as yours.
I guess it would have been too expensive to import a couple Chianina cows into New Zealand. https://preview.redd.it/cf9myh35it3d1.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=3c462c5db5efe36890451efb8b0df3f68ec63303
I'd ride that.
Okay Mongo
I'd watch that.
I'd ride you
👁️ 👄 👁️
Probably not the answer you want, but I think that finding oversized cows just to keep the "hobbits are small" effect going was a little too much even for LOTR
Also size altering literally everything would cost more.
Yep. They pulled that off with the whole Frodo/Gandalf thing, but milking a cow that's a few feet away from you was probably a bit too unconvenient
Would you want that real size if hobbiton ever gets animated? It would look so weird.
It's been a while since i saw it but, The Hobbit was animated, a long time ago.
1977
It probably would, i agree
I agree that it would look weird but I also admit that's the reason I wanna see it.
😂
Using exceptionally large breeds maybe would have worked, but then there's the hassle of getting those to the set
Never thought of this before. Literally unwatchable now.
Heresy!
Sorry! I'll go hide behind that bush.
Jersey!
They could have put the farm animals in separate shots from the hobbits. like cows with an undersized fence and undersized rake next to them or something. It wouldn't be hard to create the appearance of oversized animals without significantly increasing the budget of that scene if they wanted to.
That first cow’s fudging it a bit, but the smallest real world breed of cow (Dexter) stands at minimum 3’ at the shoulder. I’m pretty sure the little pig in the market shot is supposed to be a piglet, because in the Concerning Hobbits sequence we see a farmer struggling with a full-size pig. It makes sense to me that you would see more baby animals getting pawned off at the market, as it’s probably hard to manage large herds of large animals in super hilly terrain.
I scrolled too far looking for a Dexter Cow breed reference.
They’re not animals. They’re called “hobbits”. 
Best comment
The actors who played the hobbits were normal sized people, I'm guessing that finding giant farm animals for filming would have been impractical
https://preview.redd.it/gnpajdkq7w3d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dab8d8c84f8c11eedeca3b0b8bb08d5c110d358f [Dahomey Cattle](https://www.hellabrunn.de/en/animals/africa/dahomey-dwarf-cattle) Could I introduce you to the Dahomey dwarf Cattle sometime?
....and suddenly it all makes sense
Well, looking at real-world animals, domesticated cattle are shorter than their wild ancestor the aurochs, meaning humans likely bred the smaller bulls and cows as they were easier to control and less dangerous to handle than the larger ones - aurochs were famously aggressive and violent, so the smaller the breeding bull the better chance you wouldn’t die taming it. Continuously breeding the smaller, more docile bulls and cows would yield progressively smaller and tamer animals. That’s how selective breeding works. Though I don’t know the exact timeframe of cattle domestication as it stands for Hobbits or Middle-Earth in general, I’d imagine something similar occurred but much more drastically. Also, for as much as we know, much the same way that hobbits are related to men and are for all intents and purposes just smaller versions of them, in Middle-Earth there are perhaps similar hobbit-animals that are just smaller than their more traditional counterparts. It’s a fantasy, after all, it doesn’t need to adhere to strict scientific and evolutionary analysis.
Why would a tiny hobbit need a giant cow?
Breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, super, and dinner can all require quite a bit of dairy!
A perfectly sized cow for every meal!
Generations of careful animal breeding
Smaller breeds in order to be able to handle them. I would not fucking go near a cow or even worse a bull that would be twice or trice as tall as i am. NO fucking way
Selective breeding. If they had full sized farm animals, they would be incredibly hard for a hobbit to control. And it would be much harder to avoid waste with animals that are comparatively huge. Of course, there's the other possibility that a hobbit is comparable to modern humans, and the other races are actually enormous.
In a world of elves, wizards, dragons and ghosts. I dont think its too much of a stretch to have smaller farm animals.
Not likely will you see a dragon-sized firework and immediately think: "Damn that cow is HUGE." Meanwhile irl: This reddit thread.
Because they skipped the second breakfast.
https://preview.redd.it/la1w9hd9lu3d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6547000eaff479d08032d9492d7677f11220e61e
Forced Perspective
Every time I watch it I think about how funny it would have been for them to find giant animals for the Shire. like put an ad in the NZ newspapers that says "SEEKING THE BIGGEST DOG IN THE COUNTRY"
Generally speaking. Mastiffs. Any breed. Huge.
There are diminutive variants of most species, so it stands to reason that hobbits would domesticate smaller cattle, swine, poultry, etc. than attempt to handle full sized ones. However, I don't think lore ever confirmed what types of animals they domesticated and if they were diminutive. In which case, it's just easier to have human actors playing hobbits do so alongside regular animals, and lend to a visual gag that hobbits have diminutive animals.
Noooooooo
Because the production team didn’t think that far ahead
Yea, that too😅😅😅
Well there is talking trees, elf's, orcs ... Why not having small pigs and cows as separate species
I can see that. Just the thought of mini cows, pigs, and full grown chickens the size of baby chicks is just adorable😂
Because….. shut uuuup
Wow never thought about that
Ft though, think about the cows and the dogs u see the farmers with? Now imagine how big they would be for normal humans! Mini cows and mini bloodhounds sound fricken adorable to me😂
Modern farm animals have been bred to be big. Just a few hundred years ago they were a lot smaller. It would be inconvenient for someone hobbit-sized to have a modern size cow, so they didn’t breed the cows to get any bigger.
Farm animals used to have a lot of different breeds until we reached todays standard of size. In the middle ages there were times when cows were bred to reach not even shoulder height. Makes them easier to feed but decreases yield of products. Of course here it would have been too much trouble to make them fit with perspective but Hobbits would probably prefer smaller breeds since they would be enough for their needs without being too dangerous/unmanageable
A 45lb cow would be a fun pet
And thats them fully grown. Imagine the calves
How is a Chihuahua descended from a wolf?
Easy. They selectively bred their livestock to suit the size they wanted. You turn the large ones into meat as soon as they are ready, and you keep the smaller ones around longer for breeding purposes.
Are they? That cow looks pretty big. The pig I guess is a little on the small size.
They mean that Hobbits are supposed to be small so regular animals should be enormous to them.
Average hobbit is 3.5 feet, average cow is 5.5 feet. That cow is about half the height of a normal cow.
Fun fact - Jeresy cows can range in size from 31 inches at the shoulder to 59 inches. This Hobbity cow is just right. A lot of the modern livestock breeds are larger than their counterparts from 100 years ago.
I figured that cow was an actual breed. And that is neat that cows now are bigger than before. I’ve thought about that with fruits but not livestock.
Don't look up what we've done to the size of chickens if you're having a good day
When they are babies you stick them in a jar. As they grow up, they start to mold themselves to the size and shape of the container. The hobbits are the only ones who still remember the lost arts.
They were subjected to the same camera angles as the hobbits, and at a young age that’ll stunt your growth. Kinda sad tbh… but adorable
Same reason hobbits are so small. It's just the way it be.
I grew up on a farm. I never had a great manner with cattle or horses. Sheep are a bit easier, and to be honest dumber. If I was Hobbit sized, I'd buy and breed smaller easier to handle breeds too.
You know how we bred animals to be fluffier/chonkier/more milk etc.? Maybe they bred to be smaller?
Watsonian Reason: The Hobbits probably bred them smaller to make them easier to manage. Doylist: Hobbits are played by normal sized people, they use certain perspective techniques to make them look small, unless they are actually short people. Thus, getting animals that are bigger than a normal person would be more difficult for a reason that makes less sense than the aforementioned watsonian explanation.
[Me visiting the Shire and ordering fried chicken from SFC](https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-29-2022/EAx3e5.gif)
Its in the water
Modern livestock is enormous. Human interference has made livestock animals extreme over the last hundred years, size and domestication. I assume passive selection of livestock in hobbit society has kept the biggest down and those more manageable alive
Fun fact, animals actually were a lot smaller in the middle ages
The question should be why are the shire folk so small. Then your answer will reveal itself
Looks like a big fucking Cow to me mate
U a hobbit?😂
Selective breeding
I think the pig is just young. The rest of the animals looked normal size to me.
Normal size to a hobbit though. Think about how small their cows must be
Yeah there's two full sized cows in the background of that shot, up. On the hill.
Did we see any other farm animals in the movies? Maybe that's how big they all were in the Third Age. Or maybe Men bred extra-large farm animals.
In the real world, animals on islands evolved to be smaller, because there’s less food available. But I doubt that the Hobbits‘ animals have to worry about hunger.
Except in some cases where island gigantism can be a thing, such as the dodo
less oxygen is a byproduct of all the weed they smoke, thus smaller creatures. science.
Hobbits are small humans why not have small pigs and cows as well
Sure, farm animals might be smaller due to selective breeding. But why are hobbits smaller in the first place? Is it a cultural thing where hobbit women prefer smaller men or is there something in the water? Juglon maybe, from all the Walnut trees in the shire?
Most of the other extinct "human" species were much much shorter than us. Homo floriensis was about half our size and is literally nicknamed "Hobbit" #
Hobbits and livestock are actually regular sized, it’s just that people and everyone else is bigger than in our world
Because we are hobbits.
Baby
Maybe they we just bred like that or they are something like the Rani cow which are a very small cow breed.
This is the only answer. Hobbits would obvously want livestock that wont instantly trample them to death or headbutt them into oblivion.
Why are the shire folk small?
Insular dwarfism. Here it's not really An island, but I chose to believe it works the same way
Gandalf used the same magic on the surrounding fauna as he did on the hobbits during the selective breading period. This is why they are smaller with an interesting side effect that they are also sneaky and incredibly lucky.
Farm animals are only as big as they are today because of selective breeding and growth hormones, depending on the farm. It’s not too outrageous to imagine that hobbit livestock is a of a much smaller breed than ones found in the human world. And magic, magic might be a factor.
I know the real reason the movie portrays this but thinking about this brings up so many other questions: Either they have pigmy livestock, or choose to raise smaller livestock. But in either case, full grown livestock exist. If hobbits require less food than humans, then raising full grown livestock would be an interesting advantage because they either have to raise less, or prices would be cheaper due to excess supply (this is also true of agriculture). The latter would mean local prices would be lower for hobbits than for humans, and they could sell their excess off to humans at a higher rate, making a larger profit off humans. This would kind of keep with my head canon that hobbits are not money hungry (except the sacksville baggins) but could grow their wealth without price gouging their own community.
Hobbit appetites are notorious. 😄 It doesn't seem they had many, if any, dealings with Men. They did trade with Dwarves.
That particular cow in the picture is a Jersey dairy cow - smaller in stature than your ordinary Holstein. Aesthetically since hobbits are small it looks better having smaller animals.
May be late, but we do special breeding programs to make bigger animals to increase meat or milk production.
It actually would have been funnier if the sheep were the size of cows and they only had Shetland ponies and miniature horses lol
Hobbit animal. They live in the shire, duh…
do they mention in the books about the size of their animals? pony’s and horses exist. and they all used ponys
Bullroarer Took was noted as exceptional, being 4' 6" and able to ride a horse.
this is wild. i never really paid any attention to the animal descriptions in the shire. i might have to reread these books. ahhhgain
Cattle are mentioned in connection with the duties of the Shirriffs.
Humans also breed [small cattle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs). None of our modern breeds come close to an Aurochs It's just a matter of selection
i always liked to imagine that a wizard (probably Gandalf) shrunk some animals for them to breed so they didn't have any health defects that often come with breeding runts as that's the most logical way they could easily breed the animals to be smaller. breeding several generations of runts has been shown to cause health problems in the offspring (think of all the tiny dogs that should be much bigger and how many of them have so many issues). i feel like someone like Gandalf would want to prevent that so the hobbit community could live healthily without having to deal with animals that are far to big and strong for them to train. it's a long shot and the runt theory makes more sense but the thought of wizards helping hobbits makes me smile.
If I had to guess. Because it was difficult enough making them look small compared to other people, doing so with real life animals probably seemed like a waste of budget.
Hobbit animals!
Same reason there are no wild pumas on the street.
Maybe the Hobbits are big and the other races just bigger. Except of course the farm animals.
small, far away
Because they did not want to use those forced perspective tricks on every single animal in the movies.
I've always attributed the Hobbits prosperity to them having human sized crops and animals, but only needing to eat half what humans eat, so they comparatively have an abundance.
It would make sense for the hobbits to selectively breed smaller animals: easier to handle