The cost of abyuse

This is a really long post, and I apologize...
I was reading pool #1600, and on post #69630, noticing all the hats, I made a comment about how much it would've costed to get all those yukkuri
I didn't really put much thought into it, besides some wondering, but in its reply, mad hatter raises some valid points, and I actually began thinking about the price a pet shop might set for a common yukkuri
This whole rambling doesn't really have a purpose, but it's fun to speculate over magical talking pastries :)

Before explaining, a couple of premises: when I talk about wild yukkuri, I mean yukkuri that never met a human, or did very few times, for example because they live deep inside the forest or in some hard to reach (for humans) places. With stray yukkuri instead, I talk about yukkuri living in places where they interact a lot with humans, like cities where they hide from them or beg for food. Also, at some point I'll use some real life prices to make comparisons, but the only reference I have for them is the place where I live, so you'll see them in Euros (because I'm from Europe) and with the values of local shops

That being said, here is what I thought on the matter:
First, we must consider where someone (a lover or an abyuser, it doesn't matter) can get a yukkuri
All in all there are three different sources: from the wild, strays, or pet shops

While getting yukkuri from the wild is easy (they are not exactly the best at hiding), it's still something that requires time and effort, because you have to actually find a nest, assuming there are even wild yukkuri in your area, and not everyone has the chance to do it. As such, only a relatively small group of people would actually go around searching for some
Given how businesses work, it wouldn't be wrong to assume that most of these people would be from pet shops, trying to get free yukkuri
The problem with this approach is that, as shops and other people keep taking yukkuri from their nests, the population will go down (even if yukkuri breed fast, if you keep taking away the adults or the kos, at some point families will not be able to keep up), until either they go extinct (i.e. every wild yukkuri in the area is now a pet, in a pet shop, or dead), or population control measures are placed
Regardless, wild yukkuri would be somewhat of a rarity, even if it's a generic Reimu, so they would probably end up costing more than one bred to be sold as pet

Stray yukkuri, for the most part, are abandoned pet yukkuri
Wild yukkuri could get to the city and try living there, but life is more uneasy than the woods, and if they don't know how to deal with humans they would be crushed or something, assuming they didn't die of starvation or stress
Since it's easier for a pet yukkuri to be abandoned because it disobeyed or acted hostile towards the owner, rather than something else, not many would adopt a stray, in fear of having to deal with a shithead
Abyusers would, of course, but consider that strays live off of garbage, so they could turn out to be dangerous health hazards
It's not really just spraying them with antifungal or whatever, which acts on hazards living inside the yukkuri: when they digest garbage, the transformation to paste might generate something dangerous, making the yukkuri itself a danger
Of course one could go to the vet and cure it, but that's not exactly cheap, and for what we know it could end up costing more than a pet shop yukkuri
There is also to say that, not too differently from wild yukkuri, getting a stray isn't exactly easy: if you know there are some in some place, you can probably lure some out of their hiding places with some food, but otherwise it's going to be a great deal of work to find them (unless they were just abandoned, that is), especially if you are aiming for kos rather than adults

Pet shops are the most reliable source of yukkuri: you go there, pick one you like, pay, and you have a pet/victim
Obviously, shops need to get them somewhere, and breeders allow to produce a lot of yukkuri for relatively cheap: they have a number of adult yukkuri couples, that refresh from time to time, take care of the kos for a number of days (or they would die of uneasyness), and then the kos are sold to shops
Since the couples are essentially pets, even if in some kind of mass-producing factory, the expenses are not too different than taking care of a normal pet yukkuri

When I go buy food for my pet cat, the food I find costs between €1 and €3 each, and, overall, I end up spending around €5 every 2 or 3 days
My cat probably eats more than others, but anyway every week the expense in cat food is something like €12 on average
Unlike cat food, yukkuri food don't really need to meet particular quality standards: as long as it's at least "so so" and not dangerous for humans, it can be made with anything and yukkuris will eat it just fine
While this make it cheaper, a breeder is taking care of a whole family until kos are old enough to be sold, so it's going to buy more than the amount to feed a cat, so the cost wouldn't be too far: adult yukkuri can skip a meal from time to time, or even just eat less, but preggers and kos can't without dying of starvation, so even if you feed them less food, you'd need to give it to them more often, so in the end the quantity is the same
Assuming that a yukkuri can live with the same amount of food as an adult cat, each yukkuri would cost around €8 a week (yukkuri food is that cheap), and since a family can produce between 1 and 5 kos on average, every week a family can costs up to something around €55 only in food
Since other stuff like orange juice and flour is something bought only sometimes, they do not count
Assuming a yukkuri takes around two weeks to be ready for the shop, from being born to ko, that makes it around €100
While breeders could charge about this price, there is going to be competition between them, so prices would be lower than that
I'd say a ko would cost around €35, since selling the whole family (minus the parents) already makes up to the family expense

Pet owners, for obvious reason, don't want shitheads, especially those that were so even before birth, so at some point it would be natural for people to ask shops to separate the obvious shithead yukkuri from the more normal ones, with a certification or some other system
This certification, of course, is going to be a breeder's job, where it'll need to examine every ko individually, checking for shithead behaviour
This will end up affecting the final price (since it makes additional work), so, in the end, a yukkuri bred to be sold as a pet would cost something around €45 or even €60
This does not include any training, which will end up increasing the cost if done

Going back to the story that sparked all this, I'd say that unless the miss is getting stray koMarisa or is breeding them herself, she is up to quite the expense!

I've had a few thoughts, and there's been many cost-analysis of yukkuri.

For one thing, they eat anything. Like, anything. You can breed yukkuri, kill the shitheads, grind them up, add a pinch of sugar, and feed it to the niceheads as food. The food isn't all that much of a problem. You can literally give them ground-up grass with water, then just add a pinch of sugar. As long as it tastes mildly sweet, they'll gorge themselves on it. The trick is like most pets -- don't get them addicted to human food.

The cost of breeding and raising them is negotiable. See, there's the whole ampoule thing, where you have the filling of whatever yukkuri directly injected into another in order to breed children, then simply fill up another ampoule with orange juice in order to keep them alive. You remove (or damage/glue) the feet to prevent movement, then tape the mouth to prevent easy greeting, since yukkuri tend to imprint from their born announcement.

As for wild yukkuri, wild yukkuri tend to be strays that moved back into the forests, away from humans. There's that residual knowledge of yukkuri (hence why even wild yukkuri know what sweet-sweets are and that they should always hide underground at night and fear Remilia/Flandre) that's passed on to each subsequent generation, regardless of who/what they breed with. That's why they always seem to have that residual basic knowledge of survival. I don't accept the headcanon of ridiculously too-stupid-to-live wild yukkuri, unless they JUST left urban areas and are strays. Yukkuri are smart enough to cultivate land and farm on their own in some headcanon, and even breed insects in some.

As for the quality of the yukkuri born from the mother, there seems to literally be ZERO definition, there. The only thing I've noticed is that even the most-Deibu of Deibus tends to spit out a Nicehead, though that nicehead always inevitably dies at the end of every story (save that single-digit percentage of them).

How much food a yukkuri can consume in a day, however, is negotiable. They're born the size of a golf ball and grow up to the size of a basketball. The amount of food any creature consumes is in proportion to activity/size. Something (other than the gluttonous human :P) rarely consumes it's own weight in food every day. A can of cat food would feed a ko for maybe like, 3 days or so. For an adult yukkuri, they'd probably need more, so I assume it'd just average out in the end.

All-in-all, I'd say the most-expensive part of a yukkuri is simply the time-consumption involved in the separation and training. I know the headcanon is that shithead is shithead for life -- I personally believe they can be reformed, whether through strict, harsh discipline, logic/manners discussion (as, I think some of them -just don't know- how to act, so it's just 'inherited' from parents), or simply using a Satori to imprint their mind. Shitheads would be more-expensive to train, so likely, they'd be recycled into food for other yukkuri (Remilia/Flandre outstanding), or they'd try to push them to gold-level badges in order to recoup their losses.

They seem pretty well-mannered and semi-acquainted with pet-life, though they oddly don't seem to recognize abyuse. They don't seem to be badged, so they're probably just on-sale clearance pets. That'd probably save a lot of money. I mean, that's a lot of hats. That's a lot of food she'd fed them, only to kill them off within a few days as soon as they see the abyused Marisa. I mean, you know she purposely puts that within viewing distance at some point, so that way, her cycle can continue.

One thing nobody has mentioned yet: yukkuri as food. Frozen kos intended for people with a Remilia or something, alive and wiggling as soon as they thaw out. Almost certainly cheaper than 'live' yukkuri because they can be snap frozen as soon as they're fat enough (or even right way for non-stalk babies) and stored in bulk.

Hitosura said:

For one thing, they eat anything. Like, anything. You can breed yukkuri, kill the shitheads, grind them up, add a pinch of sugar, and feed it to the niceheads as food. The food isn't all that much of a problem. You can literally give them ground-up grass with water, then just add a pinch of sugar. As long as it tastes mildly sweet, they'll gorge themselves on it. The trick is like most pets -- don't get them addicted to human food.

Some authors (myself included) make them a bit harder to feed than that. Obviously spice/salty/sharp/hard stuff is out, and sometimes non-predators will get sick if they eat raw filling from a dead yu. But on the other hand, wild yukkuri that have never tasted sugar before will often eat grass and other easy-to-grow plants even without the sweetener. In fact in my headcanon adding refined sugar is a bad idea in the long run.

As for wild yukkuri, wild yukkuri tend to be strays that moved back into the forests, away from humans.

I have never seen this happen in a story before. Like, ever. In fact pets and urban strays are usually incapable of surviving outside the human environment, because they've forgotten how, and there are tons of stories about wild yukkuri migrating into human territory, because they see how well-off the humans are and think they're hogging all the easy places.

How much food a yukkuri can consume in a day, however, is negotiable. They're born the size of a golf ball and grow up to the size of a basketball. The amount of food any creature consumes is in proportion to activity/size. Something (other than the gluttonous human :P) rarely consumes it's own weight in food every day. A can of cat food would feed a ko for maybe like, 3 days or so. For an adult yukkuri, they'd probably need more, so I assume it'd just average out in the end.

I actually came up with a whole bunch of stuff about yukkuri digestion for a story recently. I had the idea that the smaller the yukkuri, the worse its digestive system, so babies eat enormous amounts of food (and generate enormous amounts of shit) for their size, and normal adults still eat more than a regular pet. The break-even point is the "urban dosu" (about the size of a yoga ball), which actually needs less food than a normal yu. And a true dosu needs a tiny amount of food for something so huge (though obviously still a lot).

But that's just me.

BaronMind said:

One thing nobody has mentioned yet: yukkuri as food. Frozen kos intended for people with a Remilia or something, alive and wiggling as soon as they thaw out. Almost certainly cheaper than 'live' yukkuri because they can be snap frozen as soon as they're fat enough (or even right way for non-stalk babies) and stored in bulk.

Livestock yukkuri. However, depending on your headcannon, even predators don't actually -need- to eat yukkuri to survive.

Some authors (myself included) make them a bit harder to feed than that. Obviously spice/salty/sharp/hard stuff is out, and sometimes non-predators will get sick if they eat raw filling from a dead yu. But on the other hand, wild yukkuri that have never tasted sugar before will often eat grass and other easy-to-grow plants even without the sweetener. In fact in my headcanon adding refined sugar is a bad idea in the long run.

Well, yeah, I thought that was a give-in. However, they can eat stuff that's salty, just not super-salty, or super-spicy, nor super-bitter. They eat fried rice, right?

I have never seen this happen in a story before. Like, ever. In fact pets and urban strays are usually incapable of surviving outside the human environment, because they've forgotten how, and there are tons of stories about wild yukkuri migrating into human territory, because they see how well-off the humans are and think they're hogging all the easy places.

Aglet's story follows the narrative that heavily urban areas are becoming too over-populated with strays, and as such, they have begun to move outward to less-urbanized or even forest areas, in hopes of finding more easiness. Too much fighting over space and food, plus abyuse-addicted humans.

There was also something like this in a Big.G story.

I actually came up with a whole bunch of stuff about yukkuri digestion for a story recently. I had the idea that the smaller the yukkuri, the worse its digestive system, so babies eat enormous amounts of food (and generate enormous amounts of shit) for their size, and normal adults still eat more than a regular pet. The break-even point is the "urban dosu" (about the size of a yoga ball), which actually needs less food than a normal yu. And a true dosu needs a tiny amount of food for something so huge (though obviously still a lot).

But that's just me.

The amount of food consumed is nearly linked to how much they poop. I would assume that, since they're growing, they'd eat a bit. Dosuyukkuri no longer need to eat nor poop because they live off of their own easiness. They have so much easiness, it makes other yukkuri take it easy. I'd assume they'd eat out of habit and taste than need.

I dunno, this is all discussion and open to interpretation. :D Strongest!

Hitosura said:

Livestock yukkuri. However, depending on your headcannon, even predators don't actually -need- to eat yukkuri to survive.

I was presenting them as a possible cheap source of low-grade yus. See post #57156.

Well, yeah, I thought that was a give-in. However, they can eat stuff that's salty, just not super-salty, or super-spicy, nor super-bitter. They eat fried rice, right?

Most stories I've read (and written) make the yukkuri very sensitive to spicy and bitter stuff, save for certain breeds. Salt is like you say though.

Never heard of yukkuri eating fried rice... now I'm hungry! >_<

Aglet's story follows the narrative that heavily urban areas are becoming too over-populated with strays, and as such, they have begun to move outward to less-urbanized or even forest areas, in hopes of finding more easiness. Too much fighting over space and food, plus abyuse-addicted humans.

There was also something like this in a Big.G story.

Dang, I still haven't caught up on the recent stories.

Dosuyukkuri no longer need to eat nor poop because they live off of their own easiness. They have so much easiness, it makes other yukkuri take it easy. I'd assume they'd eat out of habit and taste than need.

That's how most stories do it... but Cirno likes !!SCIENCE!! too much so... ⚞(°-°)⚟

Quoting all the messages would make this post longer than already is, hopefully you can understand what I'm replying to

While yukkuri do live on anything (I mention strays eating literal garbage), it's not as easy as you make it sound
To begin with, quantity is important: we can discuss how much a yukkuri can eat, but a breeder usually takes care of multiple families, which means that, regardless of how much they actually eat, a great amount of food is needed
While humans do produce a lot of food waste, the daily amount is not really enough to feed all those yukkuri, so just feeding on scraps is not enough

Grass and other plants could be added, but not everyone has a garden (it's been a good number of years since yukkuri moved out of Gensokyo into the human world), so not every breeder can do that
Even then, there's still quantity to factor in: wild yukkuri have no problem with grass, as they have a large area with more than enough plants, but for a small and enclosed area like a human garden, grass simply can't grow fast enough to supply all the families
Even if a breeder manages to store the plants, there's the issue that they wither fast, and withered plants either can't be eaten anymore (they are too rotten), or they get a certain gummy texture, making them hard to chew
Sure, adult yukkuris could deal with that just fine, but I doubt babies could

Giving them shitheads might sound tempting, but the problem is that they are still yukkuri
Predators will not mind, but normal yukkuri will essentially eat nothing but sweets, and we all know that that means spoiled tastebuds. No one wants a yukkuri with spoiled tastebuds, not even breeders
We can argue that shitheads actually are not sweet (I've seen a couple of stories doing this), but then yukkuri wouldn't eat them, saying it's bitter or pukegross
You can add sugar, but the amount needed to make the food at least so so kind of defeats the purpose of using shitheads to avoid buying yukkuri food

The breeding methos of using ampoules or whatever is actually less cost effective than maintaining a whole family
Sure, in the short term you spend less, but any sane business makes plans for the long term, and this method is not great at all
The first reason is, newborn babies need to be greeted. It's commong knoweledge
I can point you to stories where not being greeted caused a lot of stress, even to the point of death
There is even the extreme case of yukkuri exploding because they didn't greet, but I can't find that comic and can't link it here
Anyway, even if they survive the lack of greeting, that still caused considerable stress on them, and training them will either be difficult or even deadly for them, assuming they didn't go crazy like in that other comic I can't find, where the mister experiments in greeting-less yukkuri
In short, not greeting is bad

Another reason, but not really that important, is that when you want more babies you have to buy special paste and inject it into the mother, while with a proper family, you just nudge the parents a bit, or just shake them if needed
Sure, you buy more food, but it costs less than a dose of babymaking paste, even if you get the cheap one (if you want a parallel with real life animals, stallions' sperm can cost more than a factory worker mothly wage)

A really good reason to consider taking care of a proper family, instead, is training: when you force-breed yukkuri with ampoules, you are essentially starting training from scratch for every pregnancy, meaning you'd have to toilet-train every yukkuri, teach them how to eat properly, to be obedient to humans... the minimal pet behaviour
If you take care of the parents too, you don't have to do that, as the parents themselves will teach some of that basic knoweledge to their children just by taking care of them
You'd still have to teach the children some stuff like how scary humans can be, but besides that the babies will be trained without effort. In addition, if the parents are properly trained too, they themselves can identify shitheads and report them to the breeder (that shitheads can be born from niceheads is a fact and it's out of discussion). This means the breeder does less work but gains the same amount of money after selling the kos

Admittedly, separating the kos from their parents isn't easy at all, but consider this: yukkuri are smart enough to form clans, and they themselves have shown that if there is something or someone that prevents them from self-destructing, they can even create some kind of civilized society
As the breeder breeds more and more yukkuri, eventually it'll get enough families to form a clan. This clan is made of pet-trained yukkuri, so they know how to behave and to avoid making others uneasy, but they also see the breeder as someone that always knows what's best, like a Dosu
Since "Dosu" breeder takes the kos (not all of them, some stay to make more families) after a set period of time since birth, as generations pass by, this practice essentially becomes a tradition of the clan, in which the easiest kos with the best training will be taken by "Dosu" to the easiest place, while uneasy kos will take the big easy (even if the breeder does not actually dispose of them, going by extremes is a way to keep them engaged)
It's an even greater incentive for the parents to give a proper pet-training to their children, making training even less work for the breeder itself, and who knows, maybe shitheads will actually be reformed

Force-breeding is ok if you want to produce food
Most yukkuri have a so so taste, but since predator yukkuri need to eat them, unless they are fed nothing but sweets, it's still a profitable market
The thing is, as long as the yukkuri are not sick or poisonous, anything goes, so even if forcing repeated pregnancy causes the birth of "lacking" yukkuri (not just premature, even normal children but with some defects, like a lack of accessory) is ok
The difference between this method and breeding for pets, is that food yukkuri are not meant to be companion, so there is no real quality screening, and even if some people like the challenge of raising one as pet, it's not the intended purpose, and they are cheap but for different reasons than cheap methods of production

Yukkuri can survive in the wild, even if they were pets, but wild yukkuri can't survive in the city
Compare the life in the wilderness, where there are lots of open spaces, where plants, bugs, many places to build houses, and essentially very few dangers (since asides from yukkuri stupidity, very few animals can eat pastries filled with sweet paste), with the city, filled with cars that can crush a yukkuri any time, humans that can crush yukkuri just because there was a long queue when buying groceries, where if you find a cardboard box to call home you are living like a king, and food is scarce and filled with who knows what poison (in the human sense)
Only yukkuri that dealt with humans can survive, which is not the case for wild yukkuri (unless they were pets, but this is a special case)

As I said earlier, a family can train their children, and if the parents are properly trained, even make shitheads into decent pets, but if you still need some external help, wouldn't a Satori actually make the kos more expensive?
Satori are rare, not Shizuha-level rare, but definitely less common than Sanae (which is considered rare), so I would expect that if a breeder wants one of them, it'll have to pay quite the price
Also, considering their ultimate purpose, "Satori-trained" kos would be considered like high quality products, since the training can be ingrained into the paste core (or something), so they will have a higher price than traditionally trained kos

An addition to the previous (looooong) post, because I forgot about it:

When I talk about force-breeding yukkuri, there is also to keep in mind that burning their feet and shutting their mouth causes a lot of stress, not just the moment you do it, but also as time passes and the mother is unable to move or greet her children
This has two problems: the first is that the lifespan of the mother is greatly reduced. Even with a constant flow of orange juice (which is an added expense, again defeating the purpose of breeding for cheap), that would cover only physical damage, not psychological one, and as stress builds up, the more the mother can die of a breakdown
Given this, a breeder would have to change mother often, adding to the expense, and if the breeder has a batch of kos for this purpose, isn't that the same as keeping a family? What was saved in not taking care of the parents was made by taking a large enough number of yukkuri as subsitutes when the force-bred yukkuri dies
Another thing to keep in mind is memories: when a baby yukkuri has yet to be born, the parents pass their memories through their bean paste, so if the mother is under high or constant stress, there is a high chance the yukkuri will be born with all that stress in them, which means there is a high chance of death by uneasiness, so each batch of children has a very high chance of complete failure (i.e. every yukkuri is dead), making the whole process less than cheap (not just in money, in time too)

I won't go point-by-point, but I'll point out a few things for you.

The idea of skipping the greeting with the parent is to, instead, have the breeder do the greeting, so the yukkuri bonds to the breeder/trainer, and they're easier to train.

The idea of feeding shitheads to other yukkuri is that they DON'T know they're eating other yukkuri. There's plenty of examples of yukkuri eating other yukkuri who are not predator-types, so long as they're either REALLY EVIL (Aglet recent story) or don't know they're eating other yukkuri.

Yukkuri in the wild have one huge factor over the cities, though: weather and natural disasters. Cities have more places to hide, and the food is somewhat easier accessed (I still don't understand Japan's trash system where trash bags are literally everywhere).

Also, what you said about Satori-trained is pretty much a contradiction. Yeah, the initial investment in a Satori will be expensive, but the high-quality pets and zero (or really low) shithead count will basically make huge profit margins.

Also, the ampoules aren't as expensive as you'd like to think. The breeding one is literally just Marisa filling. The other one is OJ to keep them alive. Exactly how expensive could that be? Of course, I'm sure one of the problems is the idea behind caged breeding (AKA why-you-should-adopt-your-pet IRL); that people would prefer their pets to be born naturally, rather than tying down some yukkuri and forcing them to have babies endlessly. I mean, at this point in the lore, there'd probably statistical analysis of what one mother breeds over the course of her lifetime (before her core shatters from stress/age), and the percentage quality (rough amount) of badge-level-to-shithead yukkuri (e.g. 10% SH, 22% bronze, 48% silver, 19% gold, 1% platinum), so they know how much they're going to roughly make off of each pet.

Anyway, pure hypothetical. :D

This time I can actually quote ;)

Hitosura said:

The idea of skipping the greeting with the parent is to, instead, have the breeder do the greeting, so the yukkuri bonds to the breeder/trainer, and they're easier to train.

I guess that could be true, but again, having the breeder be a substitute parent means it would have to train every yukkuri from toilet training to respect towards humans, when that could be more easily be taught by the actual yukkuri parents
A control over the parents is needed, of course, to avoid having them getting too complacent and turn into disobedient shitheads, but it's still less work than having to train each family over and over again (also considering that the breeder is always checking on the baby yukkuri to discern obvious shitheads and eventually contain them)
Maybe a breeder could be present at the act of birth and greet the children with the parents, but as the number of families grows I think it would be a bit unfeasible

Hitosura said:

The idea of feeding shitheads to other yukkuri is that they DON'T know they're eating other yukkuri. There's plenty of examples of yukkuri eating other yukkuri who are not predator-types, so long as they're either REALLY EVIL (Aglet recent story) or don't know they're eating other yukkuri.

The issue is that yukkuri are filled with sweet food (aside some few rare species), so it doesn't matter if they know they are yukkuri or not, their tastebuds are going to get ruined
On the other hand, if we go with the theory that shitheads are not sweet at all, you get food that will never be eaten by other yukkuri, because it's bitter or pukegross

Hitosura said:

Yukkuri in the wild have one huge factor over the cities, though: weather and natural disasters. Cities have more places to hide, and the food is somewhat easier accessed (I still don't understand Japan's trash system where trash bags are literally everywhere).

If weather was that huge of a danger, even normal animals would be blown away, no?
The difference is that yukkuri are not smart enough to find a proper place where weather is not as dangerous as it would be otherwise
On the other hand, while cities do offer more coverage from the weather, food is not exactly the best
Sure, in the wild yukkuri eat grass, but strays eat food filled with preservatives, fat, colorants, you name it. Yukkuri might eat them just fine, but are we sure the result is safe for humans? I would think thrice before adopting a stray, wild yukkuri are more safe in this regard (remember that the discussion is about where one would go to get a yukkuri, and, well, strays are not really the best choice)

Hitosura said:

Also, what you said about Satori-trained is pretty much a contradiction. Yeah, the initial investment in a Satori will be expensive, but the high-quality pets and zero (or really low) shithead count will basically make huge profit margins.

Sure, the breeder will get rich fast, but I was talking about the price at the pet shop for people that want to get a pet
Satori-trained yukkuri will be the best, but they will also be expensive because of the special training, not to mention that since Satori is rare, only a few breeders can actually offer these yukkuri, making them "uncommon" and thus more expensive
So owners that want a Satori-trained pet will need a decent amount of money even just for a Marisa

Hitosura said:

Also, the ampoules aren't as expensive as you'd like to think. The breeding one is literally just Marisa filling. The other one is OJ to keep them alive. Exactly how expensive could that be? Of course, I'm sure one of the problems is the idea behind caged breeding (AKA why-you-should-adopt-your-pet IRL); that people would prefer their pets to be born naturally, rather than tying down some yukkuri and forcing them to have babies endlessly. I mean, at this point in the lore, there'd probably statistical analysis of what one mother breeds over the course of her lifetime (before her core shatters from stress/age), and the percentage quality (rough amount) of badge-level-to-shithead yukkuri (e.g. 10% SH, 22% bronze, 48% silver, 19% gold, 1% platinum), so they know how much they're going to roughly make off of each pet.

The ampoules are cheap, I can agree, but you still need them in high quantity
Well, "high" here is relative, because the amount of juice needed to keep the mother alive will definitely vary not only from species to species, but from yukkuri to yukkuri too
Depending on how much juice each ampoule contains, a pregnancy could even need 4 or 5 of them (I'm exaggerating a bit here), and if you multiply that for every yukkuri a breeder breeds (I'd assume 5 is the minimum to get a decent profit from multiple shops), the price gets high, when for a small increase in food expense (to actually care for the parents), you get always (or nearly so) pregnancies (so no juice needed), no need to buy paste (shake the husband and get free babies), and, as said before, free training
I'd say it's cheaper that way, though only now as I'm writing this sentence I realize that "naturally bred and trained with parental love" could be some kind of certification that would actually raise the price at the shop, so it's cheap only for the breeder
Though I guess prices would still be somewhat contained since the breeder itself didn't spend much, and all it takes is some smug breeder that sells yukkuri at the same quality but a lower price (thus selling more than others) to start a price battle until the market stabilizes

Hitosura said:

Anyway, pure hypothetical. :D

Obviously, and I hope my posts don't look like I'm trying to impose some kind of tought or something
It's just that when I take the established facts about yukkuri and use them to tackle this issue, I see what I explained, and when I reply I try to go more in depth to make things clearer

Super walltext time is starting? Cirno can take it easy too?

EasyV said:

Yukkuri can survive in the wild, even if they were pets, but wild yukkuri can't survive in the city

I'm in the camp that says it goes both ways. City-born yukkuri don't know what's safe to eat or how to find it in the wild, don't know how to dig nests, or that they need to stockpile food for winter in colder climates - human cities have human food, shelter either exists or it doesn't, and humans leave trash out all year round.

Wild yukkuri don't know to avoid humans, cars, pets and the like, can't tell good food from bad or stop their little ones getting their tastebuds spoiled, don't recognise what's safe to hide in and what's not (nowhere to dig mister nest!), cluster together so that humans notice and exterminate them sooner, etcetera.

And most pets, unless they're specially trained or platinum material, aren't that great at surviving in either. Mister food just grows out of mister dispenser, understand easy!

EasyV said:

As I said earlier, a family can train their children, and if the parents are properly trained, even make shitheads into decent pets, but if you still need some external help, wouldn't a Satori actually make the kos more expensive?
Satori are rare, not Shizuha-level rare, but definitely less common than Sanae (which is considered rare), so I would expect that if a breeder wants one of them, it'll have to pay quite the price
Also, considering their ultimate purpose, "Satori-trained" kos would be considered like high quality products, since the training can be ingrained into the paste core (or something), so they will have a higher price than traditionally trained kos

I'm still trying to understand how a Satori is any use at all. Satori can only read minds, not brainwash, unless there's something I'm missing...?

Hitosura said:

The idea of feeding shitheads to other yukkuri is that they DON'T know they're eating other yukkuri. There's plenty of examples of yukkuri eating other yukkuri who are not predator-types, so long as they're either REALLY EVIL (Aglet recent story) or don't know they're eating other yukkuri.

I've read a lot of stories where yukkuri that eat other yukkuri inherit memories from them. If it's their mother of father doing eat up easy, the memories will be full of easiness and advice, but if it's a scum or suffering then the memories will be uneasy and make the yukkuri sick. I remember hy835230 at least used it - a shop selling food made from yukkuri got into trouble after it made a Patchouli sick.

In that one it was poop, but others do similar with corpses, I just don't remember the names.

EasyV said:

If weather was that huge of a danger, even normal animals would be blown away, no?

Don't forget that yukkuri can dissolve in ordinary rain. Shelter is very important easy!

EasyV said:

On the other hand, while cities do offer more coverage from the weather, food is not exactly the best
Sure, in the wild yukkuri eat grass, but strays eat food filled with preservatives, fat, colorants, you name it. Yukkuri might eat them just fine, but are we sure the result is safe for humans? I would think thrice before adopting a stray, wild yukkuri are more safe in this regard (remember that the discussion is about where one would go to get a yukkuri, and, well, strays are not really the best choice)

I'm sure I've read several stories where yukkuri are harmed by preservatives and stuff. Probably strays are hardened to it, and pets too to some degree, but wild yus would get sick easily.

And yeah, I think we all agree taking in a city stray is a health hazard. Wild ones too, but not as much.

The idea of using shitheads as food is kind of interesting. For predator types, it's a no-brainer since they will eat any non-predator. Using them as food for non-predators becomes a little more nuanced: if the shithead isn't killed before being offered as food, the one eating it will start to bully and spoil almost instantly resulting in another shithead; fanons are weirdly consistent about this.

BaronMind said:

I'm sure I've read several stories where yukkuri are harmed by preservatives and stuff. Probably strays are hardened to it, and pets too to some degree, but wild yus would get sick easily.

I would imagine that certain artificial additives, especially aspartame, would do more harm to yukkuri than easy. I just don't see a yukkuri consuming any formaldehyde product without getting sick.

Ruukasu said:

especially aspartame

Ants won't even touch aspartame. I'm sure a yukkuri's sense of smell/taste would have them spitting it out.

BaronMind said:

I'm still trying to understand how a Satori is any use at all. Satori can only read minds, not brainwash, unless there's something I'm missing...?

If a Satori can read your mind, then they can imprint. Like a hypnotic suggestion. It would take time, but would be faster.

I could sit here and break down the metrics of how everything would work -- from sperm and OJ ampoules, etc., and all that, but it'd be irrelevant and, personally, too specific. Yes, tying them down to mass-breed creates stress on them, but they're literally just living to produce cheap pets, and occasionally, the money-making gold badge. Most gold badge are easily identified from birth. Few train to that level.

random thought @ satoris: being able to read minds allows them to manipulate other yukkuris better. Provided they're intelligent enough to understand "this marisa hates me, I may want to kill it first" or simple things like "Reimu is hiding mr.sweet-sweets under that bush over there!"

I think it gives them an edge in survival, maybe not physically, but in a more clan-based environment or around other yukkuris. They would also be able to tell whether yukkuris are around simply by reading their thoughts. It sort of depends a bit on your headcanon on whether satoris need direct physical contact or is able to do so without. It definitely at least gives them initiatives at least.

In yukkuri of war in their brief appearance, I have them as being able to geo-locate hostile yukkuris by simply being able to read them from a certain distance away. They become yukkuri-radars in a sense. Of course yukkuri abilities are exaggerated in my story (due to bodied yukkuris being half-youkais as is) so take it with a grain of salt.

as for staying on topic: I think it depends strictly on "which" type of yukkuris you have.

There's the canon of "yukkuris eat everything, even garbage and sewage!" vs "Yukkuris are like animals! They eat everything but poisonous stuff and garbage will kill them!" The first case leads to hilarious stories like "yukkuris save the world" while the second makes up like 90% of our stories.

Personally, I think yukkuris can feed off scraps just fine whether its leftover potato skins, onion peel or banana peels. Even if you want to get them nice "yukkuri food" because you're a responsible pet owner, I'd say they're more akin to gerbils and guinea pigs more so than cats so the cost is cheaper. In the yukkuri world, the certification and such are the expensive part, as well as the time consumption into breeding a non-shithead. There's actually a really nice story on the yukkuri fanfic forums by Hourai regarding platinum badged yukkuris that you should check out if you haven't already.

I also wrote a story long ago about yukkuris moving into a city (Dosu in the city). It's heavily abyuse oriented, but it explores the effects of wild yukkuris moving into an urban environment and I tried to keep it as realistic as possible. But the yukkuris all rolled 1s in my story, unfortunately.

https://sites.google.com/site/yukkurifanfics/home/story-list
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/yufanfics

I've always wondered why when a clan of wild yukkuri move into a city, animal control doesn't wrangle them up and simply take them back to the wild. Everyone knows you don't have to kill them, you just have to convince them, especially the dosu. If you convince the dosu, they'll all follow. It wouldn't be that hard. Heck, we'll give you a free ride! I mean, just look at this pukegross smelly munch-munch. Some of it is so poisonous! You'll take it easy forever! These easy places? Look how cold they are! They leak! They smell! Gross! Mister rats and mister roaches take it way too easy! Mister cars are super-dangerous and love to take it easy by running over wild yukkuri! Then there's the other yukkuri who live here, who are waaaaaaaaaaaay uneasy! Look how they rape, enslave, and even abyuse other yukkuri! You're better off in the wild. Look at all that open space you have! Sooooo much quieter! You can take it way easier out there!

Seriously. It wouldn't be that hard. It's simply a game of logic versus weaker logic/common sense. Know what they want, leverage it against them. Give them a human sweet-sweet (but make sure it's pukegross sour, BUT NOT DEADLY SOUR). That's a human sweet-sweet?! Ew. Humans can't take it easy.

The problem I see with feeding grass and scraps to yukkuri is not wether they eat it or not, but rather if a person can produce enough to feed them properly
For pet owners it's ok, since they have usually just one pet, but for breeders it's different, and that is going to affect the price at the shop (which is the main subject of discussion in the first post)
Unfortunately there's not much to make an estimate on how much they need, but I'd say that even just 20 kos (which is a relatively small number) can't survive on scraps of a single person
Probably a breeder can make a deal with restaurants or similar to get their scraps for free, but people might complain about giving them to homeless people rather than yukkuri, but I digress

Raising Badged Yukkuri is actually the basis of most of my headcanon
In fact, a number of starting points for my first post in this discussions were taken from there (and I even just finished re-reading it yesterday :p)
I didn't like how some stuff was handled though, and in fact I have my own beliefs on that
I started Dosu in the City, but I didn't like how the story progressed so I didn't finish. It looked like a great story though, I won't deny that

Speaking of wild yukkuri, from what I could see, whole clans moving towards cities are uncommon, while it's more common to see single families traveling around
Sure, Dosus can be convinced to keep their clan away, but they have control only over their clan and a limited territory, so they can't do much to keep families not from the clan or living outside away from humans
Animal control could keep an eye on suspicious movements, but it's not easy
There is also to consider that not every city might be aware of a clan nearby, and when they do it might be too late to call animal control

Well, because abyuse trumps reason. It makes for a very boring story when it's just "one day anon saw some yukkuris and called animal control. They came and took the clan away, the end."

Not to mention it sort of depends on what it means to "take them back to the wild". Where did a huge clan of yukkuris come from? You can't just dump it in the woods, and "the wild" is either the farmer's backyard or a 2/3 hour drive. Then there's the risk of you disrupting the local ecosystem. You can't just dump animals in a random rural place to "return them", they might eat all the stuff and destroy the place. Realistically I imagine a clan of yukkuris would be spotted and either be turned back or sent off and kept in their natural environment before they're even able to leave it. Yukkuris don't move very fast after all, any busybody will be able to report it. And generally after some generations, they'll be weary of humans like deer, birds and all other animals unless they need to be super dumb for plot devices. (abyuse)

For breeders I'd say they'll probably be operating similar to restaurants or farmers, where they purchase feed in bulk. Here in america it'll probably be corn since its dirt cheap. I honestly don't have any ideas on the costs of that, so I won't try to apply any real world logic. Unless you're a small time breeder, in which case it'll probably cost as much as it would to raise some chickens or a pig, for example.

But keeping in mind that yukkuris breed quickly and breed a lot, the value of them would likely be very low unless you have rare types. Or you'll have some stupid shit like "organic", "gmo-free" yukkuris which raise the price.

Overall, I wouldn't think yukkuri breeding would be sustainable at all if the ratio of shithead to nicehead is extremely high like in most stories. They'd probably be better off as fodder for other pets to be honest.

Perhaps, instead of being eliminated with extreme prejudice, some shitheads can be useful for something...maybe chemical testing to determine the toxicity/lethal dose of available substances/compounds, including glyphosate, aluminum-based "consumables", sodium hexametaphosphate, etc.

I would assume they do that anyway. Take out their eyes, dump a ton of junk around them and tell them it's sweet-sweets. They're shitheads and it's all they want to eat, anyway.

I don't believe that shitheads are the majority, however. I think (personally) most shitheads are shitheads only because they just don't understand things. There's people who are like that. Lots of them. We call them sociopaths. Narcissists. Possibly both.

Also, if you've been keeping up with my story, it was when the company tried to branch out into food products that they went into bankruptcy and collapsed. They were overbreeding, sales took a slip, they sold inferior products, and yukkuri don't make for good human consumption. There was another story that talked about that -- kids visited a Factory, saw the (IMHO disgusting) practices there, including a Marisa who pleaded for them to save her, then got samples of the food products, which were pretty bland.

Like I said, I'd assume they'd just be bred for pets. Livestock would be easy to breed -- just let them have huge families in controlled parameters. Yukkuri can't count passed three or four, so just take the excess. Make a whole ritual out of it. Hell, I'd assume it'd be cheaper to feed predators than it would to feed normal yukkuri.