Livestock animals

Due to the lack of large ruminants that evolved on Aurus, stickfigures instead use domesticated edmontosaurs [colloquially referred to as honks or honkers, sometimes playfully referred to as cows] for the purpose of egg, leather, and meat production. Because their chosen farmed megafauna is non-mammalian, they have no easy access to milk and instead collect “milk” from large phorusrhacids.

Honks are well-mannered animals with bright and playful personalities, though their enormous size and skittish nature means they are still dangerous and can harm someone not equipped to handle them. They are commonly paired with smaller farm animals such as pheasants, geese, griffons, and ducks to herd together and protect each other. 

Much like in real-world cows, some honks are given a medical cannula for the sake of health monitoring and research. This has strongly positive effects on the ease of medical treatment, despite the ethical debates brought forward by animal rights activists.

Bashers are raised for their fast life cycle, excellent temperaments, relatively high body fat, and usability as working animals. Alongside these factors, their horns and scale leather fetch high prices in artisan markets.

Basher meat is comparable to bison in flavor, but is much different in composition. It is lighter, leaner, and comes apart at the bone like fish. High tendon count in the meat of bashers make for very popular dishes in stickman culture, with chewier and tougher food to strengthen jaw muscles on.

Bashers, unlike honks, are much more solitary and tend to live in much smaller groups. These animals are popular for small-time farmers, or as livestock guardians for the much more skittish honks, being able to protect them from large predators with their armored and horned faces. Honks, being the type of animal to stick to a strong leader, are often spotted gathered around single bashers on farms and keeping an eye on the temperament of their chosen leader.

Instead of cows or any sort of mammalian species, stickmen in Cenara use large domesticated terror birds - known as “sicklephants”, but also affectionately referred to as churds or jigglenecks - to produce large amounts of edible crop milk, which can be used as a cheese-like or butter-like substance. They are noble and intimidating animals which aren’t to be taken lightly, and are one of the main livestock animals raised in Drustown. Their crop milk, aka “bird cheese”, is very rich and fatty, unlike the milder sweet mammal milk we are used to on earth.

Sicklephant crop milk is a key ingredient in a popular warm drink called Queijuína.

Having been around as long as they have, dragons are also the first domesticators of many large farm animals that stickfigures rely on for food and animal products today. Honks and sicklephants, among others, are extremely old lineages dating back thousands of years. It is only recently that they have been separated into different breeds by stickfigure breeders, and the colors represented above are considered “heritage” plumage from their wild type ancestors.

Dragons tend to hold the belief that animals should still be able to live in the wild on their own, even if domesticated, so many of their domestic animals retain their large sizes and natural defense mechanisms to protect themselves from predators or hunt efficiently. As such, there are many feral domestic animals such as sicklephants roaming about the Vishmian rainforests.