When we watch The Empire Strikes Back, the Hoth rescue scene looks a little weird if you think about it too hard. Han is a guy from Corellia in a coat. The tauntaun is a native Hoth creature covered in fur and blubber. Yet out in the blizzard, the tauntaun keels over and freezes while Han is still moving around.
On the surface that feels like a plot hole. How does the animal that evolved here die first?
Han Has Gear, Mass, and Time on His Side
None of this means Han is “fine” in that blizzard. By the time he finds Luke, he’s in real danger himself. The difference is that Han has a few advantages the tauntaun doesn’t.
First is gear. Han’s wrapped in Rebel cold-weather clothing designed specifically for Hoth operations, with multiple insulated layers and a proper hood and goggles. That kind of protection slows heat loss a lot more than an animal that’s been pushed out of its normal behavior pattern and left running in the open at night.
Then there’s body and workload. The tauntaun is smaller, working harder, and carrying Han and his equipment through deep snow and high wind. Han is moving, but he isn’t sprinting under someone else’s weight. In that situation, the overworked animal is going to dump heat faster than the larger, well-insulated human riding it.
From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back backs this up from the tauntaun’s side. In “She Will Keep Them Warm,” Delilah S. Dawson describes how “a tauntaun’s life has two rulers: warmth and cold” — daylight means wake up, run, feed the young, live; night means a cold so brutal that even tauntauns can only survive by huddling together and barely moving, their blood slowed almost to slurry. In the wild, that’s how they get through Hoth’s nights.
Murra, the tauntaun Han rides, never gets that option. The Rebels saddle her and send her out into exactly the kind of night she should be hiding from. Instead of huddling in a cave with the herd, she’s forced to keep running in an open storm with a rider on her back. Put that on top of the cold, and it’s not surprising that her body gives out before Han’s does. He’s wrapped in gear and only out there for a short window; she’s a tired animal pushed past the limit her species evolved for. When she finally collapses, her core is still warm enough for Han to cut her open and shove Luke inside — which is why, in the end, the tauntaun really does “keep them warm.”
In other words, the tauntaun doesn’t die because Hoth is “too cold for tauntauns,” but because she’s forced to ignore the survival rules her species depends on, while Han only has to endure the storm for a short window.