Or the Ecological Disaster that is The Dragon and the Strategic Implications
Now, what got me thinking about stuff like this, were the quotes regarding Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar and their size. We are told that at least two of the dragons could fit a horse in their mouths, and that Balerion could fit something even larger, perhaps a Mammoth or Elephant. Let's assume that horse are bite sized for most fullygrown untampered or restrained dragons. From the somewhat poor portrayals of the dragons in the TV series, the dragons seem to have a very large head to belly ratio but even so, thats freaking huge. And while I'm tempted to say that because they are reptilian that there metabolism would be slowish, but they fly and breathe fire, so I doubt that.
For that reason, I'm pretty sure that multiple meals per day is the normal for a fully grown dragon. And since I doubt they were using small breeds of horses for the description, we can use working breeds and war horses. So 3/4 ton to just over a ton. Which would put daily meals, assuming 2 meals a day, at 2 tons. Not 2 tons of meat, like just the muscles of a creature, but 2 tons of flesh and bone. I'd say that being dragons, the belly fire and internal heat help melt and sterilize bones and intestinal waste of a creature. Anyways, that's two horses. Or a few dozen sheep, or lots of boar, you get the picture. Now its not too bad if you only have half a dozen or fewer dragons, like the five that Aenar originally had, that's only 10 tons of meat a day. Or 20 horses.
Yeah at only five dragons, we're talking about 140 horses a week. Or to put that another way, 7,280 horses a year. Or the equivalent in meaty flesh, which comes out to 3,640 tons a year. That's absolutely monstrous......if they primarily eat off the land. Which excluding Drogon's behavior, I don't think dragons do or even prefer. I would think they prefer fish and other water creatures. What comes to mind is the scene from the first American Godzilla, where the beast was consuming entire ship fulls of fish in the movie. But I think the reason Drogon and his siblings eat like they do is that unlike the other Valyrian dragons, they were barely exposed to the open sea at all, only fishing in the ocean maybe once in their early lives, and the rest being land based and fed from land creatures.
Back to the the numbers and the intentionally false presumption for the sake of demonstration.
So literally thousands of horses, or tens of thousands of sheep and smaller animal over the course of a year. For merely five dragons. Now the dragons of the Dance of the Dragons were somewhat smaller, but for the purpose of demonstration let's assume that every named dragon eats horses by the mouthful. I believe there were 19 Dragons in the Dance? Let's go by the startling numbers.
19 dragons would consume 38 tons of flesh, daily. That's 266 tons of flesh a week. Or about 12 Semi Trucks a week. Or 532 adult horses a week. That's 13,832 tons of flesh a year, or 27,664 adult horses. To put that into perspective, 19 dragons could have eaten Genghis Khan's Mongol Army out of their horses in 3 years or less. And this is all being supplied by pre-industrial agriculture and herding. Even with the entirety of Westeros, they would be eating faster than the food could be replenished.
No wonder the Dothraki had to wait until the fall of Valyria to do anything, Valyrian Dragons could have eaten the horses into extinction if they wanted to! And of course, the most horrifying bit of all? I'm assuming that dragons are satisfied with just two mouthfuls a day. How many mouthfuls a day can you, personally, eat? Or any other animal?! DUN DUN DUUUUUN!
Luckily, GRRM seems to have thought of this. If you notice, the former shepherds don't actually expand that deeply into continental Essos and definitely don't expand that fast. They would know, the hard way, how voracious dragons are and how quickly they consume entire flocks of sheep and herds of cattle when they have the mood, thus developing an early caution regarding the power of dragons, and learning important environmental and conservation lessons. Again the hardest way. They have little desire to usurp and conquer the Rhoyne river system from the Rhoynish, a river system that appears to be nearly as powerful as the Mississippi system in terms of navigability and reach. And they didn't want possesion of it for themselves. Because it was too far away from the open sea, and thus too far away from the primary source to keeping dragons fed without everyone starving. What the Valyrian Empire did do, was establish sea ports and cities real close to the sea, all along the coasts. Their dragons are the source of their power, but also a logistical weight around their neck, because in order to meet the dietary requirements, its either consume from the bounty of the ocean or strip the lands bare of anything larger than a dog. So from the peninsula of Valyria, the old empire was more heavily bound to the sea ports and shores than the British Empire. Even more powerful in relative terms to everyone else, to the extreme, but also hobbled and restricted to that same extreme.
Their behavior in their two most notable wars demonstrate this. Against the Ghiscari Empire, after slaughtering their armies time and again, they took only a small portion of land for themselves, and were largely content with leaving Slaver's Bay cities intact and subservient. Qaath and Sarnor were left to be because they only had one port between them and were apparently non-hostile to boot. But the Valyrians did expand west and slightly up the Rhoyne, in addition to their port cities across Western Essos. An interesting note is that during this time, they were trading, and may have in fact founded, Old Town. Either way, Old Town and what would become Dorne are no strangers to dragons and Dragonlords.
However, while they didn't actually want to bountiful Rhoyne and all its lands, bringing and feeding dragons so far from the sea would be intensely devastating to the local ecology. Even just a few of them. The Rhoyne river system looks to be nearly as widespread and navigable as the Mississippi River System, so it would provide the water for massive amounts of food and trade from top to bottom, and with Rhoynish Water Wizards, it may have been engineered here and there for irrigation and fish farming. I would suspect that the Rhoyne valleys at the time were replete with artificial lakes and ponds for fish farming and such, with dams and berths everywhere. But a few millennia without maintenance and time would have drained and reshaped the entire system to something more natural, but still fertile. Without the Valyrians, the Rhoynish would have been a super power, based a vast and fertile continental heartland, supplying an endless source of manpower and riches. Similar to the Reach. But bigger. Way fucking bigger and with a deeper pool of manpower to boot. The 250,000 men raised was less likely an upper limit of how many were available, and more likely a limit based on transportation. And while it is portrayed as genocidally devastating to the point of forcing a mass migration, its not the numbers that really mattered. Its who was lost and how many. I'd guess they brought the majority of the most powerful and skilled water wizards with them to the battle, possibly all but a few in the entire empire, and their loss combined with the loss of all the others, would have been irreplaceable to a civilization dependent on them. Oh and the implied threat of extinction if they don't get stepping. Fast.
Shame that they thought they could use war as a diplomatic tool against a Valyrian colony. But what choice did they have with the dragons fucking shit up for the Southern most outpost of the Rhoynish?
The Valyrians were a brutal Slavocracy, conservationist tendencies aside, and I doubt they were particularly discriminating about where the slaves came from and had an endless thirst for them, for they were few in number and had an atrocious birth rate. I mean holy shit, several thousand years, and not a single colony majority Valyrian. Not a one, so in order for their port cities to even function, they needed slaves. An endless supply of them, from the planters of the field, even down to middle managers, the Valyrians at their height would have had a slave to free man ratio closer to Haiti than Rome, and with their dragons largely feeding from the seas, this vast number of slaves required feeding. The Volantenes moving up the Rhoyne would have rang massive alarm bells among the Rhoynish, who had most likely been supplying food to the ports and outpost of the Empire. Were they next for the yoke?
The Valyrian Freehold is perhaps the most brutally efficient and invincible Slavocracy of fiction. Dragons supplying the vast majority of military might that only those with particular genetics can even use, so they have no need for a large foot contingent. Endless amounts slaves supplying all essential labor that an ethnic Valyrian doesn't care to do, not a drop of pity for the enslaved among those who could do anything about it, which means no society upending war over it. No rival capable of fighting the full might of the Valyrian host, so no outside force can intervene effectively. The only weakness they had was keeping their dragons fed, which is the only thing, aside from their own conservationist tendencies, that prevented them from over-running Westeros and Essos a mere millennia into their reign. They had no choice in establishing a mostly by the sea empire if they wanted to keep using their dragons.
