I think that chickens would also be created as pets as well. As pointed out they aren't that expensive (from a resource expense POV), and there are bird lovers out there (please no South Park jokes) that would want to have them as pets. The same goes for space kitties, astro mutts, and stellar tortoises (with GM mini elephants on their backs ;) ).

I can just see the rich and famous with their oh-so trendy tiger-striped chickens

Amateur enhanced-animal fighting might be an interesting (and horrible) sport. Pokemon but with real blood and gore. The rules of the ring are likely along the lines of "as long as it makes the fight interesting and the betting fair enough, go for it!" Animals are let into a ring and the fight continues until one animal loses the will to fight, their owner or a doctor/judge declares it over, or a time limit is up. Direct control is not allowed during the fight (no puppet socks, no helper AIs) but owners can turn off their animals (and out of the ring having controls is probably a good idea for training and safety). Good fighter animals might have cortical stacks so that their egos can be saved - they have been in a lot of battles and are very experienced. Of course, the judge has to check that the downloaded ego is just an animal ego... Might actually be interesting to run as a sub-story in a game. Have PCs design their own battleanimals - distribute points among aptitudes, skills and traits, add the right enhancements and train them. "This is Firebird. Basic cock physiology, but I added thermal protection and combustible preen oil. During fighting it ignites. I rewired the heat response to the aggression response - it gets *really* mad when it is on flame and will close in on the opponent like crazy. I'm happy with the concept, but of course it only works if the opponent is damaged by fire and will be defeated before the feathers burn off. Looks amazing, though. In most fights I use this electric armadillo instead."

Speaking of pokemon, it seems odd to me that anyone would do real animal fighting when there's VR right there. :)

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

It tastes better if you know the pain is real and the damage permanent. edit: Just speculating...

Wouldn't even a mesh simulation have the possibly to cause damage? Especially if any neural dampener settings were turned off?

So, what about this as an out-of-game rule system for bloodsports: Players get to design creatures freely using a fixed number of CP. (This corresponds to a "class" of creature; in-game, trainers bring their creature for evaluation by the judge and his veterinarian, who estimate the degree of enhancement and makes sure the competition is matched enough to be fair and interesting). Using the CP the player buys an animal (which might be natural or smart), aptitudes, skills, traits and enhancements. This of course carries a cost in terms of credits or rep, and requires suitable skill tests for the people doing it. Each aptitude point costs 5 CP, skills cost 1 up to 40, then 2. Enhancements cost Low 1/4 CP, Moderate 1 CP, High 5 CP, Expensive 20 [ Using this the core book animals are worth: Fur Coat 75 CP Smart dog 565 CP Smart monkey 615 CP Smart rat 600 CP Space roach 455 CP. A smart dog equipped with adrenal boost, bioweave armor, drug glands (MRDR), neurachem level 1 and cyberclaws would be worth 577 CP. ] [ Does this make sense? Not sure how to balance the CP cost of aptitudes, skills and enhancements to make them balanced. ] The animal is then trained to become a fighting animal using various means - from traditional baiting over puppet sock training to psychosurgery and XP. The key thing is to make it obedient enough to fight on command and to generally obey the trainer. This requires the Animal Handling skill and training as per p. 177 of the Core book. At a competition the creature is pitted against another creature in a suitable environment (normally just a ring or a sphere, but sometimes more elaborate environments are used). There are a fixed number of action turns (typically about 40) before the battle is over. The fight is run as a normal fight. Outside help or direct control is not allowed: clever tricks require skill or aptitude tests for the animal. The exception is that the trainer can use his animal handling skill to shout commands: if successful the animal will obey (remember the -30 penalty for the stressful environment and the Animal Empathy bonus or Zoosemiotics trait, if applicable), otherwise it will do whatever seems reasonable to it. Every time the animal takes one wound it must succeed a WIL x 3 test or start retreating (remember the -10 from each wound). The trainer can urge it on with a successful animal handling test. A critical failure on the morale test means the animal has given up and lost the match; a critical success gives a +10 on the next test. If the animal retreats for more than three rounds it is declared the loser; the trainer can try to urge it on with animal handling. Animals that go unconscious or are otherwise disabled also lose. Typically trainers get a cut of the house profit from gambling/entrance fees, with the winner getting most of the pot. Of course, they can get extra under the table if they help criminals fix the match, but if they are found out they are in deep trouble.

That is true, although they're not chickens at that point. And you could do it with anything, including robots and humans. And that's just in the physical world, as we've discussed above. It's hard to guess about the future of this kind of thing. Video games are predominantly based on competitive violence, so that seems likely to continue. There's also the persistence of boxing, MMA, football, etc. These are all 'safe', compared to the bloodsport fantasies common in sci-fi (Running Man, Gamer, Rollerball, dueling in Heavy Gear, and so on). It does seem logical that somewhere, someone has competitions that blend the engineering ingenuity of car racing, the thrill of 'real' violence, and the exoticism of tweaked animals. It's Phantom Crash with animal cruelty. :)

so we've gone from an innocent discussion on livestock in space... to Chicken Porn?? Is there some corollary on Godwin's law for this?

Arenamontanus wrote:

While you're at it, maybe you should consider enhancing the chicken too? "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "It had a puppet sock."

That would be an interesting school project: remote-controlled chicken racing. It sure beats making balsa wood cars in shop class, plus there are so many ways that such a project could go horribly wrong. "Where did you find the interception evasion code that you uploaded into that damned thing?" "On the mesh. I found it in a proxy server someplace and messed around with it a little. It was almost too easy to port to the chicken's cyberbrain..." <The nearest Firewall Proxy facepalms hard enough to draw blood.>

Some chickens have a genetic predisposition to be able to tolerate gravities of up to three times Earth's, as evidenced by experiments run at UC Davis in the 60's, though such chickens raised in a high-G environment grow to about half the size of normal chickens and have very little body fat. I'm not sure how well chickens do in low- or zero-G environments. Rabbits are the most efficient livestock, by the way, when comparing the feed-to-meat ratio.

I had a discussion a while back about doing urban farming in compact yard spaces that might be pertinent... The plan we came up with was this tower-of-food-chain thing: /\ [#] <--- compost with black soldier fly larvae ==||== | & & | <------ raised chicken coup ^^^^^^ ~~~~~~ $ >@ $ <-------- Tilapia pool with algae The idea is that you compost and raise soldier flies which drop down to feed chickens and some fall through to the tilapia. The chicken manure is broken down by the algae and the tilapia eat the algae and larvae that falls through. The pond gets skimmed once in a while and composted. Compost is used as fertilizer. Take this principal and apply crazy nano tech and you've got a micro-ecosystem that has a high protein to energy yield.

Someones just gonna try and uplift it, I mean I would... "Hi, I'm Sid and this is my uplifted chicken friend, Sanders."

But he's JUST A CHICKEN! Can't you see that? He's Just a giant chicken pretending to be a man!

Tachi wrote:

Well, as long as he's not [i]colonel[/i] Sanders ...

*Straight Faced* uh, no.. He's a Lieutenant.

I can just imagine Preservationists protesting over people eating real chickens; it's kind of animal cruelty when you have the alternative. Then again, you could have chickens that have been grown without a brain, harvest their bodies without killing them, and let a nanovat reconstruct them. It'd be useless, of course; you can just program your mesh inserts to change the taste of whatever you eat to whatever you eat (pasta injected with nutrients, produced by your nanofabber), including that slice of blueberry pie you had when you were twelve. The rich will always pay for uselessness, though.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

I can just imagine Preservationists protesting over people eating real chickens; it's kind of animal cruelty when you have the alternative. Then again, you could have chickens that have been grown without a brain, harvest their bodies without killing them, and let a nanovat reconstruct them. It'd be useless, of course; you can just program your mesh inserts to change the taste of whatever you eat to whatever you eat (pasta injected with nutrients, produced by your nanofabber), including that slice of blueberry pie you had when you were twelve. The rich will always pay for uselessness, though.

Give the chickens cortical stacks!