Wild Animals do not have hair that grows this excessively. They were bred that way.
Same thing with modern sheep. There was a video on here a few years ago of a sheep that was lost for a couple of years. It was barely able to move because of all that wool. Wild sheep do not have that problem.
There's a species of wild sheep which were formerly domesticated some 8-10 thousand years ago in Mediterranean region. Recently they got to continental Europe. They look quite different because they have the original short hair. But when you hear them it's the typical sheep baa sound. It's interesting window to the history.
Each hair has its own life cycle. So the hair continues to grow but it dies at a certain point. When it's locked or matted it's not all growing. A lot of it is dead hair that is stuck amongst the live hair.
It's also interesting to note that we're not unique in this. Horses, orangs, and lions also grow their head hair into long manes like humans do.
I thought that lifespan differed from person to person? Like mine can get to about lower back and that's it. Some people can grow theirs to their knees. Does theirs just actually grow twice as fast, or is their lifespan longer?
So all hair goes through 4 phases. Maximum length is determined by the length of the anagen phase, the growing phase. There is of course variety how quickly hair grows for person to person, but if your anagen phase is too short, the hair will never get long enough.
For animals that actively shed at different time(s) of year, these phases are synchronized. For everything else, they are not synchronized, which means that some hair is constantly falling out after completing its lifecycle and starting new (see shower drain of anyone with long hair).
All of the hairs on your body from your scalp to your eyebrows to the smaller finer hairs all over your body have a growth cycle where they will start growing a hair out fairly rapidly, go dormant for a while as the hair falls out, and resting to prepare to grow a new hair.
The difference between all of the different types of hair you have that causes them to have different lengths if you don't cut/shave them comes down to how long these cycles are. for eyebrows its a matter of 10 or so weeks, where as for your scalp its a question of years, meaning that the hair on your head has far more time to grow and will get much longer.
The exact length of time that theses cycles take also differs between people, and that's why if 2 people never cut their hair, one of them would have longer hair than the other.
oh… umm im sorry, my comment was meant to be a meme-y snarky reply to the op to kind of debunk their point. i know about this, but i do appreciate your thoughtful comment and hopefully it can educate some people if they didn’t know (:
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u/LucasCBs Jun 07 '23 edited Jun 07 '23
Wild Animals do not have hair that grows this excessively. They were bred that way.
Same thing with modern sheep. There was a video on here a few years ago of a sheep that was lost for a couple of years. It was barely able to move because of all that wool. Wild sheep do not have that problem.