Yabby Milker

A 'yabby milker', believed to be known as a cheragkhes ('yabby squeezer') in ancient Armaidas, was a specialist profession in the days in the Armaidan Empire, who milked pack yabbies for their pheromone secretions used in the production of purple. A highly specialised profession that produced minuscule amounts of purple through tedious activity, yabby milkers could nonetheless lead comfortable lives outside their working hours, a testament to the lucrativeness of the substance. With the rise of techniques and technologies for extracting purple from crushed pack yabby remains in the later years of the Armaidan Empire, 'yabby milking' gradually fell out of favour, and may have become obsolete even before the collapse of the Armaidan Empire and presumed extinction of the pack yabby.
In its natural environment, the small Armaidan pack yabby secreted the substance known as purple only in minuscule doses and rare circumstances - it is unknown to modern zoology if it was a pheromone for mating, hunting, or something else entirely. Yabby milkers were trained with a special technique to 'massage' the underside of the yabby, causing it to secrete the small amounts of purple its body had produced. While an effective way of gaining small amounts of the substance, a milker would have to milk each yabby individually, a painstaking and tedious process. Unlike later-developed methods for purple extraction, milking did not harm the yabbies in any way, and much of the milker's job was in fact maintaining their 'colony' of yabbies, with actual milking being only an occasional practice. In the later years of the Armaidan Empire, as processes for extracting the purple by crushing yabbies en masse were developed, yabby milking became a less and less common practice, with the remaining milkers failing to compete with the crushers' output. With the expansion of the Great Fissure and the subsequent presumed extinction of the Armaidan pack yabby, the art of yabby milking is lost to history.

Type

Agricultural / Fishing / Forestry

Demand

Obsolete