On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 1:52 AM, Greg Chalik <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would also suggest that what counts for land for Aslans in terms of value
> is utility for meat animal herding in the first place. Hotels can be built
> anywhere.

I would quibble with that.  Hotels have to be built where there is a
transient population, etc.

While they CAN be built in many locations, they will only make money
if they are built in *useful* locations.

>Aslan population pressures is what drove their expansion. An Aslan
> female can potentially birth 12 kittens per year, and an Aslan male is
> likely to maintain two-four breeding age females while capable of
> reproduction. That is a lot of mouths to feed, who it seems are not as
> omnivorous as Humanity.

A male might LIKE to maintain 2-4 wives, but  not all males will have
the resources to actually do so.

There seems to be little incentive to marry a poor male when you could
be junior wife to a richer one.

If you can generalize from humans, in pre-contraception societies,
polywife households tend to have fewer children per wife than do
single wife households, although the same number of children overall.

If there are adequate resources, etc etc, a man with three wives has
about one pregnancy a  year.  A man with one wife has about one
pregnancy a year, too.  Same number of pregnancies, but fewer
pregnancies per wife.

Assuming lack of contraception is indicative of general lack of
medical knowledge, a wife in a polywife household has a longer life
expectancy than does a single wife, since the leading cause of death
ifor women is complications from childbirth.  (Maybe the Aslan are
more robust, I don't know.)

Death rare for humans in primivitive conditions is about 50% to age 6,
mostly due to malnutrition, disease, and injury, so high birth rates
are balanced by roughly half of live births dying in the first 6
years.  I'll go out on a limb and guess the same sort of survival
rates for primitive Aslan.  Just as most modern humans constrain their
breeding to conserve resources, BECAUSE THEY CAN, presumably, the
Aslan as a whole do not breed themselves willy-nilly into starvation.

Presumably, the Aslan, having mastered the intricacies of how to build
interstellar ships, have also figured out the intricacies of
contraception.  One suspects it's not so much an issue of population
pressure in an absolute sense, as it is an overabundance of
overly-agressive young males looking to go adventuring and get enough
loot to buy a house, start their own family, and repeat the process.

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan