I was looking back on your cybertronian food posts and saw a mention about mechanimals and it got me wondering if they WERE considered a viable food source, what species would they have?
oh hmm, good question. i'm assuming this means what species would they keep as food livestock?
i've talked about some mechanimal byproducts that are sometimes farmed and eaten, like caviar and milk, but that's different from eating the actual body of a living being. so if it wasn't illegal, the species that would probably be rounded up as a food source most often would be those with some necessary traits:
populous enough to be viable. because cyberfauna are forged from hotspots instead of bred, their population is completely out of farmers' control, entirely dependent on if the planet spits up enough of them. not only that, but they'd need to be accessible too. nobody wants to go spelunking into the wild unmapped layers of Cybertron (fourth ask here) to fetch a bunch of animals to add to your farm, so they'd better be relatively easy to find/catch/transport so you can control how they're reared and maintain a standard of quality
docility, herd mentality, or general ease of interaction. once again the nature of being forged instead of bred means selectively raising animals with the right traits to domesticate them simply isn't possible, so you'd better hope you're not trying to farm any species with notoriously unfriendly attitudes, or worse, inbuilt weaponry. there are friendly species out there! it's just by no means guaranteed
relatedly, ease of care. is the species too big to deal with, or too small to keep track of? do they need a specific diet of minerals that are only found somewhere stupid like the inhospitable peaks of the Manganese Mountains? will they only reach their adult frames by submerging in a leyline's runoff for a couple centuries? does their health depend on long distance migration from one end of the Rust Sea to the other?
frames that have not only edible but desirable food materials. while technically there's no danger from "raw meat" like we organics have (discounting viruses, parasites, rust or corrosion, infection, etc that would generally be considered inedible much like rancid meat is), that doesn't mean every species will have the kind of bodies you'd wanna use as ingredients. mostly, what mecha would be looking for is preprocessed quality energon, enriched energy stores like batteries, purified metal stocks in the armor and struts, "fatty" fillers like rubber or silicone, and rich juices like coolant, all of which go into well rounded meals that meet a variety of fuel needs. so does a given species have anatomy that will yield enough of one/several of these things to be cost effective for taking care of them until slaughter? some of this is also going to depend on the animal's alt mode functionality
so, like. you can see why animal husbandry has never really taken off when civilization's fuel resources have mostly been provided just through a planet's normal energon cycle. even on Carcer they mostly just hunt or capture animals according to opportunity rather than keep them on a large scale. it's a lot more work to put into caring for cyberfauna that organic farmers don't need to deal with. that said! there are some candidates that would make good livestock. ro-bovines are mostly chill, large, common, and already produce harvestable milk of magnesium. pigenoids are stupid and easy to grab but wouldn't produce a lot of "meat" due to their small size. ground crawlers would be good for battery stews if they weren't unfortunately prone to self-destructing when killed thanks to their internal acidity and easily overloaded energy stores. robo-chickens are fatter and sometimes drop refined energon crystal "eggs" if they're reared in an environment with plenty of extra fuel, but their sibling species rooboosters that are often forged and live alongside them are notoriously feisty when defending the flock. tungsten turkeys are dense and yield a lot of "meat" if you can get past their aggressive posturing and relative scarcity. some robo-deer would be populous and "meaty" enough to make it worthwhile, but there's more than a few species too dangerous to deal with. nobody messes with a titanium moose-bot!
