Oh come on, humans aren't that unnecessarily cruel! We just cut the feet off several thousand peasants back in the day to determine the average length of human feet and then made a bunch of sticks that length so we don't have to be so cruel each time we wanted to measure something. We just had to do it that one time.

"Why cut their feet off instead of just measuring them?"

It was necessary for scientific rigor, so that others could go back and verify the final result. It's very important to be accurate using a measurement that is completely relatable to the average human. Funny enough, we later realized that about 300 randomly selected feet would generally get within 5% of the true average, so that makes it even better that we did do that because how else would we have discovered something like that?

"Wouldn't that just give an average for peasant feet in that region? For average human foot size, wouldn't you need to take feet from people who aren't peasants, like nobles, clergy, and scientists?"

Well, you see... Hmm. I guess to be completely accurate... That does sound right. Hmm.

You know, I've been hearing great things about the metric system! I mean, who really thinks in terms of how big their feet are anyways?