Humans are bi-pedal animals who walk extensively over long distances. However our feet are soft and not well suited to the task. However dogs, monkeys, and other animals have paws that serve as shoes to protect the feet.
No other mammal has such unprotected - but we are known for walking the farthest distances / nomadic behavior. Is this a joke?
I want paw feet instead of shoes.
personal anecdote; I spent a year barefoot as a teen after dropping out of high school. The only time I had anything on my feet was orthodontist visits they said i couldn't go on without flip flops but nowhere else cared.
After about a year of this the callous on the bottom of my feet was so thick i could walk a few hundred meters on summer asphalt without a break and once got a small square of windshield glass embedded in my foot and it just plucked right out and left a square hole, zero pain at all. The pads were about 3/4 cm thick at the ball of my foot and 1/2cm at the heel.
I did this after reading about this effect in a book and wanting to see if it was true and it really was!
edit: also if you try this i should mention that your feet pads turn black and are impossible to clean really just get to a less dark black. most other people find this offputting.
cw: gross, blood
Tap for spoiler
don't read this part if you're squeamishI would often have to pick tiny rocks and slivers of metal out of my feet when I did this because I walked to my friends house all summer and there was no sidewalk so it was on the streets.
So i had my dad's tools like these little snippers and needle nose pliers to grab the stuff and pull it out. So one day i'm like picking at my toe where the callous is really deep and I see something black embedded in it so I start digging for it. And damn this one is deeper than most I'm snipping into the toe deeper and deeper with the metal snippers and i can't quite reach it and it's starting to get to sensitive tissue.
And that's when I snip some little blood vessel in my toe that i had mistaken for embedded road debris. Ooze not squirt so i suppose it was just a big old capillary but oof it hurt and was a mess and that was the end of my messing around with my feet I started wearing shoes and socks again after that!
Thank you for reading my barefoot memoirs ๐๐ฆถ