When the animals worked

That was the first time, the first time we successfully trained animals to train other animals. So you didn't have to manually teach every animal to stay within the fences, not go snoopin' around the electric boxes, be careful around the marsh. You could put it all in their social DNA. It was hard, and the gains were not as significant as originally proposed. The harder part was changing the patterns when they formed. What you taught the animals became innate to them, it was nigh impossible to reprogram those habits. A herd of sheep couldn't do two different grazing habits anymore, almost as if there was an upper limit on the amount of information their tiny brains could take.

Training the trainers was expensive, and centralized even quicker than had been predicted. For every pair-combination of animals you wanted the training for, you had three large mega-corporations to choose from, four if you wanted something simple like goat-on-goat. The trainer animals were twenty times as expensive as the best of mating bucks.

And when billions were spent by farmers, governments, research institutions, when those three megacorps had the combined valuation of the top ten tech companies combined, nothing. It wasn't obvious if you weren't looking hard, but folks figured out eventually. There wasn't much productivity gain if you used those specials, unless your herd sizes were far too large. And the expected savings never came. You could train a goat to come to the vet when it got sick, but often it was not worth it because by the time the goat knew it was sick, it was far too late.

Those who saw through made huge sums of money by shorting the smart-trainers, and the ecosystem that had grown around the hype and hot air. Training centers for trainers to train animals that trained other animals, projections of millions of dollars of annual income, to the ground. "Smart diagnostics" systems that promised you didn't even need a vet, the animals would pretty much jump onto your plate, they claimed, revealed to be massive hoaxes as the interest and the money backing them dried up. The research centers made some progress, universities didn't cancel courses entirely, but the excitement was gone, the frenzy dead.