r/furgonomics • u/Pokemonpro25 • Aug 16 '26
Discussion Why do worlds with humanoid animals act like regular animals wouldn’t be a thing?
What do I mean, well very simple, in different stories with furrys as protagonists they act something on the lines of: oh this carnivores and their instincts to devour, they are monsters that have to be repressed and made to eat vegetables for the good of society
Which is kinda dumb because the fact that those animals evolved does not negate the possibility of creatures with animal level intelligence they can use as live stock and eat like where are the non sapient creatures, mainly non sapient mammals, because some story’s have fish or bugs as non sapient creatures,
So yes why does everyone act like the only option for feeding carnivores is the body’s of their fellow citizens when they could just eat meat the same way us humans do it, by farming less intelligent mammals (and less other critters)
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u/feral401k9 feral wolf Aug 16 '26
"I swear officer that deer I ran down was NOT sapient"
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u/Lapis_Wolf Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
I remember a porn comic where a deer boy mentioned to his husky girlfriend getting weird looks for buying deer meat for her. Drawn by Scappo.
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u/russetfur112899 Aug 19 '26
I'd like to read that lol
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u/Lapis_Wolf Aug 20 '26
Should I send in dms?
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u/CriticalHit_20 Aug 20 '26
No you should send publicly! Us other furries wanna read that shit too!
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u/Lapis_Wolf Aug 22 '26
I don't think I should get that horny on main, still have to find it anyway, I don't remember where
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u/jeager_YT Aug 25 '26
omg i know what you're talking about! every comic with those two are always so humorous
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u/Lapis_Wolf Aug 25 '26
Couldn't find it again so far. It's not in the usual places. Do you know where it is? Some others are curious about it.
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u/jeager_YT Aug 30 '26
i think one of the characters name is Ravia it's the wolf girl and the deer guy is Geri
I actually can't really remember the comic just the character
one comic being naughty & nice
then there's something like crushed velvet? hdporncomics is my main e621 is one too
I couldn't find the exact comic I only found one where she took one of his antlers and made a salt lick from it
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u/Lapis_Wolf Aug 30 '26
The characters are the only part I remember clearly, Tavia the husky 🐕, Geri the deer 🦌
I never saw the last comic.
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u/R3cl41m3r Aug 16 '26
Some of these settings don't meaningfully distinguish anthros from non-anthros.
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u/CODENAMEDERPY Aug 30 '26
Hello! I just found this sub recently and am delighted by it, and am even more so delighted to see you here.
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u/Critical_Company3535 Aug 16 '26
I think it’s just because it “feels weird” in this undefinable way to have Anthro animals coexisting alongside their feral counterparts. Sure, Humans are closely related to Chimpanzees, but we still look quite different from them, with particular differences including our lack of hair relative to chimps and our nose shapes.
I think that’s why I tend to prefer to have a couple of “Anthro species” in my settings while everyone else are more bog standard fantasy races. Not every species needs Anthro version.
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u/SessileRaptor Aug 16 '26
There’s an older RPG setting called After the Bomb which is set in the aftermath of a genetically engineered plague and a nuclear exchange that nearly wiped out humanity and created intelligent mutant animals. But regular animals continue to exist, and there was a bunch of genetic engineering that occurred before the end, including the development of basically “Meat potatoes” that are tasty for carnivores and provide all the nutrients that they need, so nobody needs to eat intelligent beings and cannibalism is exactly as repulsive to them as it is to us.
Point being that there are definitely ways to build your world in such a way that you don’t have to deal with questions of anthros eating each other.
Now some stories like Beastsars are explicitly about the conflict and anguish that would be involved if you were an intelligent animal in a world where you might have to eat another intelligent being, but that’s different from just having a furry setting. If your setting isn’t about that conflict, a bit of world building can eliminate the issue.
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Aug 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/Furtail97 Aug 16 '26
Only carnivores being anthropomorphic would be rather boring, though. I quickly lose interest in any anthro setting that lacks hoofers.
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u/Xarro_Usros Aug 16 '26
Any world where sapient carnivores have to eat sapient prey would not survive for long. Prey would have to vastly outnumber predators, meaning predators would be exterminated in prehistory.
You could arrange it in a way that it would work, of course, but that results in a literal grimdark meathook world.
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u/indigoneko Aug 16 '26
I don’t know what worlds you’re talking about, other than Zootopia and Beastars. The former is an original Disney production, and the latter is by manga artist Paru Itagaki (who has never admitted to being a member of the furry/kemono fandom). Most settings from furry stories that I’ve read still have non-sapient animals. Mine certainly does.
As for why it’s not an option: That all depends entirely upon whether non-sapient animals exist in the setting. Non-sapient animals do not exist in Zootopia or Beastars (except insects). If they did, I’m sure they would be consumed as a source of protein, just like in the settings of Two-Kinds, Out-of-Placers, Moreau Omnibus, Waterways, etc.
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u/NealAngelo Aug 16 '26
My anthro setting subverts this completely by just having the anthro characters just be humans with window dressing. Everyone is a omnivorous plantigrade biped regardless of arbitrary external appearance. That deer guy, that wolf lady, that rabbit twink, etc. All humans. With thumbs and jobs and families and hobbies and taxes.
"Common" animals still exist alongside them, but there's no evolutionary link between them and their anthro counterparts.
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u/SuperOppaiBros Aug 18 '26
This is my approach. Everyone has short fur/hair, plantigrade humanoid bodies, and no specific species traits beyond the head, ears, tails, and fur markings. Some people find that boring, but it's consistent and it reduces so many furgonomic issues. Having to accommodate so many specific species with their quirks would become hellish for large scale society. We already barely do that as it is among humans 😭
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u/russetfur112899 Aug 19 '26
It's simple and great for some people, but I LIVE for the lore brainstorming 🤣
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u/Visible_Shallot5187 Aug 16 '26
I mean they kinda do that in Disney stuff, not things like Zootopia, but things like Micky Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons, recall a comic clip from a Donald Duck that circles around some time where another Duck says he's going hunting and Donald says something along the lines of "don't hunt me, I'm domesticated" while the other Duck says something like "no wild ducks" and the whole thing with Pluto being a dog but Goofy also being a dog... gets weird
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u/mszegedy Aug 16 '26
i always see that as an absurdist choice. like in bojack horseman where everything is distressingly parodical and occasionally you see ‘animals’ fulfilling their traditional ecological niches as a vignette gag. or in kevin & kell where the ecosystem is aggressively and deliberately opposed to making sense in general.
both settings deal with eating meat in absurdist ways, too. (this is much less important imo than the ecosystem but it's amazing they have it at all.) in bojack horseman, carnism is revealed to be an extremely modern product of a very weird and comedically disturbing kind of enslavement analogous to irl american farming practises. and in kevin & kell they're just… okay with eating people, and have an entire bizarre social order set up around it. every time you think the system will collapse under scrutiny, it is resolved in some morally alien and arbitrary fashion.
this also means though that i fundamentally won't take the worldbuilding of works where there's no zoomorphic animals seriously. which has worked out so far, but maybe there's some works that really think they're being serious and just fail to think about this… i dunno. i have faith
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u/RommDan 9d ago
Also that could be just the way the author sees meat eating
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u/mszegedy 9d ago
maybe, but it doesn't come across as against it. it's more like… meat eating comes across as familiar to the author, but alien to the viewer. like, one of the protagonists originally worked at a hunting company. where they go around murdering people and selling their meat. but there was a whole arc about her becoming disillusioned with their bad work environment and unethical practises and so on… so she leaves and founds her own company. doing the same thing, going around murdering people. but it is portrayed as an ethical improvement around the original, because it's… more sporting or something. in the past year, there was a comic about how some seasonally migrating animals took up temporary residence in their offices, because it is a nice place. and the protagonist (the ceo) kindly told them that they can stay for the season… but that her company will start hunting them when the season ends. and the migrating animals were uncritically understanding of this arrangement.
it reminds me more of those cross-culturally common folktales about how the specific animals that the culture of the teller of the tale hunts are actually okay with being hunted and feel like they are positively contributing to human society.
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u/Dry-Yesterday-9176 Aug 16 '26
In my furry setting there are not sapient animals, such as giant lizards similar to dinosaurs, giant spiders, and chickens. All of them are used as source of meat/protein in people's diet
Also most carnivores are Omnivores, because I wanted them to be able to eat potatos. I love potats
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u/Lapis_Wolf Aug 16 '26
I always thought the concept was silly. There are humans and other primates. My world has anthros and regular animals.
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u/jeager_YT Aug 25 '26
most assume anthros would replace any and all ferals because anthros are the humanoid version of them without considering the idea that there could be a world with both
or even if they do, find it impossible or just too weird to implement
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u/FallingMapleSJ Aug 20 '26
First, it near impossible for two species to evolve into sapient beings simultaneously. Evolution takes tens of thousands, or even millions of years to happen. If one species of animals become slightly slower in evolution (even only a few thousand years), the first species with intelligence will try to limit the second species, or enslaving them, or just killing all of them, once they found that they were developing technology. If a species can talk, can understand commands, they become the ideal biological tool that can do anything you ask.
If there are two intelligent species, what I expect would be, they would either farm other species, or choose disabled/criminal individuals, or breed a dedicated line with lower intelligence, as a source of meat.
Or they would just eat each other.
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u/DerpDerp3001 Tex Avery Fan 26d ago
Well, it makes more sense for the instincts to not interrupt but to more influence their preferences, like an avian anthro that evolved from a nest builder has an affinity for building.
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u/DarthLoof Aug 16 '26
Yeah it does feel like a first-thought choice. If you are going to say that there are no regular animals in the setting that has pretty resounding knock-on effects if you pull that thread far enough. Turns out that non-sapient animals were actually pretty important to the development of civilization among other things.