Why did ADVENT destroy all domesticated animals after establishing a new world order? How did they accomplish it?

After the ADVENT Coalition was formed, they outlawed and apparently euthanized all farm animals and pets owned by humans. This is referenced in several pieces of lore in-game, and Lily suggests that it's been a while since "anyone has even seen a cow."

What was their motivation behind doing this? It does not obviously fit into any of their plans, either the short-term plan of world domination or the long-term plan of The Avatar Project.

Furthermore, how did they accomplish it? There are over a billion cows on earth (and more than twice as many chickens than people), and genociding them seems like it would be an enormous task, not counting the task of feeding humanity without animals on entirely artificial sources. I suspect that this would not be worth the time of the alien overlords. How would they have performed this sweeping extermination of domesticated animals?


Most often extraterrestrials are identified and alerted to owners by domesticated animals, like dogs, cats, parrots, etc.

Since Advent has actually become a surrounding of people but in a way to sway their alertness, it sounds as normal act to prohibit anything that would go against them or serve as base for rejection.

Feeding species with its own remains (in any form) has proven to be overly bad idea, for example mad cow diseases, and I would expect the same for humans (let's not go into topic of cannibalism yet). Except if broken down to prebiotic soup and syntethizing something from that.

  • Mad chicken disease? – David Yell Oct 19 '16 at 9:30
  • 1
    There was a chicken disease I thought to be close or similar to mad cow. It was coming up often in my country for a few years in cases where chickens were fed with vaporized bones of their own kin. Found no sources to back it up, but it was a high time in those years. Edited the answer to not include this one. – Sonic Oct 19 '16 at 10:21

I think is a sort of joke or easter egg and an interesting idea:

  1. Easter egg: in old XCOM UFO game when you entered alien spaceships on missions, in larger ships you could see lots of horses and cows being abducted and in operation tables and so on. Maybe they imply that they just abducted all of them.

  2. Interesting idea: since ADVENT has been trying to control mankind in subtle ways, and it has also been said that they for instance make hamburgers from human flesh from their human farms of sorts, it makes sense that they want to change the whole ecosystem to really depend on human farming and actually adapt the planet for that. It seems human can be feed with human and that's all you need to support as alien farmer... Doesn't sound as a good plan, but hey...

The question about how they manage to kill all cows and pets remains though.

Your Answer

