Basic Trope: Turning something you had intended to eat into a pet or adopted child.
- Straight: Alice buys a pig with the intention of raising it to eat it. She ends up viewing it as a pet instead.
- Exaggerated: Alice buys a bunch of pigs with the intention of becoming a pig farmer, but she comes to view all of them as pets.
- Downplayed:
- Alice raises the pig to slaughter age. At this point she doesn't want to keep it anymore, but she can't bring herself to send it for slaughter either. She ends up giving it to Betty, who keeps it as a pet.
- Alice buys a chicken with the intention of harvesting the eggs to eat. She ends up choosing to hatch and raise the chicks.
- Justified:
- Alice loves all cute things. Of course she can't bring herself to eat her own cute little pig.
- Alice became attached to the pig through simple long-time exposure.
- The pig turns out to have a skill that is useful or novel, so Alice figures out it's more useful alive anyway.
- Alice just lost her biological child to miscarriage, the piglet was the closest thing her maternal instincts could latch on to
- Inverted: Alice buys a pig with the intention of keeping it as a pet. She decides to eat it instead when she gets tired of taking care of it and/or it dies.
- Subverted:
- Alice buys a pig with the intention of raising it to eat it. Bob later notices that she treats it like a pet ... but she tells him that she just wants to give it a good life before it's slaughtered.
- Alice is the only character to keep a pig as a pet. People assume she became too attached to it to eat it, but it's later revealed that she never intended to eat it.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice ends up viewing the pig as a pet after all.
- Alice did intend to eat the pig at first, but lied about it because she's ashamed of the fact that she once wanted to eat the animal that is now her beloved pet.
- Parodied: Alice bakes a cake and ends up viewing it as a pet. It goes double if it's a vegan cake.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice treats her pig like a pet, but some characters suspect that she just believes treating it well will make it taste better.
- Averted: Alice doesn't become attached to the pig and goes through with her plans to eat it.
- Enforced: It's a pro-animal rights work.
- Lampshaded: "I intended to eat it, but I bonded with it in the process."
- Invoked: A vegetarian Granola Girl encourages Alice to bond with the pig in the hope that it'll make her less likely to eat it.
- Exploited:
- Defied: "I may like this pig, but at the end of the day, it's food."
- Discussed: "So her pet is a pig. I bet she wanted to eat it, but changed her mind."
- Conversed:
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice finds one of her homegrown carrots too cute to eat.
- The pig's name is "Porkchop" or "Bacon".
- Played for Drama: Alice is eventually forced to eat the pig she came to view as a pet.
- Deconstructed: Alice lives in a setting where vegetarianism, animal companionship, or both are impractical, so she's stuck with the Sadistic Choice of betraying her beloved pig or starving.
- Reconstructed: Alice moves to a place where it's easier to be a vegetarian and takes the pig with her.
- Implied: Alice keeps as pets many animals that are commonly eaten in her society. When asked if she gets hungry, her usual answer is "Not anymore."
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