Unhappy Baby Animals

Any player of Harvest Moon games will be aware of the necessity of keeping animals happy by feeding them and not keeping them outside in bad weather conditions. In a game like Harvest Moon DS or Harvest Moon Cute DS, the fact that you can have many Bird Barns and Animal Barns can make Animal Care a little more complex, as you must remember to enter EVERY barn to feed animals and perform whatever tasks are needed. If you have four Bird Barns and three Animal Barns and they are in different parts of the field, it is not difficult to forget one...

You can hire a Sprite Team to care for your Animals but as you only can hire one team at a time, you may wish to hire a Team for a different task such as Watering or Fishing.

When not fed, animals first become Unhappy and then Sick. Once an Animal falls sick, you will be obliged to purchase and use Animal Medicine in order to cure it. If you do not feed an animal for even a single day, you run the risk of having a Sick Animal on the next day in Harvest Moon DS and Cute DS. Sick Animals when not medicated usually take more than one day to die but they will die ultimately if you do not medicate them.

The reason for this post is not to write about these basic facts but to share a more subtle aspect of animal behaviour in Harvest Moon DS and Cute DS.

When an Animal is born on your farm, you then will have both Mother and Child. If you sell the Mother while her offspring still is a baby, the baby MAY become Unhappy. This is a random effect but it is rather touching. I have experienced it more than once myself. I therefore try not to deprive a baby animal of its parent if possible. Once the Animal is an adult, the relationship between parent and child apparently becomes more distant, but when the Animal is a baby, it needs its mother!