Hygienic footwear for prehensile feet?
Prehensile hands have the advantage of not having to constantly touch anything they don't have to - with the exception of things like doorknobs.
Feet don't have that luxury, and so in a sense will always be 'dirty'. Even if you're wearing shoes, grabbing something still isn't hygienic. Sentient birds would be facing some issues.
Unless the nature of your footwear allows for some way to keep the grasping surface of your foot both away from the ground AND available to manipulate objects.
But how?
For the purposes of detail, the species I'm imagining is a theropoid race with 3 digits and 1 opposable 'thumb' on each birdlike foot.
One thing I've imagined is a kind of 'flip-flop' type shoe with a pivoting joint at the ankle. A regular flip flop can also work, but this one allows the shoe to stay on by moving it at the snappable joint.
This design is pretty primitive and exposes the rest of the foot, so wouldn't allow for anything boot-like.
Any ideas?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/148048. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
One approach is to look at shoes used by people with upper-limb amputations or who were born with missing upper limbs.
While your characters are not human and may or may not have partial or full use of hands, the basic premise is the same: how to keep your feet clean so you can use them for hand-like tasks.
Diamond Excell was born with no arms and uses her feet for everything she can. Slip on shoes without socks are what she, and other foot-users seem to prefer. There's a picture of her in some boots at 6:30 in to the video, also 7:02. Her goal is to start her own shoe line.
When she cooks, she sits in a rolling chair in the kitchen so she has use of both feet at the same time.
Jessica Cox, who also has no arms, uses slip-on shoes and sits in a chair if she needs to use both feet together.
A wide variety of shoes are easy to put on and off without use of your hands.
Moccasin slipper shoes with light soles (for indoors and occasional outdoor use) keep feet clean and dry and are easy to kick on and off. You can throw these in the wash too, though not too often.
A low boot would work for outdoors.
Or just plain old slip-on shoes.
Now, your characters do not have human feet, so obviously human shoes aren't going to be an off-the-rack possibility.
I will encourage you though to consider enclosed shoes like the examples I give. Note how people who rely on their feet to do things hands usually do aren't in flip flops or sandals most of the time. Why? Because feet get really dirty in open shoes. Sure, the sole of your foot is protected from stuff you might step in, but I think you underestimate the effects of dust, dirt, mud, and random uck. Far more than you'd pick up with your hands.
Indoors your characters would keep floors very clean and use rugs or carpets to keep dust and grit off of feet. Then they'd go barefoot. They would slip on shoes whenever they went outside.
The other consideration is cultural. We think dirt is unhygienic and gross. But no animal wears shoes and many use their paws/claws/etc to pick up or manipulate food, or they lick their feet directly.
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