Watching a newborn lamb or giraffe take its first steps can be simultaneously cute and painful. In these and other early-to-walk species — typically larger grazing animal — the wobbles are sweet, but the falls are hard. Limbs sometimes bend in ways that would mangle your own legs. “The first 24 to 48 hours, they're still pretty awkward,” says Sarah Reed, an animal biologist at the University of Connecticut.
Once the early learning phase passes, a cow, horse or zebra less than one week old can literally run circles around human infants of the same age. Many large, grazing mammals develop this way. And though it might seem strange from our perspective, learning to walk — or more specifically, get out of harm's way — is one of the simplest survival strategies around. Truthfully, the fact that a human baby does so little for so long makes us the odd species out.
