"My understanding is that if we provided additional land to house animals, and labor to keep the area free of predators, this would do quite a lot for the chickens and not actually economically hurt you?"

"- I suppose it might? If you want to earmark some land for chickens? I think the things that I'd get questions about with my people back on Amenta, about that, would be how far this would ultimately go. There are billions of chickens on Amenta, more of them than there are of us, and there are other animals we farm too. It's important to us to get along well with you, worth making plenty of adjustments - I'm not sure there's space on either planet for all of those animals to have all the space you have in mind, or enough amaliens to look after them."

"I'm not sure. I think roughly twice the space with additional windows would make a big improvement. Chickens are the biggest concern. Regardless, we will help as much as we can, even though that's not enough to fix everything."

"Why are chickens the biggest concern and not cows or pigs?"

"As far as I can tell they're treated worse, and there's also far more of them. However I'm concerned about the cows and pigs as well."

"Okay. So, this is a big sector of our economy. There are a lot of things where if you wanted them we could probably just make it happen. This one, not so much. You're going to need to prioritize and figure out what tradeoffs are worth it to you. I like to think of political problems in terms of what's easy, what needs pushing, what needs pulling, and what needs flipping over. So in this case maybe you want to subsidize farmers whose conditions you approve of for the chickens, push good-chicken-conditions. Or try to organize a boycott - not that I think that would work, but you could try it - to pull on bad-chicken-conditions. Or fund research into growing meat without needing an animal at all so we stop breeding new ones entirely and then everyone's happier, including, I suppose the average remaining chicken."

Lucien really likes the mayor.

"I haven't looked into such research, but it sounds like the most promising long term option. I think in the meantime we could provide an additional large amount of land for chicken farmers to use on our planet right now that has basic welfare requirements. We'd charge for keeping the additional land free of harmful-to-amentans monsters and could use that to fund research? Probably some amaliens will want to help with the research as well."

"Hm, I'm not sure how you see that working out economically. Egg farmers get their money by selling eggs. More land is useful to them if, and only if, it results in them selling more eggs. So they won't pay for it if they will only sell the same number of eggs that way."

"My impression was that land use is a major cost of chicken farming?"

"It is! But if eggs per land goes down at the same time land goes up, it might not mean they can make any extra money that way."

"As long as we scale the space provided with the requirements of number of chickens per square foot I imagine that will be okay?"

"Maybe - my point is that if you want the chickens to have twice as much space you have to earmark more than the same amount of land chickens are currently using again, so more than twice as many chickens can fit on it. Also, this might not work very soon because there are only so many people eating eggs on this planet and I don't think they'd suddenly start eating more eggs given the opportunity or the farm would have more chickens already; instead what it'd do is slow down the rate at which new farms have a reason to be established here."

"I was hoping some of the eggs could be exported. And also that, given the land would be exclusively for chickens - it would be economically worthwhile to move the farms and sell the current land which can be used for other things. I'm pretty sure this can be solved with economics somehow. Lots of problems can be - I spent a bunch of time reading about it last night."

He actually ended up enjoying that part of the night, though he feels guilty about that.

"Eggs aren't worth enough per weight to be worth shipping between planets. If we had more settlements here, then of course the larger number of people would eat more eggs, but I'm glad we started with one to uncover friction exactly like this one."

"Yes that's why I suggested only the one small settlement."

The mayor is being confusingly hard to explain to.

"I feel like there's a cultural gap here again. I'm trying to figure out ways to address concerns about the welfare of the chickens that amaliens have while making the Amentans better off. A mutually beneficial trade. Is there a reason a large grant of land that is free of monsters and ear marked for chicken farming at acceptable densities couldn't achieve this?"

"If it were only that I'd expect it to work! It was the plan to charge money for keeping it free of monsters that I expect to make the deal unprofitable for the farm."

"We can charge a small amount - or even zero - if needed. I have a few other ideas about how to raise money that we could discuss?"

"Sure, lay them on me."

Lucien has several ideas! There's a weird goo from a monster that can make it easy to live and maneuver deep underwater they could sell, some amaliens might do normal jobs to earn money, he thinks the Esteel Tree might be able to make a lot of food if needed, there's one monster that is really really good at crushing things, ...

Those are all neat ideas that could totally work for getting the amaliens more leverage in the economy and the mayor encourages them to all be tried, though the goo from the monster might not work on Amentans and should probably be tried on a weasel or something first.

He thinks some amaliens have brought animals underwater with it but he's not sure and can check. Oh uh, not that the Amentans are animals just. That's what is not as hardy on this planet.

Anyways, his plan is that amaliens will provide land to start fixing the immediate problems they have with the chicken farming and they can work on the other methods to provide more substantial funding in the long term to research. Does that seem good?

Amentans are biologically speaking a kind of animal, they're just also people and that's more important - but not for whether they can breathe underwater specifically; in that department they are basically animals.

Sounds great. There will be some initial costs associated with moving the chickens and so on but that's one-time and the mayor is willing to spot the funds for that as a signal of goodwill and cooperation.

The mayor is very good.

"One last thing I guess. I think we should hold off on the interviews and the joint social activities for a bit longer. Just until things have cooled down. It's still important to do them eventually I think."

"Sure, we didn't have a firm schedule for those and it's no trouble to move them."

Lucien is actually a bit excited after leaving the meeting. This was hard, really hard, and there were really sad problems to have to deal with. But they were able to figure them out! There's a lot of work to be done and he'll have to co-ordinate a bunch of amaliens to achieve things and probably other problems will come up but, he's ready to deal with all that. There are differences between Amentans and amaliens, but despite that they can work together - even if they don't always understand each other.