How does an aquatic creature farm land animals?

Question

An intelligent species of aquatic creatures considers human fat to be a delicacy therefore human flesh is a status food only the rich can afford.

There is a problem, those aquatic creatures can walk on land but they have a hard time doing so and they become vulnerable when not in water.

Because of this, I need a safe method my aquatic creatures can use to farm humans.

People can't escape and they are overfed to become as fat as possible, the fattest and biggest people are bred in order to produce the naturally bigger humans. They are not killed right off the bat because pregnancy is really long and it takes a lot of time for a child to grow into adulthood. Instead, they chop pieces of fat off humans while keeping them alive, and sometimes limbs are cut off but this is rare since it's way more expensive and usually only happens to older people who are about to die anyway.

I need a way to keep humans unable to escape, but they also need to have a good food source to fatten them and also safe breeding, all of this while considering the fact that the aquatic creatures have a really hard time on land, so hunting people by foot is not an option.

Answer 1

Perennial beach parties with fast food attached, along the lines of the internet version of summer breaks in Florida:

• free mating between most of the attendees, ensuring reproduction
• rivers of alcohol to dumb them down
• the fast food will fatten more than some specimen, who would then happen to "drown"

If the place where you place the farm is blessed by good weather all year long, you are not limited to the seasonal 3 months of summer.

Answer 2

Humans will farm them for you.

Humans are great at keeping other humans captive. Also great at finding good food for humans. Humans have a long history of entering into commercial enterprises that involve selling the bodies of their fellow humans against the will of those sold.

Your aquatic folk will contract with surface dwellers to provide them delectable humans to eat in return for desirable ocean riches. Your surface dwellers will either capture people to provide, or raise them for the purpose (more reliable but more expensive).

The great part of the story is when it is revealed that delicious salty and smoky fat chopped off of people who are still alive is actually bacon from pigs. The ocean people don't know about pigs and get off on the meanness of eating people alive. And it turns out they love pig fat and are willing to pay big bucks for the eating live humans fantasy. The pig farmers occasionally give them a recognizably human hand or other part, to keep the dream (and revenue) going.

Then at the end the ocean people figure out they have been duped for years paying a 100x markup for pig meat. They charge out to attack the pig farmers but wind up in the pig pens where the pigs knock them down and eat them alive.

Answer 3

For the close voters: the question boils down to "what is the best way for aquatic things to use to prevent humans from escaping their future dinner appointment".

Put them on an island. Whenever they want to escape they have to do so through your medium. Better yet: if you can feed them yourself, you put them on a boat that only the aquatics can steer. That way they cannot build their escape vessle (not without you noticing) and you control their wealth, luxury and food intake. A boat can be more like a raft with a few holes in it where the aquatics can poke their heads through. In warmer climates you can have partially flioded area's where the humies and aquatics can relax together (before one is taken "out to land" where he can live the rest of his days and never be seen again, really you should thank us humies that we take such good care of you...)

The one's that you start chopping up alive are all located on a seperate boat, so the growing humies arent interrupted by the screaming and escape plans. This way the humies can safely learn fattening habits that they wont shake when they get taken to the boat with the butche- I mean out to land.

Answer 4

Raise them in big air-filled tanks, deep underwater.

The humans are kept in what are basically large room-sized diving bells, each with enough dry floor space for maybe a few hundred humans (or whatever number you like) kept in locked pens inside the enclosure. Air can be pumped in from the surface to replenish oxygen and to keep the air pressure matched to the local water pressure. Access is through a hatchway in the floor, open to the water. If these structures are deep enough, escape would be out of the question, as any human who manages to get out will drown before they can reach the surface.

One major advantage of this approach is that the aquatic creatures have total control over the environment at all times. If kept on dry land, the humans would have access to an extended environment where they can easily breath, and run, jump, climb, throw things, etc. while their captors are relatively helpless without special equipment. There would be constant attempts at rebellion and/or escape. Deep underwater, the captors always have the upper hand. At the first sign of rebellion they could simply open a valve and flood the enclosure, leaving only a small air gap near the ceiling. The humans would suddenly be unable to do anything but fight for air.

Answer 5

Just battery farm them and force feed them like your after human Foie gras.

One you have a way to catch them (L Dutch has a great idea) take them to safe location where they cant be found by other humans and farm them. By the second or third generation the humans will be used to their immobile obese life, just waiting for food.

Scraps from the seas could be brought up and thrown in troughs for the humans to feed on. Manual breeding would have to take place as humans would be too obese to move.

Answer 6

Use a Resource Bare Island

Humans have a bad habit of adapting to dangerous situations which makes it difficult get a stable supply of them. The best recourse then is to put them on an island so that they have nowhere to run too. Ideally you should clear the island of all trees and pointy rocks first to make sure they can not make any boats to run away with or weapons to fight back.

Once you take away the resources human can use to make all their nasty inventions with, they are basically just caged monkeys. At this point of course, they will not be able to feed themselves very well; so, you'll need bring them regular feedings, but making them rely on you to feed them will also force them to the shores making snatching them up much easier.

As for what you feed the humans, most seafood is pretty lean compared to terrestrial food sources; so, you can't just feed them a bunch of seaweed and fish and expect them to get fat. Instead you will probably need to prepare your human food with added fats and/or sugars. Added sugar is hard to process underwater; so, I would suggest "enriching" thier food with the blubber from whales, seals, or dolphins to make sure they put on enough calories to get the humans all fat and tasty themselves. Because mammals store fat in separate layers from thier muscles this makes properly butchered mammal meat a better source of empty calories than fish.

As for the Bounty looking for a credible source:

Your need a system that does two things very well. 1: It must detain people, and 2: it must make it easy for a water predator to catch land based prey. So, this question draws inspiration from two sources that are each individually REALLY good at that.

When it comes to detaining human beings, the best experts in the world at that are the people who design and run maximum security prisons. They regulate the hell out of what the prisoners are allowed to own because they often use relatively mundane items to fashion tools and weapons. By stripping the island of resources, you are replicating this precaution. The second thing they do is create an exclusion zone around the prison to make sure there is no where to run to. While many prisons use deserts or other kinds of wilderness, the most effective exclusion zone is always water such as you see with Alcatraz prison; so, using an island is not just about what is convenient for your aquatic life forms, but what is hardest for your humans to get away from.

As for the water predator, I take a certain amount of inspiration from Nile crocodiles. Most aquatic animals don't have much luck hunting land based animals, but for crocodiles it is easy. In places where they live, land animals are 100% reliant on the water where the crocodiles live if they want to survive. By feeding the humans, you create that same absolute need for humans to go to the water where the predators are for survival. If you can bring them to the water, then like the crocodile, you don't need to leave the safety of your home turf advantage to pick off otherwise dangerous prey.

Answer 7

The answer? Slave trade.

People are dickheads and will happily trade other people into conditions that will lead to their death. If the water creatures pay some land-based mercenaries with some sort of under-sea riches like pearls then the human mercenaries will take poorer or less capable people and sell them to the sea people. If these slaves are not up to the standards of the oceanic things then they could be fattened by them in big air-filled tanks, being fed on enormous crops of algae.

Answer 8

The obvious way is for the creatures to exchange treasure for human blubber. If they are intelligent, they must have recognized that humans are too, and communication was possible. Either for self-preservation or greed, some human would surely have proposed an exchange between their meager endowment of body fat and a much larger and/or steady supply. Human fat can be harvested from several sources, not necessarily involving murder or bodily harm. The cremation business would be a viable alternative: offer very cheap rates, remove the prime cuts, reduce the rest (and any manufacturing byproducts) to ashes.

Also, the creatures almost certainly developed a yen for human fat from drowned humans. It was a low hanging fruit; it stands to reason that there might be lots of other, perhaps even more sought-after delicacies just waiting to be discovered, that never were because they were never involved in a shipwreck, or never recovered in time: examples in literature abound (maple syrup in Live free or Die by John Ringo, ginger in the Invasion cycle by Harry Turtledove, tobacco in Iceworld by Hal Clement).

In time, the creatures could also supply cheap workforce for all sort of underwater enterprises. It would be probably weird to have a multinational conglomerate owning liposuction clinics, crematoriums, underwater salvages, plastic recycling, deep sea mining and prospection services, but nowadays diversification is all.

Answer 9

Humans or other terrestrial animals could be kept in air-filled tanks deep below the ocean's surface, for the purpose of underwater farming. This is analogous to the process whereby aquatic creatures, bred for eventual consumption, such as fish or shellfish are kept in water-filled tanks in the air. Several factors would need to be accounted for, such as oxygen levels, barometric pressure, toxicity, etc. These conditions could be brought within a range habitable to humans with a series of vents, pumps, and filters with only a modicum of effort.

Answer 10

Immobilise ships. This shouldn't be too difficult for any semi-intelligent aquatic species with access to tools or strong physical forms.

Encourage the crew to eat up their emergency rations and throw the occasional survivor or recent corpse over the side by promising to release the last survivor to the port of their choice. Obviously don't as this would breach the secrecy of the operation. Any escapees should be relatively easy to overcome (or you simply immobilise their ships as well). Provide additional human-suitable food once they run out of rations.

So long as it is a mixed-sex crew they can then reproduce and provide more humans. If the gender ratio isn't right a few beach-based kidnappings could even things up.

Doing so in an area of high navigational uncertainty (or in the Bermuda Triangle) would cover up what is happening for a while. This gets hard once the humans invent GPS, reliable ships, satellites and planes unless the aquatic race have some other tricks for remaining unseen.

Eventually they will catch on. At which point, assuming the humans aren't significantly technologically superior, the aquatic race can negotiate a 'toll' with a mercantile nation for protection of their shipping.

Answer 11

Play God:

If people think they are serving a god, they will do anything.

• people have offered human sacrifices to gods for thousands of years. All you need to do is have the Sea People play god and ask for offerings of the fatted human. You wouldn't need to cut off parts, just ask for the whole sacrifice - especially a voluntary sacrifice raised from childhood to believe they're special and chosen.
• Or (as a variant on the other questions) the culture can capture prisoners, force-feed them, and offer them up Aztec-style. This works even better if there is a reciprocal relationship, so the gods have something to offer, like drugs or gold (or offerings in return? Religion can be funny).
• Cultural practices around death can be turned into burial at sea, where all the dead are available to feed the hunger of the undersea gods. People might even be offended if the gods refuse to eat their dead, denying the dead the chance to "become one" with the gods and attain spiritual immortality.
• Isolations would not be needed, but could help reinforce the consistent message of the gods. After all, those zealots who came to convert them and spoke blasphemy of the gods all died when their ship inexplicably sank, right? Naturally it's the will of the gods.