I have seen of the scrawnier ones in labs, they probably would only feed one or two people so I am not sure the utilitarian approach is a winner ? Maybe if we fed them a diet of Mountain Dew and Pizza it might improve the flavours?
It's largely due to the relatively low effort required to hunt and catch one. Less energy spent means it's economical to hunt the scrawny ones.
You could spend a couple of days chasing down the larger specimens, but they tend to put up more of a struggle, and in the time spent, you could have a dozen scrawny engineers already in your larder or stew.
This is of course similar to how early human hunters operated - simply chasing down the prey till they fell exhausted. For the average post-doc CS student this will be three to four blocks so the energy trade off is in your favour. However the available calories drops significantly with cryptographers and even though you can drop one after just one block the energy trade off is even.
I have seen of the scrawnier ones in labs, they probably would only feed one or two people so I am not sure the utilitarian approach is a winner ? Maybe if we fed them a diet of Mountain Dew and Pizza it might improve the flavours?