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Millions of animals die every year in snares, a type of trap that ensnares the legs or feet of wildlife that step into them. They may suffer for days in the snare, where they are likely to experience painful injuries or starve from loss of body weight. Snares are one of the most widespread and indiscriminate methods of hunting, killing everything from tortoises to elephants and tigers. The snares sit silently in the forest, waiting for animals to walk or run into them. https://marmaids.com/ They are considered to be among the cruelest types of hunting, as many animals are caught in these snares and die from injury, infection, starvation, or other complications associated with the snares.

Although limited qualitative observations suggest that some primates amble instead of trot or pace, there are no quantitative data on the frequency and mechanics of this unusual gait pattern in a broad sample of phylogenetically and ecologically diverse primate species. Because ambles do not involve a whole-body aerial phase, they are more like running than walking, and spring-like limb and body mechanics have been reported for both ambling and trotting(Robilliard, 2005; Biknevicius et al., 2003).

Our footfall analysis of videotapes of crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis) reveals that ambles are common and have similar mechanical properties to running trots. Ambles cluster around a line on a Hildebrand plot of diagonality (phase difference between ipsilateral fore- and hindlimb touchdowns) and duty factor (percentage of the stride interval during which the forelimb contacts the substrate). The gaits in this cluster, therefore, are likely to be running trots.

However, this clustering is likely a result of sampling bias. To avoid this problem, we used a more rigorous statistical analysis and plotted the distribution of the 295 gait cycles that lacked a whole-body aerial phase and did not occur in the upper blue triangle (diagonality > 50%) or in the lower blue triangle (diagonality 50%). These results show that ambles cluster around a different line on the plot than running trots and paces, and they have substantially less vertical oscillation of the center of mass. This suggests that ambling provides a more stable, continuous contact with the ground than a running gait, which may be especially advantageous for large terrestrial mammals such as elephants and for arboreal mammals like primates that move on unstable branches.