Bleeding Mounts for Food

[Sociotard]

I was reading about how Mongol Keshiks would, if there wasn't anything else to eat, drink the blood of their horses. Marco Polo said they could last for 10 days like that, but he may have been exagerating. You can watch an Englishman try to do it to a camel in the movie "The Four Feathers." Good movie, by the way.

 

Anyway, how would you represent this in hero? I looked over the bleeding rules on page 417 of 5er and the starvation rules on page 438 of 5er. I think the easiest way is just to make the horse take the riders 1d6 normal damage from starvation for the first ten days. Whadayathink?

[Badger]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I was reading about how Mongol Keshiks would, if there wasn't anything else to eat, drink the blood of their horses. Marco Polo said they could last for 10 days like that, but he may have been exagerating. You can watch an Englishman try to do it to a camel in the movie "The Four Feathers." Good movie, by the way.

 

Anyway, how would you represent this in hero? I looked over the bleeding rules on page 417 of 5er and the starvation rules on page 438 of 5er. I think the easiest way is just to make the horse take the riders 1d6 normal damage from starvation for the first ten days. Whadayathink?

 

SO they werent killing them just cutting their horses, am I right?

 

I've heard of Native American tribes riding horses into the ground then drinking the horses blood. I think Apache, maybe Commanche.

[Sociotard]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

They weren't killing them, no. Just bleeding them off a little bit.

[Frenchman]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I would just have them deal the horse a small amount of damage - 1 body at most, maybe 1 body every few meals. Don't make the horse take starvation damage, after all it still gets to eat grass. I'm not too sure about the Mongols particularly, but there are still people who do this in central asia, with both horses and camels. As I understand it, they choose a particular vein and always drink from it, and I think I heard somewhere that they use an anasthetic of some kind, probably herbal.

I've heard/read that among some of these peoples, they prefer to ingest blood in this fashion to eating "normal" food (normal to us).With my extremely basic knowledge of nutrition I cannot think of any reason offhand why a person couldn't subsist on this almost indefinitely, since blood is full of water, sugar, and all the other nutrients a horse needs. Probably some vitamin deficiencies, but those can take months to show up.

[Badger]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I guess it would also depend on how much they drink. Too little they might get weak, too much the horse would. Anyhow, I've always wanted to find out more about the Mongol history, one area in history I dont much about (besides the basics on Genghis, of course)

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Huh. I never realized the Mongols were vampires. Ya learn something new every day...

 

 

 

 

[Sean Waters]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Starvation is nothing like the problem that dehydration is. Given that horses can eat grass, which humans can't (well we can't extract nutrition from it as we can't digest cellulose), and assuming there is water available to both horse and rider, bleeding a small amount of blood each day is not something that would even cause 1 BODY, realistically, although it would seriously piss off the horse, and weaken it if you did it continually. There's a lot of blood in a horse.

 

I wouldn't be particularly inclined to use the damage mechanics. What I'd do is simply reduce the horse's movement rate by 1" or 2" per day you fed off them. When they can no longer move they collapse, and start dying.

 

If there was no water available, I'd just assume that the horse takes dehydration daamge at twice the normal rate and the rider takes none. And I'd probably do the loss of movement rate too, as I quite like the idea

[ghost-angel]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Sounds like a good use of the Survival Skill to stave off starvation and death, while not killing your mount by accident.

[Sociotard]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Sounds like a good use of the Survival Skill to stave off starvation and death' date=' while not killing your mount by accident.[/quote']

Interesting idea. If the rider failed the survival roll badly he might have to make a successful paramedics roll or the horse starts to bleed to death.

 

After some more reading, blood was only one source of nutrition horses could provide. Apparently, many riders prefered mares because they could be milked, and the milk fermented into a sort of milk wine called Kumis.

 

I wonder if they ever combined the two into a sort of Mongol Martini?

[Zeropoint]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

The Dark Elves in my fantasy setting (who live in the desert, not underground) do this. It gives everyone else one more reason to find them creepy.

[pinecone]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I remember seeing a documentary about the Watusi(sp?) in which it showed that cow blood and milk were the primary form of nutrition for the Maran (sp?) (the young warrior class) strange to use, but not unknown for human behavior....

[Sir Ofeelya]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Mongol riders usually rode with a string of horses, so tapping some blood could be spread around, allowing each horse to recover. If you only had the one horse, then in game terms perhaps dropping it's END and CON a bit each time it is used for sustemance.

 

The Masai of Africa also cut their cattle to get fresh blood which is mixed with milk. One of my brothers hasa tried it and said that it was not the worst thing he had eaten.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Interesting idea. If the rider failed the survival roll badly he might have to make a successful paramedics roll or the horse starts to bleed to death.

 

After some more reading, blood was only one source of nutrition horses could provide. Apparently, many riders prefered mares because they could be milked, and the milk fermented into a sort of milk wine called Kumis.

 

I wonder if they ever combined the two into a sort of Mongol Martini?

 

I very much doubt that you'd accidentally hit a major artery: the cuts would be made into muscle rich areas, like the shoulders, and would be very shallow. The 'worst case scenario' would probably be making the horse lame.

[Eosin]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I have always meant to look more up on this subject. I wonder how they do it without nausea? Ingestion of blood tends to upset the stomach (probably the iron content)....

[Sean Waters]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I seem to recall the technique being used by the Nadir is the David Gemmell 'Legend' series. As for the nausea, it would be the iron content that would be the problem, but I imagine that they don't simply open a vein, take a pint and then throw up. If memory serves you make a light cut in the shoulder that you sip at over a period of hours, taking in tiny amounts that presumably the body can cope with. I believe the idea is that it is done fromt he saddle ont he move. Don't go touching the ground unless you ned to

[Lucius]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

I'd never heard that about the Mongols; but I had heard of African tribes like the Masai, Nuer, etc. that they could go for a long time on nothing but blood and milk of cattle.

 

Well, I did know the Mongols made kumis out of fermented mare's milk, but not that they drank the horse's blood.

 

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Why is the palindromedary looking at me so nervously?

[Vondy]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Interesting idea. If the rider failed the survival roll badly he might have to make a successful paramedics roll or the horse starts to bleed to death.

 

For characters in a culture where this was common practice I wouldn't require a roll unless there were unusual circumstances in play.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

There is also a very good chance that the Mongols invented yoghurt.

 

I'm not sure what my point is.

[Markdoc]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Couple of points. To get enough nutrition out of blood just to survive on, you need to drink a fairish amount (say 300 mls - or a biggish cup). Even a horse will collapse if you tap it like that every day for more than a week or two (for a human to completely replace that much blood loss takes about a week or more, depending on your diet. This is strictly an emergency measure, although as Brian noted, if you have a string of horses, you could go quite a while like this - especially if you butchered and ate one, once you had tapped it out. That'd be last resort stuff though.

 

The Masai do this with cattle, as noted, but usually have 20-30 head, so you rotate them, tapping each one for blood perhaps once a month. You can keep that up indefinately, especially since they don't normally drink blood every day - it's used to supplement milk (they normally mix the blood with the milk, which makes a more palatable drink - relatively speaking of course). Remember of course that cattle give lots more milk than horses, so what works for them wouldn't normally work even with a string of horses - like I say, there it's more of an emergency thing.

 

Last of all, you don't - whatever you do - cut into muscle. That'd lame your animal for little benefit. You cut instead into a small vein or artery near the surface (usually on the neck, but occasionally on the legs). I've never seen Masai do it, but I have watched Boruna (a related, nore northerly tribe) do it. A narrow, deep cut will bleed quite freely into a gourd or cup and can then be sealed with a plug of chewed, astringent resin from treebark, which stops the bleeding and helps prevent infection.

 

cheers, Mark

[zornwil]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Sounds like a good use of the Survival Skill to stave off starvation and death' date=' while not killing your mount by accident.[/quote']

Rarely do I like to put it this way, but I think that's the "perfect answer". That is exactly what is happening, mechanically, excellent reasoning from effect!

[zornwil]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

For characters in a culture where this was common practice I wouldn't require a roll unless there were unusual circumstances in play.

Brief tangent but, I think, an interesting one, since we're discussing the Mongols...

 

As the Russians dropped their support of the Mongolian economy, in response to their own economic plight and general geopolitical priorities, the capital city really went downhill. Many Mongols, only being 1 or 2 generations removed from a nomadic lifestyle, took to the countryside again...only to fail miserably. Most ended up back in Ulaanbaatar, homeless or in shacks. They lacked the Survival skill.

 

Just a sidenote of recent historical interest, not suggesting VDM was saying that this expertise existed among the urban population. What was interesting, to me, was the sense among the urbanites that they knew "enough" to pick it back up, deluding themselves as to their skill level, and the subsequent fallout, and given what we're discussing it seemed appropriate.

[Markdoc]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

What was interesting' date=' to me, was the sense among the urbanites that they knew "enough" to pick it back up, deluding themselves as to their skill level, and the subsequent fallout, and given what we're discussing it seemed appropriate.[/quote']

 

Doesn't surprise me - most people delude themselves about their relative skill levels in lots of fields: with survival, you're lucky if you recognise that in time!

 

cheers, Mark

[Sean Waters]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Last of all, you don't - whatever you do - cut into muscle. That'd lame your animal for little benefit. You cut instead into a small vein or artery near the surface (usually on the neck, but occasionally on the legs). I've never seen Masai do it, but I have watched Boruna (a related, nore northerly tribe) do it. A narrow, deep cut will bleed quite freely into a gourd or cup and can then be sealed with a plug of chewed, astringent resin from treebark, which stops the bleeding and helps prevent infection.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Now you tell me. I could have sworn that horse is just faking it.

 

Oh, and where can you get astringent resin treebark?

 

Quickly, Mark, this is kinda urgent.

[archermoo]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Yes, Mongols would drink the blood of their horses. As someone else already said, the rode with a string of horses so they could switch mounts frequently and keep up their speed. It also allowed them to bleed from several different horses so as not to weaken any of them. They were known to mix the blood with both milk and kumis. Generally the bleeding of horses was done while on the move, not usually as a standard "at home" method of eating. Though a friend of mine who has studied them more than I like to comment (only half jokingly) that the Mongol native diet was the main reason that they took over most of the known world at one point. So they could get some good grub.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Bleeding Mounts for Food

 

Frankly if there was any mileage in this 'Theory of Evolution', horses would have learned to cook, so I'm not buying in to that one.