FunkSoulBrother said: Seems unlikely that a yukkuri growing up in the wild would be fatter than one raised under human care.
Not necessarily, Just because they are on the wild, that doesn't necessarily make them more active, they are yukkuris remember, to "take it easy" is their reason to be, at least they claim that, so wild yukkuris may not be as active as you expect them, besides yukkuri chow could be a less fattening and more nutritive food than everything they may find in the wild, and we have to include the chance of the owner limiting the ammounts per lunch/dinner, while a wild yukkuri may not have any level of self restraint outside of winter, so they could just gooble down whatever they found.
Plus it may be nooraki's nod at how Wild Yukkuris have more tendencies ot be scum or shithead and how as such, they become ugly and annoying looking, meanwhile the pet yukkuris are less prone to be scum or shithead (at least if you make sure to get a good pet and not some "shady and questionable" one) so they tend to be cuter and more loveable looking.
If they are Kos, fat and wild, then its likely they are pampered and overfed by their parents where the pet are fed a certain amount to maintain an appearance to be appealing to potential customers.
We have to also notice the smaller features of the wild ones, not only hair and accesories but the face itself is smaller.
So a question raises if the wild one is a young ko or aka while the pet one is an older ko, or both have the same age, and like ukshadow said, the wild one has malformation out of all the shit wild and stray yukkuri may face.
Hey, maybe that elongated body contains muscle (er, the yukkuri equivalent thereof) that allows the wild yukkuri to jump and stretch and dig and hunt and survive.
I can imagine a setting in which breeders/the factory have selectively bred yukkuris for generations, making them "cuter" to appeal to pet buyers, with a smaller body (and by "body" I mean "the part of the yukkuri that is not the face"), relatively bigger accessories and eyes, etc.
Nah Platina that isn't muscle, usually "muscular" yukkuris don't look too different from the average yukkuris.
In general, a yukkuri, a healthy and strong yukkuri, had to look more like the pet, if it looks like the wild one, there is something seriously wrong on it, over feeding, malformation, buriism, prematurity, you call it, but something is wrong.
I think it relates to what a pet yukkuri would look like if it originally was wild raised or bred for pet use. Wild ones are more used to being active so to hunt and gather, and are also used to not having a lot of food available to them, whereas pet bred ones are the opposite.