ASK FLUFFIESAREFOOD
Volume 2 Number 10
Happy Friday, Fluffherders! It’s August 13, 2085, and time for another edition of Ask FluffiesAreFood, the advice column that seeks to answer questions of fluffherders and fluffy eaters everywhere! If you have a question, just ask here!
Today’s question comes from MadgeTheVadgePHD, who asks:
Dear FluffiesAreFood,
As an adjunct economics professor who has to supplement her starvation-wage income with sex work, I’ve managed to wrap both my brain and my cunt around all sorts of big stuff. However, I haven’t been able to wrap either around the economic case for the existence of fluffies. It just doesn’t make sense that a company would go through that much R&D risk for the meager reward of a new line of pets and pet-related products. Simply put, Hasbio didn’t start out just trying to create a pet. So, what is the consensus in the fluffy community about why fluffies were created in the first place?
That’s an excellent question, MadgeTheVadgePHD, and the answer is pretty simple: we don’t know. Because we don’t know, we have to speculate. As you know, truth is simple, speculation is complicated.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the majority of fluffy economists I’ve spoken to agree with you. There’s no way Hasbio started out to create a pet (or “biotoy” as they used to call it) when they began developing the fluffy. The consensus seems to be that Hasbio was working on something else - something much bigger - and that the cute, sapient, talking animal with colorful fluff, that they marketed to us as an artificial species of pet, is an accident, and one that they exploited for easy cash.
Of course, it follows from this that they probably weren’t setting out to create a new kind of livestock either. All of which means that the biggest geopolitical phenomenon of the 21st Century - the fluffy - and all of its consequences, including the environmental devastation that led to the collapse of the American world order, and the rise of the fluffy as the single largest source of animal calories in human history, are simply unintended consequences of a marketing decision.
Let’s circle back to your original question. What led Hasbio to create the fluffy in the first place? As I stated before, we don’t know. But we do have theories.
The most popular theory is that Hasbio was working on a biomedical technology – a way to grow human-compatible organs quickly.
It used to be that organ transplants required a recently dead human (“donor”) from which the appropriate organs could be harvested. Donors had to be genetically similar enough to the patient as to keep the risk of rejection (the recipient’s own immune system attacking the organ) to a minimum. Under some circumstances, pig organs could be used (as was the case with heart valves).
Hasbio’s parent company Hasbro had a long tradition of philanthropic work focused largely on pediatric medicine, including funding a children’s hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. So it wouldn’t be surprising that they would fund research into an artificial animal that grows quickly and accepts transplants easily, with organs similar to those of humans.
Of course, that effort never came to fruition, and now that we can print new organs from a patient’s own stem cells, any continued work along this line would be pointless.
Another, more radical theory, is that Hasbio was working on biocomputing technology. It’s no secret that fluffies are one of the smartest animals on the planet, with the intelligence of a three year old and even a vocabulary to match. Nor is it a secret that they breed and grow quickly.
There is speculation that Hasbio was trying to build an artificial species that would grow lots of brains quickly, to put them to work as naturally sentient computers. This might seem far fetched, but we know that Russia, India and China independently developed similar technologies in the 2020s and 2030s.
The only ones who really know the original purpose of the project that led to the fluffy work at Hasbro. Unfortunately those records are subject to strict nondisclosure laws, and Hasbro has kept mum.
In theory we could examine the genetic code of the fluffy to find out what species’ DNA is included in fluffy DNA; and based on that, make inferences as to what Hasbio was trying to do. However, that would infringe on Hasbro’s intellectual property, which is a felony in the reunited USA. Even reporting on the results of such an effort is against the law.
However, I can report that scientists in Texas have carried out an analysis of fluffy DNA, and have released their findings. All you have to do is join a public library in Texas or the EU to read their research.
I note, dear reader, that you write me from Nevada. It might be worth a trip to Texas to find out what’s in fluffy DNA. Texas accepts all North American passports and issues 90-day tourist visas free of charge. Just remember that public libraries in Texas are run by private enterprises and come with a membership fee of about about TX$10-20; exchange rates between TX$ and USA$ are about one-to-one.
On an editorial note, this is the last of the old FluffiesAreFood content. I have, since posting this, completed an index of all the FAF posts, which can be found in my profiile. I might publish new content as the inspiration strikes. That said, things are getting busy for me again, so I may end up taking another hiatus. As always, we’ll see.
Ask FluffiesAreFood is a service of the Fluffherders’ Association of America. If you have a question about raising, slaughtering, or eating of fluffies, you may comment here.