It is generally understood that most, if not all, learning can be ultimately reduced, in one way or another, to processes of association. Thus it should be no revelation that the two ways a fluffy learns, artificially from their genetic programming, and ‘naturally’ as they go through life, are also both fundamentally based on association.
In describing the specific mechanics of how fluffies learn one must consider the strange dual construct that is the fluffy brain; a structure that is partly a meticulously planned structure carefully coded into the fluffy’s very DNA and partly fleshy organic chaos. That said brain ends up being entirely and uniquely dumb is beyond the scope of this discussion.
When presented with a sensory input, any brain, no matter how simple or sophisticated, will attempt to compare it to previous experiences and memories. In short, the brain will search for applicable associations it can draw between the sensory input and prior experience, regardless if those are appropriate or not. In the case of pareidolia, a human brain will misidentify stimulus, most usually visual, as a familiar thing, often something humans are, to a sense, pre-programmed to look for. This often leads to people incorrectly identifying random patterns such as jumbled sand or leaves as human faces, for example.
With this in mind, it is easy to understand how something as convoluted and compromise filled as the fluffy brain might tend towards some inappropriate associations, especially ones stemming from DNA based programming. Thus we, at last, arrive at the topic of the undesirable or ‘poopy’ foals.
Given the above considerations, it is easy to imagine how a subtle and difficult to detect error somewhere in the vast amount of code packed into each fluffy’s DNA could somehow, in a roundabout way, lead to each foal being valued by its color by the mother. Perhaps a programming note was left in by accident, or perhaps all of them were included and a single line was missing a #, allowing the line to be actionable, for example:
405 goto 519 #correct ‘wan-die’ when fluffy sees tacos
brown and green-brown fluffies don’t sell well and so are less valuable, might as well let them eat shit
#mono black and mono white sell well, but non-mono colors sell less well
While it may well be that simple, as fluffies were indeed released prematurely, and such items may have been noticed and slated for correction, that is ultimately unlikely to be the case given that ‘mummahs’ also tend to prize whichever foal has the coloration the closest to her own, suggesting a more subtle mechanism at work.
One possible route may be that there are actually two effects at play, with mummahs having been deliberately been programmed to try to feed and protect the ‘best’ ie ‘prettiest’ ie most likely to sell for a high price foal above the interest of the others, with a simultaneous lack of care for the foals least likely to sell, ie the ‘poopy’ colors. Given that fluffy foals are, at the best of times, unspeakably foul things, a lack of desire to care for a foal rapidly transitioning into contempt and indirect or direct abuse is in no way, shape, or form surprising. A mummah refusing to give her milk she is reserving for ‘good’ foals would look around and see the poop ever-present anywhere a fluffy exists for more than a few seconds, and promptly connect the color with that of the brown or green-brown foal currently beg-wailing for food as it starves to death during the first hours or days of life, and from here it is suddenly easy to see why so very many mummahs try to feed feces to ‘poopy’ foals. That so many such fed foals survive is a testament to the almost comical inefficiency of the fluffy digestive system.
It is, in this author’s opinion, most likely this case that leads to the phenomenon of the so called ‘poopy’ fluffies being forced to eat feces, with the reasoning needing only the trivialest of extensions to see the fluffy also forced to live in the feces as well. In the case of ‘poopy’ adults, it is no stretch to think that either the smarty witnessed such behavior in a mare and internalized it as normal, or that said ‘poopy’ adult started life as a ‘poopy’ foal, and at no point since did their status substantively change.
That said, another possibility is a more direct inappropriate association, suggesting a more fundamental cognitive error. The suggested idea that the fluffy might insist a brown fluffy consume feces solely because both the brown fluffy and the feces are the same color, while interesting, seems to be fatally weakened and perhaps downright disproven by the near-complete lack of any instances of red fluffies being told/forced to consume only blood/meat/red plant matter, or of green fluffies being told/forced to consume only green plant matter.
Given that the inappropriate association theory for the ‘poopy’ fluffy phenomenon seems to profoundly fail to match reality when applied to other circumstances, it would seem that fluffies telling a brown fluffy that they need to eat feces because they are brown is a justification for cruelty and/or milk and food rationing, rather than an actual unintentional logical or associational error.
See also part one discussing Alicorn fear, rejection, and fluffy mental pathways.
