my bleating heart

The logic he was throwing back at her was hard for Aryn to swallow, her empathy towards these creatures was the very reason she was currently a very struggling hunter within Lirim and unable to be useful to her father and pack. While she understood the necessity of killing defenseless prey animals it was entirely another thing to scare and torture them, at least most hunters tried to end their suffering quickly.

"I'm sure the bears and lions think we're just wolves too, but the fact of the matter is everyone feels pain and everyone feels fear, you can at least be a gentleman about it and try to keep them happy and safe. If he feels secure I'm sure he'll give you lots of cute baby goats, and the mothers will provide more nutritious and fortifying milk for them if they feel the same." Aryn tried to seem confident in her words, as if she had real experience in animal husbandry instead of imaginative fantasy experience. She decided one day she wanted to raise animals for Lirim, to provide her pack healthy food without unnecessary bloodshed and suffering. Maybe if she learned healing as well she could even create a sedative so when the animals were eventually harvested, they did not feel their deaths.

She tried to appeal to the business side of him, if he saw the goats as only a resource to be one-day eaten then perhaps she could reason with him in that way. "If all you care about is the quality of your product you at least need to understand how to produce quality. Sickly animals taste worse and you can kind of taste the fear in the animals who fight for their lives before they die. Terror and suffering is only going to ruin your meat." The yearling imagined his earlier threat, the goat's head mounted upon their fence as a warning to future studs and shivered. She certainly didn't think that would be a very happy environment to live, breed, or raise kids in.