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Dragon eating habits


Vaedys Targaryen

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Something that has always bothered me about dragons in ASoIaF is how much do they eat and for how long can they go without food.

We know Drogon regularily eats sheep and goats, but how much would a dragon need to eat to sustain itself for a while? Dragons can grow to become massive and would need a lot of food to sustain themselves if they need to eat at least once a day, which we know Dany's dragons do. Which begs the question, how did the Valyrians, and the Targaryens, afford to feed such massive animals? Or are they maybe like many irl reptiles who can go months without eating and Dany is just overfeeding them?

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It depends on their activity level.  They can hibernate and reduce their caloric needs.  

The ones on Dragonstone hunted their own food.  Sheepstealer lived up to his name.  Some hunted whales, kraken, and whatever creature they could find.  

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9 hours ago, Vaedys Targaryen said:

Something that has always bothered me about dragons in ASoIaF is how much do they eat and for how long can they go without food.

We know Drogon regularily eats sheep and goats, but how much would a dragon need to eat to sustain itself for a while? Dragons can grow to become massive and would need a lot of food to sustain themselves if they need to eat at least once a day, which we know Dany's dragons do. Which begs the question, how did the Valyrians, and the Targaryens, afford to feed such massive animals? Or are they maybe like many irl reptiles who can go months without eating and Dany is just overfeeding them?

There was a good thread on this a while back that went in to the type of detail you may be looking for?

Here is a clip from that thread and link below:

Yeah at only five dragons, we're talking about 140 horses a week. Or to put that another way, 7,280 horses a year. Or the equivalent in meaty flesh, which comes out to 3,640 tons a year. That's absolutely monstrous......if they primarily eat off the land. Which excluding Drogon's behavior, I don't think dragons do or even prefer. I would think they prefer fish and other water creatures. What comes to mind is the scene from the first American Godzilla, where the beast was consuming entire ship fulls of fish in the movie. But I think the reason Drogon and his siblings eat like they do is that unlike the other Valyrian dragons, they were barely exposed to the open sea at all, only fishing in the ocean maybe once in their early lives, and the rest being land based and fed from land creatures.

Back to the the numbers and the intentionally false presumption for the sake of demonstration.

So literally thousands of horses, or tens of thousands of sheep and smaller animal over the course of a year. For merely five dragons. Now the dragons of the Dance of the Dragons were somewhat smaller, but for the purpose of demonstration let's assume that every named dragon eats horses by the mouthful. I believe there were 19 Dragons in the Dance? Let's go by the startling numbers.

19 dragons would consume 38 tons of flesh, daily. That's 266 tons of flesh a week. Or about 12 Semi Trucks a week.  Or 532 adult horses a week.  That's 13,832 tons of flesh a year, or 27,664 adult horses. To put that into perspective, 19 dragons could have eaten Genghis Khan's Mongol Army out of their horses in 3 years or less. And this is all being supplied by pre-industrial agriculture and herding. Even with the entirety of Westeros, they would be eating faster than the food could be replenished.

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/138740-the-logistics-of-dragons/

 

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I feel @Megorova had it right in a previous thread:

Quote

It could be that while dragons are small, and still growing (like Drogon now), they need to eat a lot every day. But when they are fully grown, their metabolism is slowing down, and they rarely eat. Like snakes, crocodiles, and other reptiles, that eat once per week, or even rarer. So until Drogon's metabolism will slow down, he isn't very effective as a war weapon. He will constantly need to go away from battlefield, to hunt and eat. Unless Dany is willing to make her dragons to switch to human meat ration, and eat whomever they will kill on battlefield.

 

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On ‎3‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 0:03 PM, Vaedys Targaryen said:

Something that has always bothered me about dragons in ASoIaF is how much do they eat and for how long can they go without food.

We know Drogon regularily eats sheep and goats, but how much would a dragon need to eat to sustain itself for a while? Dragons can grow to become massive and would need a lot of food to sustain themselves if they need to eat at least once a day, which we know Dany's dragons do. Which begs the question, how did the Valyrians, and the Targaryens, afford to feed such massive animals? Or are they maybe like many irl reptiles who can go months without eating and Dany is just overfeeding them?

Dragons have the gift of flight.  They have an almost unlimited range to forage.  The easiest is to hunt something big from the oceans.  A varied diet is usually best.  Mammoth steak.  Shark Fin soup.  Giant Burgers. 

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Well it's always been my understanding that it's the environment that dictates the size of the dragon, rather than the dragon dictating what type of environment it needs. 

For example, we know that dragons that were confined to the dragon pit hatched smaller and smaller over the years as their activity levels were severely restricted. Their food would be a similar scenario I would imagine. They would only grow as big as their diets would allow. 

On 27/03/2018 at 6:17 AM, Son of Man said:

It depends on their activity level.  They can hibernate and reduce their caloric needs.  

The ones on Dragonstone hunted their own food.  Sheepstealer lived up to his name.  Some hunted whales, kraken, and whatever creature they could find.  

I would agree with this. Being able to access bigger prey like kraken and whales would definitely impact the size of those dragons. I wouldn't expect any of Dany's dragons to get anywhere near as big as Balerion for example (assuming any of them survive) because they don't have access to these food sources. 

In terms of sustaining the diet of a large dragon, I would also agree with @Son of Man - they'd need to reduce their activity as food would be scarce (or would soon become scarce). 

Do we know what Balerion's activity was like? I doubt he was given free roam of Westeros, they must have been trained in some small capacity to where they could be fed?

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