"secretlondon123;c-17457404" wrote:
"DaWaterRat;c-17457375" wrote:
"secretlondon123;c-17457265" wrote:
"DaWaterRat;c-17455433" wrote:
You appear to be unaware of just how dark a young girl's mind can go...
And my mom had a dozen horses on a non-commercial farm. Ask horse people - they're companions, not just working animals.
The chances of the sims 4 going anywhere dark is nil. It will be cloyingly saccharine, nauseatingly disneyfied.
What's a non-commercial farm? A toy project for people with another source of income?
Non-commercial may have been the wrong term, But I did mean it as a farm (or, in my mom's case, ranch) where their crops or animals are not the regular/primary source of income for the household. Usually they're smaller, older family farms that are being priced out of the market by corporate farms, or just small farms that maintain smaller crops as a side income because it's the family's land. They're not "toy projects" by any means (that's just insulting.) Heck, my husband grew up on a small dairy farm - where his dad also worked as a Die Cutter in a factory and his mom was a cleaner.
I don't know where you live, but where my mom lives, there are a lot of farms that fall into this category. There are also lots of smaller horse ranches with a dozen or fewer horses that truly straddle the line between being pets and working animals - as do the goats, chickens, rabbits, geese, ducks, dogs and cats that are to be found on them.
I don't expect the sims to go dark any time soon, but treating farm animals as pets is not nearly as far outside of reality as you seem to think it is. So either you have an unnecessarily stark view of farms, or an exceptionally saccharine opinion of pets.
There's nothing like that where I live (London, UK). You do get rich people buying houses in rural areas which I'd presumed this was - I don't know if we have small scale actual farms in the UK at all. I've always lived in British cities.
I did volunteer in a city farm quite a few years ago. They were very keen to teach children that farm animals die for food.
Oh, I've never had any illusions that animals die to provide us with meat. My mom had an extended joke about what it's like trying to raise a Steer that you get as a calf that I first heard when I was 8. (Step one - name it something like Sir Loin, or T-Bone...) But just because you can recognize that an animal is being raised for slaughter doesn't mean it's not treated well or even as a certain degree of pet. When it gets to animals like dairy cows, goats, chickens and other animals that provide non-meat resources it gets even fuzzier, and then "working" companion animals like horses, dogs and cats are fuzzier still... to the point where I'd certainly not blink at horses being considered pets.
Now, the Sims is never going to have animals sent off for slaughter, to be sure. And there will be no calling the knacker for old horses or anything like that. But that doesn't mean having animals treated as pets on farms isn't realistic. From what I've seen, it's not uncommon at all.
(And I think farms like this do exist in the UK. Or at least the one that also doubled as a B&B I stayed at in Wales back in '98 was very like the farms around my mom's place which is in the Midwestern US.)
