It was when it was about queens!

Okay, they suspect it is not the only problem.

What do they think the other problem is?

They're not sure of the details but it probably has something to do with the fact that they think torture floors are a good idea.

The green is sure there is some way to explain that which makes sense but doesn't know enough about alien culture to find analogies.

Alien culture does not have circumstances under which torture is acceptable, they're really not sure how this isn't getting through.

Well, right, they don't have reds. Do they have domestic animals?

Yes.

And there's seldom a good reason to deliberately hurt one, but if there is for some reason - birds pecking each other, trim their beaks? Excessively breeding animals, castrate some of them?

...Or you could just. Separate the animals.

A lot of animals are also better-behaved castrated and the locals operate under really serious space constraints and can't just separate all the animals.

Castration is not literally torture though.

All right, Amentans also have a history of branding and tattooing animals for identification. That's painful.

They also find it wildly implausible that being coroners and plumbers for generations turns off your ability to person.

It makes them unclean for theological reasons that alas this green did not major in in college.

The bit where uncleanliness is hereditary they find mildly dubious but are willing to take the green's word on; the bit where it makes it okay to torture them is far more specious.

He did mention famines, wars, etc., right? The stakes are really high when reds start misbehaving and they are not very well-behaved all on their own.

They would probably not be well-behaved either if their government was sufficiently adversarial to them to find torturing them okay.

They have a sort of circularity problem there but definitely can't make anyone like them, because they are unclean.

You do not have to like someone to not torture them.

The reds aren't specifically badly behaved about the electrified floors. Which, has he mentioned, they will remove. They are generally antagonistic and uncivilized and poorly educated and violent and often murder scientists, and solving this problem by treating them better, even if the entire problem were all about how they were treated, would run into a natural limit because of the uncleanliness.

If the aliens can teach them magic that would allow the reds' jobs to be handled without reds, the reds could all go somewhere else! Then everyone would be happy.

They continue to not be policymakers but he suspect the policymakers will want to talk to the reds.

That sounds like a terrible idea.

If aliens had shown up and declared that another kind of alien was horrible would they take the first aliens' word for it or would it occur to them that people sometimes say things for reasons other than their being true and the sayers being objective, focused truth-seekers.

They would certainly want to know more about it, but the aliens would be the experts for the time being, and they wouldn't go talk to the other aliens if that would be dangerous or something.