Good to know. They’d be a bigger danger when it’s small and young at least. Also, maybe during harvest. That’s highly automated for big operations, no? Could a decent herd get killed and contaminate loads of corn harvested? Or should it be assumed that engineers will have worked on that issue?
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That’s a very good retcon, especially given the bit re: Lake Erie and nearby rivers. Think I might adopt that explanation in my canon going forward as well. Economic fallout also makes more sense if you’re talking about hoity-toity neighborhoods in the 'burbs as well facing accidental devastation. More fitting that way, too, since the very thing meant to appeal to a demographic with enough disposable income ultimately becomes a victim of the very company that wanted to serve them so bad.
I kind of always just assumed Cleveland was chosen since it’s populous but not so populous as it would fundamentally make an unrecognizable fictional world if it got blown sky high.
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Threshers mash feces from sheep used to keep the rows clean (even pygmy goats are more likely to get the stalk down), and a LOT of small animals like rabbits ands snakes get caught.
Corn harvesters are not super fast and not low to the ground though. Herds would probably have enough time to flee, unless they ran the wrong way right in.
Even then, the machine sifts the corn from the stalk and anything else it sucks up. Hell, a very lucky Fluffy could end up in the corn pile unharmed. Maybe get adopted as a barn Fluffy to chase away mice and sing songs to cows. I dunno.
I’m not duper knowledgeable on agriculture though across the board. You could probably find some crops they fuck up, and others they are a total benefit to.
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That’d be interesting to explore. There is a Carpdime picture with fluffalos i like where there’s water paddies for growing something. Could be rice? And here in Hawai’i taro is traditionally grown like that too. It’d keep fluffies away.
Hrm.
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I’m relying on basically all the small cities that get grouped into Cleveland because they look like part of the same city, mostly called Heights.
Especially Cuyahoga Heights. Sorry if anyone is from there.
Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation Park is where I’m picturing Spaghetti Land set up like a carnival rather than a Disneyland (but advertised as a Disneyland), the Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant being the location of their Resident Evil style secret lab in addition to the infrastructure most likely to have failed first them become irrelevant as the population dropped from 500000 to 45000 of mostly poor.
Hasbio doesn’t get all the blame due to farmers using, and still using, herds. Cleveland is forgotten as fast as Centralia was in real life beyond an amusing story and cautionary tale nobody heeds.
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This comes to mind.
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Still my favorite style even if I find the human reactions too extreme.
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I find that level of consistent civic pitching in hard to believe 
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noting should be dangerous about fluffies they where made to be a childs toy
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Tripping on a fat foal left on some stairs is a hazard.
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A fluffy could do sorry hoofsies to an unsteady granny and push her down the stairs. But yeah I agree mostly.
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Toys can harm kids if they were made wrong or were left unfinished.
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you can rip their legs off whit your bare hands i think the world is safe from them
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no more dangerous than a bunched up rug
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That was it. It covers that the bodies piled up and blacked a major storm drain which would be damming to the infrastructure. Thanks for finding it.
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They can be like a puppy and under you and trip you up the same, but I wouldn’t think they would because they run the risk of being crushed under their owners weight.
I’d see them as a tripping hazard, especially if you have limited mobility, or are already frail. Their small size, combined with their clinginess would make them dangerous for the elderly. I’m thinking that thing where cats like to walk between your legs when you’re walking. Old person has a fluffy, the fluffy gets a bit over excited, tries to hug the old person’s legs when they’re walking, and then they fall. The fall may be made worse if the fluffy has scardy poopies, and now that person is laying in vile shit. Can see them being banned outright from old folks homes, with staff making sure that no fluffy can enter the facilities. Maybe even fences around the grounds.
With urban ferals, dying in the sewers and clogging them with their corpses is a concern. General pest behavior as well, although I don’t see them surviving too well in the winters. They were designed for life indoors, and they’re not panting all the time, so their fluff can’t be that insulating. So if you live in a city where below freezing nightly temperatures is common in the winter months, there will probably be a large die off of feral fluffies.
For rural ferals, one thing that hasn’t been discussed is predation by regular animals. Assuming animals like eating fluffies in your headcanon. Sight based predators would have a field day with standard fluffies, birds of prey especially. When your eyes are evolved for spotting a rabbit from the air, a hunter orange, or bright purple, slow moving, noisy fluffy would be an easy meal. Would need a big eagle to take out adults, but adolescents and foals would be easy pickings for hawks. The time where a fluffy wishes it was poopie. Could also have feral herds comprised mostly of earth tones and dark green fluffies, natural selection being what it is, assuming they last long enough to breed. I can also see owls snatching foals and adolescents that happen to be out on their own. Or ones sheltering in a barn. This might have unforeseen consequences with a population boom of regular prey animals.
I don’t see herds in the wilderness or even rural areas lasting too long. Fluffies are made to be indoor toys, they’re not going to be doing much digging with their soft leathery hooves. Ferals will have tougher hoof pads than your average pet fluffy for sure, but they’re not horse hooves. They’re also REALLY dumb, so expect deaths from accidents to increase with any group of fluffies not managed by a human, regardless of where they are. Temperature extremes would also do a number on them. I don’t see a herd of fluffies lasting long in a hot desert, a day or two tops before they all die of thirst or overheating.
So yeah, watch out for tripping over a fluffy, especially on stairs, don’t get one for your 93 year old grandma, and make sure they don’t clog your water treatment system.
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I think its more a matter of “they make a great plot device for unintended consequences!”
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Where I’m located in Central CA, Ferals, runaways, and lost pet fluffies definitely wouldn’t survive in the valley for long. The winter months are cold, wet, rainy (when there’s a not a drought) they’d easily freeze at night during December to February, where freeze advisories are common. Not to mention the “Tule fog” that envelopes the valley with it’s low visibility (sometimes the fog is really low visibility like less than 5 feet at times!), Sometimes the fog doesn’t lift until noon the following day only to roll back in early afternoon. Fluffies would be easily lost and disoriented if they walking in it, probably in circles around neighborhoods and even worse when they start getting out in the rural areas & farm lands.
In the fog fluffies would being easily ran over because while they can hear the cars but have no idea where a vehicle is coming form until it’s too late. Not to mention this is where all the major farms are; farmers and their workers wouldn’t care if a pet fluffy or feral fluffy herd is on their property definitely be shooting and killing fluffies the moment they are on or around the farmers property they wouldn’t waste with them.
But the real killer of fluffies would be the summer weather, this is where they’d die en mass. The summers in the central valley start to get hot around mid to late April and early May (like low 90’s F / 32’ C) and really start heating up in mid May to early June where temps start to rise to 100’ (37’ C) and then there’s long stretches of high temps up to 105’ - 110’ ( 40’ - 43’ C) during the months of June to Mid September, when it starts to cool down back to the 90’s before cooling off in October for a bit only to get cold again.
So if there’s feral or lost pets roaming in the day time, and walking on the sidewalks or asphalt their soft hooves would practically melt! Not to mention they’d die of dehydration and exhaustion in the valley heat it would be pretty ugly. It gets worse if the actually make it to the foothills and further up the terrain, predators, people who take their privacy and property very seriously and hate trespassing, and wildfires would wipe them out.
This is just a reference for walking dogs, so for fluffies they’d be so much worse off.
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Yeah, I can see ferals wandering onto asphalt, and especially recently escaped/dumped domestics getting severe burns on their feet. Maybe on their bodies too, when they fall over. I don’t imagine the fluff being that thick or protective. If you have a pet fluffy and it needs surgery or something as simple as having something really sticky like gum or maltose syrup stuck in its fluff and needs a shave, they’re going to have a bad time in the summer. Can only imagine how quickly their bare skin would burn.
Speaking of fog, I can imagine mirages affecting fluffies like they’re in an old Loony Tunes. Simple highway mirage of water would encourage a thirsty herd to run to the water, only to not understand why it’s not there. Of course, will suffer attrition from vehicles if they are doing it on an actual highway. Even without getting hit by a car, the increased activity of running in the heat would probably knock out a few of the thirstier members of the herd, or at least ensure that they won’t make it to the next day.
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