"Any Ideas On What Alien Cattle Should Look Like?" Topic

Suggestions?

I'm almost tempted to buy a tub of plastic zoo or farm animals and swap a few heads. :)

Dan

They should look like us.

Humans it's what's for dinner.

Now THAT would be scary indeed!

Dan
PS. Or as pets for aliens:

Etotheipi has a whole blog of intetesting toy animal conversions, you might want to check his stuff out.

That cover is absolutely wonderful.

I plan to make something like this at some point.

Dan, there was a whole chunk of Heinlein's "Methusalah's Children" that dealt with somethung similar to that GIF…

They should be gray or green with enormous eyes.

I think like this.

or maybe this

From a biological standpoint, an animal bred for food should have a high ratio of muscle to bone, be able to live well on poor nutrition sources and preferably vegetation or other common substances that are not digestible by the organisms who domesticate them so as to make use of readily available foodstuffs. Only a few of our livestock species (Pigs, notably) are omnivores and only some game animal ( Mostly fish species ) are carnivores.

With those as some ground rules, let's think: The most effective "cattle" would be large herbivores, though you might make an argument for lithovorous creatures if a lot of carbonaceous rocks were present ( "Lithovore" -= Literally rock eater ), that could use minerals from such rocks to catalyses the reactions to convert the carbon into proteins. Any large ( 4 to 25 or more times the mass of a human ) organisms would make good herd stock. That gives you an idea of what alien species to look for, but let's stick a little closer to the familiar for a moment.

H Beam Piper in "Four Day Planet" posited dinosaur-like cattle for his world and went on to postulate a political system arising from the requirements such herds would demand to maintain. James Schmitz had Seabeef, heavily modified Earth animals ( Possibly manatees and hippos ) that lived in oceans on worlds with sparse land and grazed the equivalent of kelp beds on the continental shelves.

Other Terran life could be taken elsewhere and thrive/be modified on other worlds,: Kangaroos, deer and capybara might be used as such, and as they might be enlarged forms or become larger due to local conditions, the scale of your miniatures wouldn't be a problem.

Of course if you had tissue-culturing of meat in large scale production facilities, you would not have huge herds for meat – You *would* still require some herds to donate fresh cell strains for the culture vats, though, like the pedigree and heritage herds of today. And with tissue culture, you could bulk produce even the rarest of breeds and meats for the table – One ANALOG story had cultured exotic meats such as Lark's tongues produced in such volume as to make McLarkies possible. :)

In The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle, the alien species, Moties, went through rapid evolutionary cycles, developing and redeveloping as a species in double quick time.

They kept a museum of all the variants of their own species that had come before.
One of those evolutionary cycles included breeding a special variant of their own species, which walked on four legs, was extremely large and docile. Cattle, in other words.

I always forget the Horkuns, by Splintered Light Miniatures:

link

Ah, and there's the Wub too:

gutenberg.org/ebooks/28554
YouTube link

Dan

According to the Twilight Zone episode "How to Serve Man" they look like us.

You might be right.

From Soylent Green (1973):
"Ocean's dying, plankton's dying… it's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!"

Dan
PS. There's even one made out of "crackers": :)

How about a "Buggalo" from Futurama

Or one of the critters from "Teenagers From Outer Space",that the aliens were planning to bring to Earth. I think the writers called it a "gargan",looks like a lobster or crawfish on steroids when fully grown.

That cover reminds me of a Far Side cartoon….

Etotheipi has a whole blog of intetesting toy animal conversions, you might want to check his stuff out.

inlgames.com/free-arch.htm

A couple of faves …

Upsized tardigrades/waterbears (though they look a bit fatty, but just might be good for 'bacon'… ;-)

I am surprised no one said like this yet…

GZG Crusties Scuttler Bugs

You guys do know that Soylent in both liquid and powder has been available for several years now? soylent.com/products

Walking Sailor

LOL. I'm sure one day we'll be forced to give the real thing a try, right before we get thrown into the giant mixing vat ourselves.

Dan

Have I made a mother-in-law joke on this thread yet? Jeeez, I really hope so. It was such a perfect setup.

These are my scratchbuilt cattle….

castrarunis.blogspot.com.mt/2016/09/ikwen-barabuu-cattle.html[/url}

Very pink:
YouTube link

Z

Wow! How did you make those???

Dan

From my Ikwen range…

Found here – link

Eli

I love that fella. I'm puttting him on my shopping list.

Dan

Thanks Dan,
Scratchbuilt using milliput & Gs.

Look here.

link

& another one here

link

Fixed the link in the previous post

link

Z

They look pretty much like normal cattle, only with demonic tattoos:

Some great stuff there guys !

@Whemever1
LOL. You need to paint their eyes glowing neon red! Or Arrakis Fremen blue! :)

@Zrunelord
I love that Alien bull and cow.
- So what's the story on those? What made you think of that design?
- Do they drag half their body with those strong "arms" or is the back of the body moveable, like that of an inchworm (see gif below)?
- And how did they get food into their mouths?

Inquiring minds (well, mine) want to know! :)

Dan

Thnks Dan,
Just a product of doodling , which I do a lot.

Not arms but strong legs.
They drag their heavy , thick lower bodies on the vegetation they feed on turning it to mush, then they simply swivel their huge maws down to shovel it up. You can imagine the lines they leave behind on the landscape.

2 sets of eyes ala Ikwen alert them of danger. Then they just huddle up with the bull on the front. Not very fast but are almost impossible to budge.

They can stomp quite quickly, so predators must be careful of ending up with a crushed foot or worse. They have been known to catch raptors by pinning their tail under their hooves/toes & then stomping them to death.

Their achilles heel is their huge maw which exposes their insides when open.

Z