Fantastic Livestock

Common livestock — cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and all their barnyard kin — are some of the most familiar and down-to-earth animals in popular cultural perception; more so than anything except perhaps household pets and garden critters, they're parts of everyday life and mundanity, some of the first creatures we become familiar with as children. Consequently, works which make a point of setting themselves apart from mundanity, especially fantasy and science fiction stories set in worlds far from or very unlike Earth, often make a point of subverting this expectation as well, and of populating their pastures, barns and coops with strange and alien farm animals.

Overall, these creatures tend to come in two main categories:

• Fantastic Fauna Counterparts: These are essentially just exotic, fictional or fantasy animals treated like or used instead of real-life livestock. Their main purpose is to serve as a visual reminder that the work's setting is somewhere unusual, alien or fantastical, where creatures we'd view as strange or exotic are just another part of everyday life and where even normally mundane and unremarkable matters have a touch of the fantastical.
• Phlebotinum Producers: These are creatures who produce some kind of special or valuable resource, either a real product that isn't normally produced by livestock (essentially an animal version of Grows on Trees) or something outright fantastical and useful to a high-tech or magical society (if Eye of Newt is valuable to wizards, it won't be long before somebody starts wondering if they should set up a newt farm). These often serve an important role in society, which may depend to various degrees on the resource these beasts are farmed for. In extreme examples, the animals might even provide everything a society needs, as a non-vegetative Multipurpose Monocultured Crop.

Note that this specifically covers livestock, meaning creatures raised for food or for other useful byproducts. Fantastic riding animals and draught animals have their own tropes — Horse of a Different Color and Chariot Pulled by Cats, respectively.

May overlap with Domesticated Dinosaurs and Weird World, Weird Food. Compare Monster Organ Trafficking, for when someone exploits lucrative resources (other than food) from nonsapient creatures. Contrast Fantastic Vermin. See also Beast of Battle, for unusual war animals, and Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables, which may appear in the same farms as these animals. If the livestock are sapient, this may be a case of People Farms or Let's Meet the Meat.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: Once Laios and his party reach the Golden Village, they find that the villagers use dungeon monsters in place of regular livestock, such as using Minotaurs instead of cows. The monster freak Laios is overjoyed at the sight, to the chagrin of his teammates. Later, the Golden Lion tries enticing him to be the next dungeon master by showing a vision of a kingdom whose main economy is based around monsters.
• Overlord (2012): In order to supply the monster denizens of Nazarick and their master Ainz Ooal Gown with a steady and reliable stream of low tier scrolls to cast spells, Demiurge was tasked with finding suitable livestock to harvest, which he finds in the the skin of Abelion Sheep. Horrifically subverted when it's revealed the "Abelion Sheep" Demiurge has rounded up in his pastures are actually humans; the moniker simply arose from Demiurge mistakenly assuming Ainz already knew they were humans and chose to name them "Abelion Sheep" to even further dehumanize them when Ainz simply, and genuinely, believed they really were sheep.

Art

• Beast Fables: According to the description of "Blacktip Reef Shark", merfolk have domesticated noble pen mussels for their "silk" and meat. They've also domesticated manatees and herd them like cattle.

Films — Animation

• The Ant Bully: The ants use caterpillars as livestock, specifically farming them for their honeydew.
• The Cars series has tractors that act like cattle. They moo, live on a ranch, and Lighting and Mater even try tipping one.

Films — Live-Action

• The Dark Crystal: Nerbies are large, tame animals farmed for their meat, skin and milk in a manner similar to cows.
• Star Wars:
  • Nunas are scaly, barbeled but otherwise very birdlike Armless Bipeds raised for their meat and eggs in a manner very similar to chickens.
  • Shaaks are rotund, trunk-mouthed grazers raised on Naboo as a source of meat and leather, as well as for fatty ambergris used for perfumes.

Literature

• Across the Green Grass Fields: Unicorns are the most common livestock animal in the Hooflands. When Regan first arrives, she's a bit thrown to learn that the ethereally beautiful creatures are dumb as posts and kept for food.
• The Brightest Shadow: Monstrous aurochs — the wild ancestors of domestic cows — fill the role of cattle, cockatrices are raised like chickens, and bicorns are similar to goats.
• Ciaphas Cain: Duty Calls has the world of Periremunda (Canis Latinicus for "Lost World") which uses sauropods as livestock. Unfortunately, the world falls under attack by Tyranids, and the immense farm animals them a huge amount of biomatter to convert into more Tyranid organisms.
• The Dinosaur Lords: Domesticated Dinosaurs are widespread and ubiquitous. In addition to serving as war mounts, they're also bred for eggs, food and hides, and used to pull carts, plow fields and carry burdens.
• Discworld:
  • Mort: Mort's father keeps tharga beasts. Little is learnt about them in the book, but The Discworld Companion says that they have four brains, one for each leg, an evolutionary dead-end which mostly means they fall over a lot. Apart from that they seem to be cattle-like; the official "Flora and Fauna of Discworld" teatowel◊ shows one as something like a longhorn yak or very large Highland cow.
  • Snuff: A complicated chicken farmer appears. His complicated chickens lay square eggs.
• Dragaera: The residents of Dragaera make ample use of kethna — hoofed animals not dissimilar to pigs — as a meat source. Norska, resembling rabbits but omnivorous in their diet, are raised both for their fur and their flesh.
• Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Book 3 (Calling On Dragons) has the travelers stop near a farm (run by a man named MacDonald), who's currently only growing magical vegetables (or in some cases, vegetables used in standard fairy tale arrangements) but plans to branch out soon and include livestock of this type:
  "Oh, little dogs that laugh, winged horses, geese that lay golden eggs, that sort of thing."
• Gor:
  • Earth livestock are absent from Gor, though there are clear analogues such as bosk in place of cattle, verr in place of goats among others.
  • The hurt is a kangaroo-like animal that is sheared for its wool.
  • Vulos are described as being like pigeons, but they are also raised for their meat and eggs like chickens.
• InCryptid:
  • The Ohio gorgon community raises Basilisk and Cockatrice as livestock, since they're naturally immune to the creatures' petrification ability.
  • In the other dimension from Calculated Risks, the native sapient species has some sort of giant termites that they tend like cows, and they feed a giant aphid to Greg the Giant Spider.
• In the Instrumentality of Mankind, Cordwainer Smith's science fiction 'verse, an immensely valuable life-extension drug can only be acquired from a single planet, where it is extracted from the grotesque mutant "sheep" that are kept as livestock.
• Known Space: Bandersnatchi are gigantic slug-like beasts, around twice the size of a large sauropod, originally created as livestock for a long-gone alien empire.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Geryon's Triple G Ranch has many types of monsters from Greek mythology, including Hippaelektryon, flesh eating horses, and giant scorpions.
• Rod Allbright Alien Adventures: Giant worms are commonly ranched for food in Galactic society. Captain Grakker tells a queasy Earthling that consuming animals as intelligent as cows and pigs is just as offputting to them.
• Safehold has a mixture of imported earthly livestock and domesticated native animals. Particularly common examples of the later are the domesticated draft dragons (six-legged herbivores roughly the size of elephants) and the various species of domesticated wyverns (the native bird-analogs).
• The Stainless Steel Rat: Jim diGriz's home planet, Bit O'Heaven, is noteworthy chiefly for being home to some very effective predators, who did quite a number on the original colonists and their livestock. The colonists used genetic engineering to produce an animal that could defend itself against these predators. The resulting Mix-and-Match Critter is basically a very large, very aggressive pig with the quills of a porcupine for protection — a "porcuswine".
• Star Wars Legends: Nerfs are shaggy, cow-like creatures farmed for their meat and hides, while grazers are gigantic alien pigs.
• Steel Beach: Brontosaurs have been revived to serve as food animals on the Moon.
• Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland: McDonaldland feeds its citizens exclusively through its McDonalds menus. To keep up with the citizens' state-mandated dietary needs, the government created artificial animals like "nu-cows" and "nu-chickens", creatures comparable to slugs with computer chips for brains. Or at least that's what the citizens think. The Awful Truth is that the Outlanders capture Wolf Girls — who were all once human women that lived in McDonaldland — and turns them into giant wolves via rape (It Makes Sense in Context) and sells their meat as Big Macs and McNuggets to an ignorant populace.

Live-Action TV

• Peacemaker (2022): The buttlerflies have a giant caterpillar-like creature referred to as a "cow" that produces the nectar that is necessary for them to survive since they cannot live off of Earth's food.

Podcast

• Twilight Histories: "Beyond the Indus" takes place in a world where dinosaurs somehow survived in India, and were domesticated by the Indians as sources of food and beast of burden.

Roleplay

• Embers in the Dusk has the nogs, a small Avernite animal which is relatively harmless as far as Deathworld fauna goes, and only survives due to its reproduction being a Beta version of the Ork spores. It was made into livestock that even the Chaos worshippers use extensively, despite the inherent hatred of all Avernus life towards them.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dark Sun is set on the Death World of Athas, a scorching, blasted wasteland where many conventional animal (and humanoid) species have long since died out and been replaced by stranger, frequently non-mammalian creatures. Kanks are oversized but docile insects used as steeds, or herded for the honey they produce. Inixes and the even larger mekillots are enormous armored lizards often equipped with howdahs or used to pull loads. Erdlus are ostrich-sized flightless, featherless birds kept for their meat and eggs, while crodlu are larger, Oviraptor-like creatures that can be bred as war mounts.
  • The Forgotten Realms reference book Elminster's Ecologies describes the Marsh Drovers, a human culture native to the Farsea Marshes, who herd domesticated catoblepas — a type of long-necked, warthog-like monsters who live in swamps and can kill with a glance — bred to be more social than their wild relatives and to see the Drovers as a part of their herd. The catoblepas are valued for their ability to live and graze in deep swampland where other livestock can't go, and because their deadly gaze lets them easily protect themselves against bandits, predators and monsters. Besides their edible meat and milk, they're raised for their eyes, hearts and brains, which are valuable spell components.
• Exalted: Beasts of the Resplendent Liquid are giant reptiles that were engineered during the First Age to be living chemical refineries — they feed on something that contains a desired substance, and then urinate the purified product. Most died out after the fall of the Solars' empire, and only a handful survive — the ones known to still be around are a group of seven owned by the Guild that eat poppies and produce heroin and a pair owned by the Realm that produce longevity drugs.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Grox are elephant-sized, extremely ill-tempered and aggressive reptiles that are widely farmed as the Imperium's primary source of meat. Farming grox requires them to be lobotomized, sedated through drugs or controlled through implants in their brains to tamp down on their intense territoriality; the Imperium goes through this trouble because grox meat is very good and nutritious, and because the creatures can live on diets of unpalatable roughage and even on dirt for short periods.
  • Ambulls, giant four-limbed insectoids with apelike gaits, are a failed attempt at this. Their flesh is edible and they thrive in barren environments, so they were spread through the Imperium with the idea of using them as livestock on desert planets. However, their extreme aggressiveness and predatory habits made them very difficult to control, while their ability to dig through nearly any substance made keeping them corralled impossible. Consequently, these projects were eventually discontinued, although not before enough ambulls escaped into the wild to establish large feral populations throughout the galaxy.
  • Dark Heresy describes Cel, an agri-world dedicated to the raising of a type of livestock known as Mhoxen, mountains of blubber with enormous, teeth-ringed mouths that can reach two thousand tonnes at full maturity — for comparison, blue whales top out at about a hundred tonnes. The Mhoxen herds are fed with the products of half a dozen other agri-worlds dedicated to raising mundane livestock, which are in turn fed by cheap crops grown on other agri-worlds that are fertilized with oceans of planktonic slime grown on yet more agri-worlds. The reason for all this effort is partly that the output of one planet whose surface is dedicated entirely to housing these things provides for enough food to feed billions of people, and partly because Mhoxen meat is so delicious that it borders on the addictive.
  • Vaults Of Terra: In The Hollow Mountain, it's briefly mentioned that the pigs of the 41st milenium, chiefly for the purpose of providing the ungodly amounts of vellum used by the Imperium's assorted bureaucracies, are giant, bloated things incapable of movement, stuffed full of chemical growth stimulants and fed on high-nutrient chemical soups.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • On the island of Mata Nui, Po-Matoran raise and herd Mahi and Husi (robotic goats and ostriches respectively) for trading.
  • On the island of Mahri Nui, Matoran use Hydruka as livestock to help harvest air bubbles as the setting is underwater.

Video Games

• Baten Kaitos series has pows, which are basically pigs with cow-like spotted pigmentation, held for their milk.
• Bug Fables: Aphids are a stand-in for cows and chickens in the game's Mouse World, and are commonly farmed for their eggs and for honeydew that serves as a substitute for milk. Wooly aphids are also shorn like sheep, and cochineals are raised for their dye.
• Civilization: Beyond Earth is set on an Alien Landmass with various giant arthropods and reptiles, which the human colonists can harvest for valuable chemicals, shells, and edible eggs.
• Dwarf Fortress: Purring maggot are milk-producing vermin, while goblins shear trolls like sheep.
• The Elder Scrolls: This is particularly common amongst the various mer (read:elf) races of Tamriel and greater Nirn:
  • The Dunmer (Dark Elves) use silt striders (insectoids resembling giant fleas on stilts) to get around like camels, use insectoids called kwama for their eggs, and raise jellyfish-like creatures known as netches for their leathery hides and paralytic jelly to use as armor and alchemical ingredients respectively. (You can visit several working netch farms in Morrowind). They're also known for using bipedal reptilians known as guar as mounts and beasts of burden similar to horses and donkeys, but also for their hides, and have small reptiles known as bantam guar that serve as their equivalent to chickens, being used for their meat and eggs, and are even called "ugly chickens" in-universe due to their similarity.
  • Falmer farm giant insectoid monsters known as Chaurus for their chitin, which they use to make weapons and armor.
  • Orsimer farm six-legged beasts known as echateres for their meat, fur, vellum, and milk. They can also be used to search for snow truffles like a pig. They're also believed to farm a species of furry giant centipde that can only be found at high altitudes, but it's believed that these stories are most likely apocryphal.
  • Giants herd woolly mammoths. The relationship is said to be symbiotic, with the mammoths allowing the Giants to milk them and create cheese in exchange for the Giants' protection.
• Fae Farm: Animals you can keep on your farm include cottontails, which resemble rabbits or chinchillas and produce cotton; lunens, mammal/moth hybrids that produce silk; and sprigans, which look like anthropomorphic peas and produce magical leaves.
• Fate/Grand Order: The people of the Russia Lostbelt farm bicorns for transportation and hunting, as well as training exercises. Due to the environment being a Death World, there's not much else they can farm.
• Halo: The Moa are named after the real life bird from New Zealand but are actually alien bird-like creatures native to Reach. They are kept as food sources for the colonists, and some can be seen running around the farms in Halo: Reach. Unfortunately, the Moa became endangered after the Covenant glassed their homeworld, to the point that even fast food like burgers and nuggets made from Moa meat have become rare delicacies.
• Lenna's Inception: According to a collectible library book, humans started milking dolphins after cows went extinct, and dolphins want revenge.
• Minecraft: In addition to regular cows, there are "mooshrooms", which are essentially red (or, rarely, brown) cows with white spots and toadstools growing on them. They can be milked like regular cows, but they can also be "milked" with bowls for mushroom soup or have the toadstools shorn off of them.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Gold and Silver and Pokémon Sun and Moon feature ranches where Miltank (an all-female species of bipedal cows) are farmed for their milk.
  • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 has Floccesy Ranch, where Mareep (electric sheep) roam free. According to Mareep's PokéDex entry in Ultra Sun, its wool is used to make clothing, but it easily charges with static electricity.
• RimWorld, alongside several familiar animals (cows, alpacas, yaks), has some exotic ones to tame and farm such as boomalopes that can be "milked" for fuel (just be careful not to shoot them) and muffalos that provide high quality wool and lots of meat.
• Starbound: You can buy a number of different creatures to harvest for crafting and cooking materials, ranging from cow-like mooshi that produce milk to robot chickens that produce AA batteries.
• Downplayed in Stardew Valley. While most of the livestock you can own are the standard fare, such as chickens, cows, and sheep, the game also has dinosaurs as a possible livestock. They produce dinosaur eggs, which can be turned into dinosaur mayonnaise.
• Tales Series, most prominently Abyss and Arise, features rappigs. They are basically pigs with rabbit ears. In Arise they can be raised on the farm for their meat.
• TinkerQuarry: Some characters farm the game's enemies for resources:
  • Wilson catches Roaches and keeps them in a room for Staya to take whenever he comes by. According to Word of God, Staya uses the Roaches to feed the Rat King.
  • Immanuel has an endless supply of Lesser Softies, teddy-bear-like enemies, that he sends into an unseen machine to harvest their fabric and stuffing.
• Unreal: The Nali people use large, docile, two-limbed creatures that resemble dinosaurs. You can find them penned up in a few Nali settlements found throughout the game.
• The Xenoblade Chronicles series features Armus, which are dinosaur-like creatures. They are often kept in villages for the purpose of using their meat and milk. In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, you can even raise an Armu yourself, and if you take care of it right, it makes for a powerful enemy as a Unique Monster. In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Colony Mu starts building an Armu ranch, where you help breed and raise them.

Webcomics

• Tales of the Questor: The Racconans have several unique animal species (many genetically engineered with magic) which they use for various purposes. Examples include bigdiggers (enormous moles the size of a cow or horse, used to till their fields), tree-apes (Treant-like creatures used for heavy lifting), and enormous spiders about the size of two human fists which produce silk in vast quantities (and are so overgrown that they can barely move on their own and must be hand-fed).
• The Fellowship of Heroes: After a supervillain overran the southwest states with dinosaurs, many states were evacuated but Texas decided to domesticate them. By the comic's time, prehistoric megafauna such as mammoths and brachiosaurs are commonly raised like oversized cattle.
• Unsounded:
  • Spindleworms are Senet beasts which are carefully maintained and cared for in order to harvest their silk, which as First Silk is capable of holding spells burned into it unlike baseline materials.
  • Starflies are large bioluminescent insects raised to milk their luminescence as a light source. They are also kept as pets by children, though they don't live terribly long.

Web Original

• Bosun's Journal:
  • The early shipboard civilization used genetic engineering to turn some of the shipboard animals into sources of meat, such as rodent-derived rattle and songfowl created by altering songbirds into chicken analogues.
  • Later, some corporations take to creating human-derived livestock such as sheep-like woolly humies and almost immobile fleshloafs, which ends up sparking an outright war over ethical clashes.
  • Millions of years down the line, one lineage of feline-like posthuman animals takes to hunting feral woolly humie descendants. Much later on, their sapient descendants, the riddlesphinxes, tend to herds of woolly manoths as a form of nomadic livestock.
• Codex Inversus:
  • Susmaggots, raised in the Infernal Empire, are creatures resembling piges with the rear ends of pale worms or maggots. They are delicious to a literally supernatural degree, as their flesh has the uncanny quality of tasting like the first thing you eat after a days-long fast, and smell equally enticing. However, they are slow breeders and need to be extensively pampered and killed extremely quickly and painlessly, as fear, stress and pain cause their flesh to become bitter and sour; the traditional way to do it is to take the selected pig-maggot out for a stroll, give it a beautiful and delightful day, and then kill instantly with a pike blow to the back of the head. As a result, they are more of a luxury meat than any kind of staple. They are believed to have originated in Hell as a way to torment the gluttonous, tempting them with their smell but turning foul when slain by ravenous souls, and to be one of the few kinds of animal left largely unchanged by the Collapse.
  • The Angelic Unison raises herds of livestock with wondrous appearances and properties. Stargazing cows are cattle with star-studded fur and milk that induces calm and relaxation when drunk and is downright narcotic when aged into cheese. Insomniac sheep are infested by glowing ticks that inject stimulants into their bloodstream over the summer, and produce milk with a caffeine-like effect; insomniac sheep butter is a popular breakfast food. Holy cows are descended from celestial kine that interbred with Earthly animals after the Collapse have halo-like horns, the ability to calm other beings with a glance, milk that always tastes sweet, and meat that heals those that eat it.
• Hamster's Paradise: The highbrows are a mountain-dwelling subspecies of the sapient wolf-like southhounds who farm an animal they call "horn-herders" as their primary source of food due to the relative scarcity of wild prey. They guide them to fresh grass and protect them from predators like the tigerillas. The horn-herders are a member of the ungulope family (Fantastic Fauna Counterpart to deer and antelope) whose males are the size of moose with elaborate horns while the smaller females possess simple, sharp horns. Notably, they are the only southhounds to farm their food, which has led them to become somewhat possessive and can result in more violent fights when some packs try to steal their rivals' animals, leading to some highbrows questioning whether the more consistent food the horn-herders provide is worth the cost. Word of God also states that some packs also farm the dinosaur-like podotheres as a backup food supply due to their larger litter sizes, but they aren’t as successful with them due to the podotheres' more skittish behavior and the fact that they produce less meat per animal when compared to the horn-herders.
• Serina:
  • The farmerjays are a species of songbird that feed and raise fattened, domesticated snails in tree hollows. Notably, the farmerjays themselves are intelligent but aren't truly sapient as they farm their snail livestock through a combination of instinct and behaviors passed down from the adults.
  • The social gravediggers end up domesticating a species of smeerp (A rabbit-like tribbethere) for food, which allows their population to no longer be tied to the amount of wild prey in their environment. As a result, the population skyrockets in virtually no time.
  • The daydreamers are sapient, orca-like marine birds that farm a herbivorous marine bird known as a ring-necked porplet as livestock, over millions of years these porplets become fatter and dumber, eventually developing into the bloated, barley intelligent nops. One thing of note is that the porplets and their nop descendants are actually related to the daydreamers (making it somewhat analogous to humans farming monkeys for meat) and this relation causes some daydreamers to view the eating of nops as morally repugnant and they start feeding exclusively on creatures like fish.
  • Five million years later, the novan daydreamers and their terrestrial gravedigger allies have replaced the nops with the floating bloat, a massive sauropod-like animal that can reach lengths of 140 feet and feeds on the plants growing on the ocean floor. The only reason these birds can even grow so large is because the daydreamers, gravediggers and greenskeepers (sapient descendants of the nops' still-wild relatives) have been actively maintaining the shallow seas for millions of years and have made them more biologically productive.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: The frogs farm giant caterpillars with cow-like colorations, the aptly named cowapillars, for dairy — it's implied, though not explicitly stated, that they create cheese from their mucus.
• Dino Ranch follows life on a ranch that has dinosaurs as farm animals. Large herbivorous dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus and Stegosaurus fill the role of cows, there's a Triceratops that acts like a bull and a Pteranodon instead of a rooster, and Compsognathus run around the ranch like chickens.
• Futurama: By the 31st century, cattle are extinct and have been replaced by giant black-and-white spotted beetles called buggalo. They’re used for meat and milk, and their shells make good row-boats.
  Zoidberg: I broke your television!
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The jellyfish, being the undersea counterpart to bees, are implied to be farmed for jelly as a commodity. In "Jellyfish Hunter", after discovering the money-making potential of jellyfish jelly in Krabby Patties, Mr. Krabs orders SpongeBob to capture more jellyfish to the point of over-hunting its entire population in Jellyfish Fields, and he later builds a factory to mass-farm the jellyfish for his own benefit. The climax of the episode has SpongeBob trying to undo the damage Mr. Krabs has done to the jellyfish population, complete with a Green Aesop.

Real Life

• Ants will sometimes domesticate aphids in order to harvest their nectar, which the colony uses for nutrition, similar to how humans treat cows.

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