How to preserve the remaining trolls?
During the early medieval age, the population of trolls is declining. These are savage creatures who aren't as cunning as humans, and not only are we part of their diet, humans are in fact their only source of food.
An adult troll is about ten times as large as a mature human but half as agile. They use their sensitive noses to track and swallow humans whole. They usually reside in mountains and are nocturnal animals; when night falls, they are often sighted terrorizing villagers.
However, things change when humans launch a worldwide campaign to exterminate the trolls, and within a period of two decades their numbers have fallen to around a couple hundreds. The reason for their rapid decline is due to stress: humans erect tall fences to keep them at bay, but since the trolls can't eat anything else, they are starved to death. Many people have become concerned about the imbalance their disappearance could place on the ecosystem. They have also begun to wonder if these once terrifying creatures also have the right to live.
How can we preserve this now-endangered species? They are not scavengers, meaning they prefer to chase food.
Acceptable answer should touch on how the remaining trolls can flourish and co-exist with human and yet at the same time their diet stays the same.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23174. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
Many animals also prefer to chase their food, but are not allowed to at zoos. And a troll that has to decide between starving and scavenging almost certainly would prefer the latter.
Therefore a solution could be to feed the dead to the trolls instead of burial. Given that cultures developed that feed the dead to vultures, I think feeding the dead to trolls would not be inconceivable.
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Why do they have the right to live? Serious question.
They eat us. It's all they do, and we have a right to defend ourselves from being eaten.
If they can be taught to eat something else, fine.
But the real message of history is "adapt or die".
This is just evolutionary pressure to become something more. Either the inflexible ones will die and leave the ones that can adapt to eating something else, or the dumb ones will die leaving the ones smart enough to hunt us.
Or they'll go extinct.
There are not a lot of animals that hunt humans, and that's because we killed them all.
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I agree with another answer that, if your cultural values permit it, giving over the dead to the trolls could work. That'd be a tough sell for early-middle-ages Europe, but then, caring about troll welfare would be too and you've got that, so this might work.
Two other approaches:
Military application:
Given that it's the early middle ages, wars are widespread. Offer the trolls a treaty: if they agree to be the shock troops in your army, they can eat as much as they want from the enemies you face.
Down-side: you still have a problem in peace time.
Judicial application:
Capital punishment just got a whole lot easier.
Down-side: this might encourage a harsher judicial system or even -- gasp -- a corrupt one.
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