... Okay, this is just excessive. You could have just picked the yukkuri up and set it outside. All over. In fact, from a perspective of yukkuri control, that would actually be a better move -- or at least leaving the children alive.
The problem with yukkuri torture and murder from a practical perspective is well-illustrated in the story "Dangerous Yukkuris." Namely, evolution. By torturing and killing any yukkuri you can catch, you're eliminating the stupid and helpless ones from the gene pool... while the ones that are smart enough or strong enough to escape are allowed to breed. You're selecting for smarter, stronger yukkuri. Ones that can defend themselves whether passively or actively, like Utsuho, Shou, or Kanako become more common... and even among "harmless" ones like Reimu or Marisa, the ones that are the most dangerous and hardest to deal with become more and more common.
Eventually, you end up in a world where Factories and Yukkuri Bullies simply cannot operate, because the only yukkuri that survive are too clever and dangerous to bully or exploit.
Ideally, from the perspective of maintaining yukkuri bullying or yukkuri livestock supplies, you want to cull the strong and allow the weak to breed, making the species weaker and easier to control or abuse.
Just like how people poison rabbits or raccoons that keep eating their gardens, this is largely the same... just on a physical scale. It doesn't change the fact that some people are... "intense".
Also I don't really agree with you on how that genetic selection works. By your logic, you'd have a world where deers don't freeze up when they see a car coming, because all the ones that'd freeze up are dead already from all the accidents.
What's more likely is that you'd have yukkuri that break into houses, and then run away quickly instead of doing dumb shit like this instead. That doesn't make them less stupid, but it does make them more likely to survive an encounter with humans. Just like how you can still catch mice with mousetraps, there will be ways that people will be able to catch yukkuris (sic).
I'd like to think the stupidity of yukkuris is built in on a genetic level. :)
Two absolute rules of Yukkuri: 1. Yukkuris are dumb. Some are better than others, but for the most part, they're stupid. Smart ones are a needle in a hundred haystacks. 2. They're buns, or some variant.
Stories like Dangerous Yukkuri are generally outliers, and I wouldn't trust the fact that certain types have attacks that can fend off people. The Yukkuri wiki is horribly out of date, and most of the information contradicted by stories that can be found in the usual places such as Yu113.doc. Other stuff is made up just for the purpose of making certain types of Yukkuri seem un-abusable. Speaking of culling though, there's some great stories on the subject. Story 163 from the document is a personal favourite.
There's a slight problem with your assumption. Namely... you're comparing a universal trait of deer that has been bred in as a useful survival trait over countless generations -- if it's even possible to breed it out at this point, it will take a vast amount of time -- not a non-universal trait of yukkuri. There are already comparatively smart yukkuri around to select toward -- farmers, Tewi types, Patchouli types...
As well, yukkuri evolution will be comparatively fast due to their quick growth and prolific breeding -- they can have dozens of generations in the space that humans have one, allowing a large amount of mutation and selection to occur in what we'd consider a relatively short period.
Independent of the morality of this, it just seems problematic to apply an evolutionary pressure toward smart/dangerous creatures in something with such short generations. If you want to maintain bullying, you want to cull the smart and dangerous ones to promote the stupid and helpless ones. If you want to eliminate them as a pest, you want to target the stupid ones and the dangerous ones, in order to select towards farmers and other smart-but-harmless types.
I apologize for the double-post... but a flaw in my own argument occurs to me:
There's no such thing as a yukkuri that cannot be abused. Even an Utsoho can be, if one has proper radiation shielding and is careful not to induce an explosion. There will always be a way to abuse yukkuri. The issue is that if dangerous yukkuri become more common due to selection toward them, it will become beyond the means of most casual abusers.
Also, there's a limit to Yukkuri intelligence -- the smartest we've seen, the Smart Reimu and the ones from Dangerous Yukkuris are still more than possible for people to outwit. The Dangerous Yukkuris were able to survive because they were dangerous on top of being smart, but the Smart Reimu ultimately failed in its plans and became subject to abuse.
Well, from the assumption that yukkuris will breed comparatively fast (almost fruit-fly fast), we can assume that no matter how many stupid ones get into houses, there will be enough stupid ones in nature to breed and make stupidity a trait that's impossible to breed out. We can take into account that the physical ability and the level of cunning a yukkuri can evolve at their level will forever limit them to the bottom of the food chain as well, so making "Dangerous" a very subjective term.
The "smart" and "dangerous" ones we can rule as possible sub-species, if we really want to get into it. The vastly different characteristics of different types of yukkuri should speak for itself. The dangerous kinds (utsuho, tenshi) are rare enough in (fanfic) representation that we can treat them as a sort of abominable snowman.
Again, it really depends on your setting. Will you compare yukkuris to the passenger pigeon? Or will you compare them to fruit flies? It is ultimately up to the author on how smart and how dumb the yukkuris can be.
Don't really have a counter for that one. It matches perfectly with my own arguments and premises, and makes biological sense. Ultimately, as it is, either yukkuri have a high enough rate of reproduction that it becomes difficult to completely weed out traits -- the same high reproductive rate that accelerates genetic drift and selection for traits also ensures that a significant population with any trait that's not catastrophically fatal will survive -- or they do not reproduce sufficiently for this, and rather than selecting for more capable yukkuri, you're simply driving them to extinction.
Reasoned, civil debates are a lot more interesting than the intractable flamewars about the morality of yukkuri guro.
Oh, and to go off on a tangent... speaking of Yu113.doc and other Yukkuri story sources... anyone have a recommendation of stories that involve bad things happening to yukkuri abusers (whether human or yukkuri)? Things like the comic where Wriggle Nightbug tosses a murderous yukkurisa to some fish, or the comic where Alice is driven insane by a yukkuri she abused to the point of breaking, or many of the scenes in The Yukkuri Family that Lives In The City. That's really where my taste in stuff that's not non-violent/family-friendly tends to flow.
There's a few that comes off the top of my head. The yukkuri mansion, the queen alice series, cirno and yuka's garden... i think most of them you can find in yu113.doc but they're fairly old. I haven't been keeping up with most of the newest stuff unless they get illustrations to go with them. As usual, if there's any requests you can post it up in yu-fanfics group and I'll get on it when I get some time.
The question of whether or not it's "right" is not at issue -- and is a debate I'd rather not get into as it inevitably ends in an intractable, pointless flamewar. The issue is that it's excessive force if one merely wants to remove the invading yukkuri from your house. Once it had conveniently taken the children into its mouth, it would have been a simple matter to simply pick up the mother and set it outside. Physically and mentally abusing and tormenting it is unnecessary to accomplish this end.
I believe people doesn't simply pick up any creature that break your window and set it outside. It doesn't matter what logic is the matter is what people do,people always kill them. And this is imaginary creature where logic doesn't apply to it "You're selecting for smarter, stronger yukkuri" doesn't exist. As long as you don't start to write one yourself. This is a whole matter about yukkuri is imaginary creature.
Well your logic is correct look on people who use pesticide on crop. Insect is getting stronger. But I see it is so pointless to talk about yukkuri like that.
>All over. In fact, from a perspective of yukkuri control, that would actually be a better move -- or at least leaving the children alive.
Just wanna bring up another point. You're assuming that this guy is doing this for yukkuri control, but he's clearly not. What's he's doing is more akin to someone beating up a burglar who has broken into thier home rather than trying to weed out yukkuri. Sure it 'may' result in improving the yukkuri gene pool, but I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't give a hoot about that.
Not to mention smarter yukkuri often end up as pets in many stories.
"Physically and mentally abusing and tormenting it is unnecessary to accomplish this end" This statement would only correct if and only if the goal is just to drove off the pest It's entirely perfectly necessary if the goal is well... prove a point to them or rather... troll them