I'll be more direct. How will ponies take dragon eggs and get away with it?
I don't really understand how you can ask this question seriously. Spike obviously had time to eat his fill. How long does it take a dragon to hunt, eat and return home? Twenty minutes? An hour? How long does it take for a magic weilding, teleporting unicorn to rush in, grab an egg and leave?
It would be very easy, and magic and/or flight could be used to cover tracks and hide scent. You've suggested that a dragon would go after the egg. But how does she do that when the eggnaper leaves no scent? How does she do that if the egg is passed off to a pegasus? We've no indication of how fast dragons can fly, but we've every indication that pegasi can fly very fast, and bring in rain and clouds to hide in and remove their scent from the air if they want to. Where does your rampaging dragon go to find her egg? Which village does she destroy? Surely she knows where they all are, but with no indication of which one is harboring her egg, or even if it's in a village at all, does she risk the wrath of ponies and goddesses tearing up towns to find it?
If ponies wanted to steal eggs, they could.
Except for the bit about how male lions tend to kill
male cubs to prevent them from becoming competition.
And yet, humans nevertheless
return lions to the wild.
Ponies don't. They keep them as servants.
Owls Well That Ends Well has the equivalent of someone breaking into your home and eating a bowl full of breath mints when you've got a stocked kitchen, tons of electronics, and a basement full of weapons and tools. Not exactly something to be more than annoyed at. I was plainly not talking about situations in which nothing of import was stolen
See: Every story to ever use the "dragon in a cave with treasure" plot point.
Yes, see every story to ever use dragon treasure as a plot point, and I think you'll see that equating stealing a belly fell of gems from a dragon's hoard is not analagous to stealing a bowl full of breath mints.
I already addressed this in my post.
You nevertheless asked the question and I answered it. I find your arguments suggesting that the messaging is of no particular value unconvincing. Here they are:
A pegasus can fly from Canterlot to Ponyville in less than a day
And a dragon can relay a message in seconds. Clearly dragon messaging is superior.
The second is hardly necessary, given the relatively peaceful nature of Equestria.
They, nevertheless,
do it. I don't understand how you can insist that it's not necessary when the observeable fact remains that
they do this. Ponies use dragons to facilitate messages, and obviously they perceive it to be worthwhile to do so.
If you want to assert on your own that you personally think the value they get from it isn't worth the moral tradeoff of using the dragons in such a way...go ahead and make that assertion. But it won't change the fact that they nevertheless use dragons to send messages.
You also edited my statement to act as a strawman for your own argument, such that it is.
Are you serious? Do you even know what that means?
A
Strawman argument is:
"to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position"I created no proposition to dismantle. You asked a question, and I answered it. I simply edited out the rest of the paragraph that wasn't part of the question I was answering.
Here's your complete quote:
And the point I was making was that an isolated incident involving three individuals involved in a rather poorly designed attempt at enslaving a fourth with a fairly rare special talent which was very useful to them, which was rapidly thwarted, is substantially different from an organized program of enslavement on the part of a benevolent goddess/dictator who has no practical reason for doing so. Why would they possibly need dragon child-slaves? This is the biggest flaw in your argument: there is no economic or social reason for ponies to enslave dragon children. Why?
And here's my response:
Isn't that obvious? They're the communications medium between Celestia and the students of her school. This is shown in every single episode. Why are you even asking this?
My answer stands just as well, I simply removed the portions of the paragraph that I wasn't responding to. There's no strawman here, and there's no conspiracy to twist your words. Read what you said, then read what I said. You asked why, I told you why.
You also edited my statement to act as a strawman
for your own argument, such that it is.
Don't try to impress people with formal debate terms when you don't know what they mean.