The mummahs are generally pillowed anyway and so can’t hurt the foals. It seems like a waste of a resource for a lactating mare’s milk not to be used. I know the doylist reason is probably just that it’s an excuse to pillow a second fluffy, but what is the reason in-universe?
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there is no one answer, all of what makes fluffies fluffies is a mess of headcannon and inspiration from other works.
however, the most common reasons i see are to prevent mares from harming their foals and to keep sellable fluffies away from the horror that their mothers live in. making a pen that can keep a pillowed fluffy alive is easy, making it safe for foals to play in is harder. foals are generally able to walk and talk by the time theyre weaned, leaving them in a filthy, cramped cage with their mother could lead to illnesses and injuries that are hard to spot when the foals are all over the place. then they go off to their new homes and start talking about how their mother didnt have legs and cried all the time, how theyre so excited to have a ball that isnt just a crusted up piece of shit, etc. then you have protesters out front and sales plummeting.
in lots of creatures lactation prevents pregnancy, so there might even be a biological reason for it depending on how you want to write it.
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Look at how the babymaker mares are usually set up. It’s in an uncomfortable box or cage that drops the babies onto an escalator belt. To use the babymaker mare as a milkbag, you would need to either stop using the escalator belt method (thus stopping you from quality checking foal colors), or have it loop back to the mare afterward, where the foals will get like … what, 2 weeks? 3? of sustenance before the next batch of babies is born and pushed into the exact same spot, meaning some worker has to manually swap the babies out or they need a bunch of extra escalator set-up to move them manually when the new batch is detected.
Plus, I imagine the constant pregnancy and hormone injections etc is gonna mess up the milk quality something fierce. So you’d get subpar milk, be unable to sort the foals properly, have to interact with each one of the 50 breeder mares just to see if their babies are dead at their teats or not … there’s way too much hassle to be worth it when you can just have a designated saferoom area with regular milkbags in it for all the foals.
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Fheres prolly different answer but I assume its so the mare would not like kill the foals that arent hers drinking the milk. Especially with like alicorns whicb in universe are like gold mines. I think thats like the common answer.
Whence cometh the milkbag?
Why is it there? What is it feeding?
‘Horrible monster’ alicorns?
poopie babbehs it would normally reject?
just forced to feed the thousands of babbehs per week in a fluffy mill?
Imagine a world so cruel, and a life so valueless, that a person can just hack off the limbs of a creature
that can speak
and cry
and plead for mercy
Because after it’s treated this way, it now has more value than it had before
And there you have a milkbag.
You feed it with a constant paste supply down into it’s stomach. Edit the chemicals, the genes, the radiation, and you can get some incredible results from small additions.
What does the paste taste like?
NOBODY CARES
Well, nobody that matters at least.
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At the end of the day, the cruelty is the point. How your characters rationalize / ‘excuse it’ in your fluffy universe is up to you.
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Fuck em thats why. Its missery maxing at its finest it corrupts even the act of nurturing offspring into a torture.
Also specialized tools are usually most cost effective and can be made with resources that would otherwise be wasted such as poorly colored fillies especially if you are looking for a scale where its important to breed your good colored ones as much as possible without letting them nurse their offspring you can pump out mad unicorns since with fluffies you can have 6 broods per years lets say thats 1% chance per foal thats on average still only about 20% chance per brood for atleast one alicorn per year if you use this accelerated method
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The cruelty is the point. Fluffies are ultimately narrative devices governed by “what the content needs” rather than any real logic or “hard” scifi jibberjabber. Whatever in universe excuse you like will work.
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Three main reasons in my headcanon:
A - easy to manage: the milkbags don’t need too much care, just three tubes: food, piss and shit, don’t need a place to sleep, to play, to eat, just hang them as the bags they are and you can have a lot of miserable shit rats doing something useful.
B - punishment and optimization: imagine you have three mares, one its a bitch, knows to kill her no pwewy foals or even worst, starving them in pro of her favorite one. So, intead of kill the bitch and loose a shit rat, better to pillowed her, uses her as a milkbag, and as a plus, she can’t deny to feed a ugly foal. Or an old mare that only give birth death or unfinished foals, you still can uses her. The third one is a love of mare so you can keep her to have more foals until she dies or her turn to be a milkbag comes.
C - because fucked them: its funny to make them suffer and just pillow them is not enough, you need a reason to make them miserable, and what better to torture them like that. Also you can kill their foals in from of them without resistance, just watching their mental breakdown.
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Efficiency
Yeah, but my point was that the broodmares generally already have their limbs hacked off too, so why should the broodmares and the milkbags be a seperate population
They certainly can be, if that’s what’s appropriate for your story.
But it’s not a rule. Nor even a guideline.
The thing is, I’m even writing a weirdbox/horrorbox story where they’re literally farming liquid pain/garmonbozia (well, that and blood) and I was actually worried that it would mess up the econony of scale for that
Simplicity and economy of space, especially when dealing with large numbers of foals from mixed litters. And, as others have pointed out, alicorns.
Sounds like dremcrom
Mass use of milkbags are usually a feature of industrialised fluffy breeding, so one potential reason is cost effectiveness - it costs a couple cents cheaper per foal, to pillow and maintain unsellable excess mares as milkbags, than it is to leave the foals with the mother, since letting her feed her foals extends the cycle time before she can be bred again.
Industrial abuse is less about the deliberate torture of child-like, empathetic animals and more about the banal, apathetic, unintentional cruelty caused by accountants and C-suite executives relentless chasing unsustainable short-term growth for the next quarter’s financials report.
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in my own headcanon, the hormones they use to instigate large litters would be transferred to the babies through the milk, causing issues with precocious puberty.
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