Llama cavalry?

The earlier picture of a pack llama also had a woman next to it for reference, hence the woman here for consistency. Assuming she's of average height, the mule is four feet tall at the shoulder, some six inches taller than the llama and twelve inches shorter than the average horse. Big enough to ride, but not big enough for an effective cavalry mount.

Part of what makes cavalry effective in battle is the sheer mass of the horse and rider as opposed to the footsoldier opposing them. It's one thing to face a charging two hundred pound man; it's quite another to face him mounted on eight hundred pounds of horse. Animals like llamas and mules simply aren't massive enough to be effective, not in the shock role.

You also have the issue with Mules being sterile (1 in 1,000 being able to actually breed) and having to have horses and donkey's around to produce them, essentially making the point moot. Now if you can make it so that they are not sterile and can breed effectively (maybe 1 in 20/10) then it's possible for them to be useful
 
So what if we go nuts and have Titanotylopus survive and spread forming the basis for a true heavy cavalry in the Americas! :)

 
A Mongolian pony is larger (though by less), faster, and better able to carry riders.

More importantly, they are still individually slower and weaker than regular warhorses of the settled folks, making up for it in hardiness and numbers. A mongol soldier had anywhere between 7-11 remounts, where a contemporary European/Persian horseman would have like 2-3 at most.

Andean and Mesoamerican states already, by all accounts, had massive problems with logistics. Mongol-pony-level numbers would completely stress transportation routes. This isn't the Eurasian Steppe.
 
Well Camels, Dromedary and Llamas are domesticated so why not (its an What if after all)?
 
Well Camels, Dromedary and Llamas are domesticated so why not [domesticate Titanotylopus] (its an What if after all)?

While I am a staunch critic of the Jared Diamond approach of labeling things "domesticable" or "not domesticable," I think domesticating a camel the size of a giraffe stretches plausibility a bit too far.

I have become a fan of domestic Macrauchenia, although I admit that it's largely because of the novelty of it. It's about the size of a horse or camel, but it has feet more like rhino feet, so it probably wasn't as fast as a horse. Its sturdier legs possibly means it could carry more weight, though. Its tiny head possibly means it had lower intelligence and lower tractability, though it would be impossible to know that for sure.
 
I've just had the mental image of doing a crossover of this with Robert's Guns of the Tawantinsuya. Just think of the possibilities ! Llama or machauchenia riding Incan dragoons ! :eek: :cool: :D
 
Bumping this thread to hear if we have an artist here that can turn those mental images into real images?
 
I have become a fan of domestic Macrauchenia, although I admit that it's largely because of the novelty of it. It's about the size of a horse or camel, but it has feet more like rhino feet, so it probably wasn't as fast as a horse. Its sturdier legs possibly means it could carry more weight, though. Its tiny head possibly means it had lower intelligence and lower tractability, though it would be impossible to know that for sure.
One of the players in the NationStates game has created a nation whose history included Macrauchenia-pulled chariots... and "cavalry" riding giant ground sloths! I'll try to find links to his pictures of these when I've got more time available, probably next week.
 
Even if you could breed a Llama or Dog big enough to carry a adult human of decent size you will never get heavy cavalry. As you'd already have reached the upper end of the Llama or Dog it's size capabilities, achievable in the time that humans and these animals have lived together.
I think that's the key part of this whole debate... people in the old world were working with it's domesticated animals for way longer than the people in the new world. If you could ASB people into the Andes at the same time as humans entered the Middle East, you'd have a better shot at getting llamas big enough to ride. After all, the original horse wasn't all that big an animal either, but humans had a long long time to breed them up...
 
One of the players in the NationStates game has created a nation whose history included Macrauchenia-pulled chariots... and "cavalry" riding giant ground sloths! I'll try to find links to his pictures of these when I've got more time available, probably next week.

Googling "NationStates Macrauchenia" led me to Inutoland, and a diagram of their armies on this discussion forum thread. That person has apparently put a lot of effort into that project.

It's certainly fun and creative. Riding giant sloths is pretty ridiculous, though.
 
Googling "NationStates Macrauchenia" led me to Inutoland, and a diagram of their armies on this discussion forum thread. That person has apparently put a lot of effort into that project.

It's certainly fun and creative. Riding giant sloths is pretty ridiculous, though.
Well, that's saved me some work: Yes, those were the pictures that I was talking about.
 
They ARE 'bred up', as you put it; the modern llama is much larger than its ancestors. To make it larger you'd have to genetically modify it, which would be beyond any civilization which existed in the world before the present day.

Are you sure? They don't seem much larger than wild guanacos. Obviously, they are bred up, but they where bred up based on the need of a mountain people, the ancestors of the Incas, who lived in the highest plains of South America. They needed animals that could climb up mountains, not large animals that could walk straight across a plain terrain.

I believe that, had the Americas not been conquered, the llamas would have difused more, and eventually, some people in the arid Peruvian coast or in the border of Argentine pampas would try to breed them in order to make them more usefull to their own needs. Bear in mind that the first domesticated horses were much smoller, and weren't used for riding, that took more than a thousand years after they were first used to pull chariots.

IOTL, in the late XV century, the Incas brought llamas as far South as the Chileanean forests (were they were taken by the Mapuche) and the hills of Northern Cordoba (Argentina), were they were adopted local Amerindians (Comechingones). Had they given time, I believe the second ones might have brought them down the hills, and used bred them according to their own needs. We might see much bigger llama, and even llama riders across the Pampas (after all, guanacos, a closely related wild animal, lived there fine, and in moder times llamas have been raised in farms in that region without much trouble).

Llamas don't seem suited for the jungles, that's why they never made it out of the South American Andes into Colombia or Panama, nor intro Brazil. But I see no reason why they couldn't be useful for the hot but arid Peruvian Pacific coast (as it happened OTL IIRC), the temperate plains of the Pampas, or the Mexican highlands (if they can be taken there by sea).
 
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But I see no reason why they couldn't be usefull for the temperate plains of the Pampas, or the Mexican highlands (if they can be taken there by sea).

Taking llamas by sea to the Mexican highlands is not easily done. They can take some pretty high temperatures, but when you combine that with humidity they suffer heatstroke pretty easily. Sailing through tropical seas in boats that don't have air-conditioning is going to be pretty brutal for the poor creatures, about as bad as marching them through jungle on land.

Maybe if you have fast boats, and they are introduced as curiosities for the uber-rich rather than livestock for the common man (so it can be economically feasible to transport them, as only one successful delivery could turn a profit) you could eventually build up a viable herd.
 
I think I read somewhere that llamas' backs are too delicate to be used as mounts. I have no sources, though, so hey, I could be completely wrong.

So where horses at first, until they were bred to be stronger. Of course, that happened in vaste tracks of flat land. In the Andes, there isn't the sort of demand for cavalry that would exist on the steppes of Eurasia.
 
What about using children as riders along with whoever else may be small enough to ride a llama without hurting it or slowing it down. If they could be trained as archers or even lancers this could then allow the larger more muscular warriors to remain as footmen.
 
Who says it has to be heavy charging cavalry? Why not mounted archers or javlineers? So how does the Mongolian pony stack up to the Llama?

I feel like llama mounted jinetes could work. Might have interesting butterflies when Pizarro arrives. Do horses react as badly to llama as they do to camels? I know certain desert people used camel cavalry in part because they scared horses by their smell and provided an advantage against cavalry.
 
Just because you can ride it doesn't make it a suitable cavalry mount. You'll note in those pictures just how small zebras are compared to horses; they simply wouldn't stand up to the strain of carrying an adult human for any length of time. You could use them as pack animals, ala donkeys, although I don't know if they're temperamentally suited to it.

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images

I'm pretty sure that's how big the original steppe ponies were that were domesticated. Horses are big now, because they were bred to be. The original domesticated horses only pulled chariots for a reason, they were to small to ride.
 
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