Now humans are herded and farmed for food exactly like cattle. The Farmers have huge complexes of hangar like sheds in which batches of humans are kept and fattened.They are slaughtered at age 14-16 and shipped off to the rest of the planet and some exported to the home planet where the meat is prized. The women are kept with their young until they are four or five years old,then the children are forcibly taken from them. This is dangerous work as the mothers resist. More humane farmers sedate the whole hangar and sweep up the children, in the past they just wrenched them using electric prods and sticks. Animal welfare legislation is starting to catch up with planet earth.
The children are then transferred to a series of hangars, kept in age-groups to avoid conflict and bullying which is the farmers' main problem. The four to seven year olds together, the seven to 10s in another hangar and the ten to 12s in another. The last hangar is for the 12-16s, who are fed an extra high calorie diet to fatten them.
Humans are vicious and difficult animals to farm. The farmers have found that they respond well to the short term satisfaction of an array of games and puzzles which reward them with food. This system, combined with keeping them in small pen groups of 8-10, keeps them in good condition without damage to themselves or each other and also helps to fatten them up.
The males are castrated at 12 to prevent sexual activity except a few specimens which are kept in solitary confinement and allowed to grow up. Sperm is extracted weekly by electric shock treatment from the "men" (the proper plural - some people ignorantly call them "mans" which annoys our chief character, a farmer and his family.
The females are artificially inseminated. Because the babies develop so slowly and it is so long before they can feed themselves, this can only be done every two years.
The sound of three hundred females waking from sedation to find that their four year olds have disappeared is something the farmer hates and won't ever talk about. So is the noise the human males make when they are being castrated, which has to be carried out by pressing them between two metal grills with their genitals poking out through a hole. This is high paid work as it is very skilled but it is very unpleasant.
The alternative is slaughtering the males at 12, which many people think is actually kinder though the meat yield is a lot lower.
The humans have no clothes. They live on straw. The children learn to defecate in a ditch on the side of the pen, which is sluiced about once a week.
Because they are kept away from adults, language development is stunted. The women are slaughtered after having 2 children as it has been found that to let them survive beyond the age of 20 makes them difficult to control.
They experience intense pleasure when they are fed a sweet, high calorie food three times a day. They can play simple games with the screens in their pens.
The meat is very sweet but very fatty so to produce a leaner cut the humans are moved to long, narrow outdoor pens for several months a year where they have to go further from their shelter to the food.
Their excrement is prodigious and this is the main problem with human farming - the smell.
People are aware that humans once had their own civilisation but argue that that was in the past, it has been bred out of them...and anyway, "people have to eat".
A main POV is the farmer and his family - they are nice, decent people and they enjoy a roast dinner like anyone else.
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