this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Worldbuilding
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I got this spacefaring race of what are basically big sentient tardigrades. There is a subspecies among them that are used as cattle that they trade with other races for whatever they need.
(Apologies if this ends up a double post. I replied to this comment in my notifications and it just fell into the abyss. Lemmy is weird like that. I've sometimes seen things I've only posted once show up two or three times in a row, too)
Anyway, I love the idea of a sapient species having a closely related nonsapient species. Yinrih have nonsapient congeners called tree dwellers. Humans often compare them to chimps, and while their intelligence is about on par with chimps, tree dwellers look indistinguishable from yinrih, at least to humans. Yinrih traditionally consider themselves to be sapient tree dwellers, even though they are different species, and there is a faction of yinrih that wants to shed their sapience and join their cousins in irrationality.
How big are these tardigrades?
Roughly cow sized and pretty chunky.
After rereading your post and given the context of the thread I realize you didn’t specifically say the cattle weren’t sapient
Yeah, the whole species is the prey animal in the thread context. They just have a subspecies they are willing to sacrifice.