Monster Organ Trafficking

aka: Mainlining The Monster

All you can eat hydra heads!

"Every part of the Kaiju sells. Cartilage, spleen, liver... Even the crap! One cubic meter of crap has enough phosphorus in it to fertilize a whole field!"

— Hannibal Chau, Pacific Rim

Fictional, nonsapient creatures (aka the monsters) often produce all kinds of useful resources (aka the organs); points added if the transaction (aka the trafficking) turns out to be profitable. So, some unscrupulous people decide to forgo any pain or life-threatening injury they may cause the creature and go harvest said resources. Either by keeping the creature captive or raising it for this express purpose.

As a result, it's not rare for the exploiters to prove far more dangerous than the creature itself. They can be outright Villains, Opportunistic Bastards, or even Unscrupulous Heroes if the situation calls for it.

The people using the monster materials can either be as bad as the harvesters or oblivious to the process. In the second case, expect that, the longer the extraction goes on, the likelihood of someone bringing it to attention (and causing a public scandal) increases.

That's why this trope often comes in hand with a "What Measure Is a Non-Human?" debate. However, it's possible to make use of it without commenting on it — usually by not showing the most unsavory parts (such as killing, hunting, and painful extractions) of the process or just making it like shearing sheep: if done carefully, it doesn't harm the creature.

In any case, the key element of this trope is that the exploited creatures do not possess sapience. I.e., human-like cognition (see Analysis.Monster Organ Trafficking for an extended discussion on this and the previous topic).

If in a Plot Twist, the creatures turn out to be sapient, then it's a subversion of this trope. If the creatures were sapient all along and the harvesters knew it, then it's Sapient Fur Trade.

Can overlap with Solid Gold Poop if the resource extracted is the creature's waste material, with Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product if the product has healing properties, with Eye of Newt if the material is a magical reagent, and with Fantastic Drug if the substance is psychedelic. May overlap with Captured Super-Entity as long as said entity is not sapient.

Compare with Fantastic Livestock, when creatures are raised for food.

Contrast with Human Resources, for the catch-it-all trope about harvesting useful stuff from sapient beings, even if they look "monstrous".

Do not confuse with Milking the Monster, when it's the presence of the monster that works to someone's financial or social/political advantage, or with Merchandising the Monster, when an evil person/entity is marketed and profited from In-Universe.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bio-Meat: Nectar: If they weren't a massively profitable source of marketable food for humans, the B-Ms would've surely been written off as a bad design and destroyed as soon as their appetite for people was noticed. Instead, the Corrupt Corporate Executive whose company created them writes off one catastrophic BM escape after another, and is perfectly content to slaughter innocents and his own son to protect his "product"'s public image.
• Cross Ange: It's revealed that Mana is generated from the DRAGON Aura after the latter is force fed with DRAGON hearts.
• Delicious in Dungeon: Part of the draw of dungeon crawling is that certain monsters and monster-derived substances are extremely valuable, promising a way for bold adventurers to make money fast. Treasure bugs fetch a high price among certain collectors, for example, and the succubus mosquito is said to suffer from overhunting because their venom is a powerful euphoric drug. Of course, the rewards are mitigated by the risks of fighting monsters in a dungeon. Marcille's goal in studying the Island is to figure out how to make a "managed" dungeon that will allow people to farm the beneficial products of dungeons without the danger.
• Drifters: The Black King's "alliance" with the Bronze Dragon amounts to using his healing abilities in the most awful way possible to generate enormous bronze cancer blobs on her body, which his minions rip out to use the metal for their war effort.
• Drifting Dragons: Similar to whaling in the real world, the setting has dragons hunted for their oil which is used as fuel and their delicious meat.
• Gintama: One episode is about a rural village that is plagued by hordes of monsters... RPG monsters. The town quickly learns the definition of lootsplosion and bullies away all the mercenaries that they were desperately calling for earlier. Unfortunately for them and the main characters, the gold mine runs out when they kill the final boss and the beasts' creator thanks them for their greed, leaving. The main characters discuss this and then go back to fighting over 100 yen on the ground.
• Magic Artisan Dahlia Wilts No More: The world of Ordine is rife with magic and monsters that have inherently magical properties like slime monsters and gryphons (or they're just plain tasty like krakens). Magic Artisans like protagonist Dahlia often use monster components during research and in the production of magically-powered appliances. Dahlia's first big breakthrough comes when she develops a fabric waterproofing solution made from concentrated slime essence.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: For the pilots to power the giant EVA robots it's essential that they establish a good sync with the robot, and for this purpose they are immersed in LCL — a breathable fluid that greatly eases the sync process. It turns out that LCL is the blood of the second angel Lilith, kept crucified deep underground, wounded and constantly bleeding into a vast lake. For that matter, the EV As themselves are all monsters cloned from either the first Angel Adam or the Second Angel Lilith, and it's heavily implied Second Impact was caused by Adam going on a rampage after escaping.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Grief Seeds dropped by witches when they are killed are given to Kyubey for him to use to stave off the heat death of the universe. It’s too bad that the witches were once magical girls that were intentionally corrupted by Kyubey for this exact purpose.
• Silent Möbius: One chapter centers on the drug "Domel", a performance enhancer that has the unfortunate side effect of mutating users into monsters and then melting down when their bodies are no longer able to withstand the changes. It's extracted from a captive Lucifer Hawk, an interdimensional demon.

Comic Books

• Alien: Aliens produce Royal Jelly, which has the same role for this species as it has for real-life bees. However, it is also an extremely valuable substance in human society, used as a powerful and mind-enhancing drug for wealthy individuals. Since the only source of Royal Jelly is often deep inside an alien hive, collecting it can be very dangerous. The Hive mini-series details such an operation.
• Deep Sea: All the world's Crudelis comes from a massive sea creature that's held in a cave at the bottom of the ocean. It's held in place with chains and has multiple pipes attached to its body, which siphon Crudelis out of its body. When Patricia comes to fix a pipe, the monster telepathically begs her to set it free.
• In L Imploseur, a French comic, the miracle drink Ultra which boosts reflexes, muscles, etc. turns out to be the blood of a goat-human hybrid.
• The Real Ghostbusters: In the Slimer! series, a pair of unscrupulous, down-on-their-luck mechanics attempt to capture Slimer and bottle his slime upon discovering that the stuff can keep a car's radiator from overheating no matter what.
• Operacion Bolivar has a massive underground operation for hunting angels, and the comic details an insane attempt at mass-farming them. It's mentioned that there is a similar operation in Asia, focused on hunting dragons.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It's further explored beyond Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Alan Jonah provides his investors in the Titan DNA market with samples of Ghidorah's biology from the decapitated head.
• Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons: In Chapter 15, a group of ponies is feeding unfortunate wastelanders to a mutated hydra to make a regenerative drug known as — naturally — Hydra.
• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Virtually every aspect of this world's economy is built on harvesting resources from the intelligent dungeons: literal monster parts, tamed monsters, loot from the Inexplicable Treasure Chests, metal or stone harvested from veins the dungeon grows, and more. It is, however, a symbiotic cycle: dungeons get the mana they need to sustain themselves from people fighting and dying within them, so they are incentivized to contain loot worth the delving.

Films — Animation

• Princess Mononoke: The Forest Spirit has power over life and death, and his blood is believed to grant immortality, which is why the Emperor of Japan has placed a bounty on it. When the Forest Spirit is decapitated during his Night Walker transformation, his blood turns into a World-Wrecking Wave that sucks the life out of any living thing it comes in contact with. After his head is returned, his blood turns into a World-Healing Wave, kick-starting a new forest as well as healing the lepers and Ashitaka's curse.

Films — Live-Action

• The Field Guide to Evil: In "What Ever Happened to Panagas the Pagan?", the goblin bleeds an incredibly intoxicating wine that, according to legend, can send the drinker mad.
• In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Knowhere is a mining complex/city carved into the severed head of a Celestial that is large enough to have its own gravitational pull and atmosphere. According to Gamora, the workers there are harvesting brain matter, spinal fluid and other organic matter to sell on the black market.
• Godzilla:
  • MonsterVerse: It briefly gets mentioned by Dr. Graham in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) that there's a new and dangerous market in trafficking Titans' DNA which Alan Jonah is invested in, although this has yet to be fully explored — it also gets mentioned in the film's novelization that Monarch are experimenting on the remains of the dead MUTOs and Margygr hoping they can use the Titans' biology to make animal gene therapy advances. The Leafwings' profile in the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong mentions that the Iwi tribe on Skull Island hunt the creatures down and grind their wings into powder, believed to have unique psychotropic effects.
  • Shin Godzilla: The Americans discovered Godzilla long before he hit land, but kept this secret so as to be the first to benefit from researching its Bizarre Alien Biology (including a new element formed inside its body). As Godzilla is left frozen but intact, many are hoping such discoveries could help fund the reconstruction of Tokyo.
• In Pacific Rim, there's a lucrative black market selling body parts harvested from dead kaiju, and Hannibal Chau is its king. Aside from the kaiju brains (which have too much ammonia), every part of the kaiju is useful (or at least, Chau has convinced his customer base of this fact), even their feces and skin parasites. Thankfully the black market dealers are smart enough to wait until the PPDC does their job and renders the kaiju dead before moving in to make their money.
• Pete's Dragon (1977) has an entire Villain Song about it, wherein Dr. Terminus and his lackey, Hoagy, go over all the different miracle cures that can be made from dragon body parts, and all the money they'll be able to make from "Every Little Piece".
• In Spiders 3 D, the giant spider-alien hybrids were being bred in captivity because their silk would have industrial and military applications.
• The Stone Tape: Brock's first thought upon realizing that the "ghost" is more of a recording than an entity is to redirect the think tank's resources entirely to commercializing an information-storage system based on the same principles.

Literature

• Alastair Reynolds:
  • In Terminal World, the world has been divided up into differing areas of technology, where the laws of reality are literally different from one are to the next, limiting how advanced certain items can be in certain areas. For the people of this world, traveling between these areas involves suffering from the debilitating "Zone Sickness" that, in severe enough cases (or too fast of a transition between different zones) can kill. Fortunately, creatures called Carnivorgs can synthesize a medicine that alleviates the sickness... unfortunately, as their name would suggest, the Carnivorgs are vicious carnivorous cyborgs who harvest the brain matter from the people they capture.
  • Revelation Space Series: In Chasm City, an alien marooned on Yellowstone is the only source of a drug that can suppress the melding plague.
• In Alien in a Small Town, kreg is a live alien virus. The human body can fight off the infection, but the user experiences a hallucinogenic high until it does; and the user's body does not gain a lasting immunity, so subsequent use will give a longer and longer high until the user may eventually be trapped in a hallucinogenic state lasting for days.
• And Then There Were Monsters: This is the only way the people of Grandsbriar have survived so long. In addition to collecting parts from monsters they kill for potions and weapons, they've also started trying to domesticate some of the less hostile types, like leaf dancers. It's slow going, because most of the monsters don't reproduce too close to human habitation.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): During the first "dungeon wave", where monsters spawn endlessly out of the walls, Anthony digs out farming chambers, to collect monsters that can be slaughtered for XP and biomass. He even diverts a stream to fill ponds inside the chambers with mana-infused water, so that some of the monsters can form cores for harvesting. It's a big contributor to the Colony's fast growth.
• In Coldfire Trilogy, the Forest is a very dangerous place since it's the Hunter's domain. People live near it and venture into it anyway because the Forest, due to the Hunter altering its ecosystem for centuries to suit him, is also home to unique flora and fauna that don't exist anywhere else. For example, there's a breed of wolf that only lives in the Forest with pelts so beautiful that people will pay a small fortune for them. One can make a good living gathering and hunting in the Forest as long as one pays the Hunter due respect.
• The Dark Profit Saga: One magical weapons manufacturer tempers their swords in the blood of a fire drake, which is kept chained up and constantly bled slowly in their factory.
• The Day of the Triffids: Triffids are initially culled because their predatory habits pose a threat to humans, but when it's discovered that they can be exploited as a source of high-quality vegetable oil, standard practise becomes capturing them, removing their stingers, and farming them instead.
• Discworld: In The Fifth Elephant, the titular elephant crashed into the Disc millennia ago, leaving large fat deposits in Überwald that are still mined to this day.
• Dune's sandworms are the source of the invaluable Spice, without which galactic civilization would collapse. While keeping them captive is unfeasible to say the least, the need to preserve their species runs at odds with the Fremen drive to make Arrakis more livable for humans (due to water, a necessary component of any reasonably human-inhabitable environment, being lethal to the worms), making it a major political issue.
• In The Golgotha Series, Clay begins keeping some of the worm-like Tainted parasites birthed by the Mother of a Thousand Young in captivity so he can harvest their secretions as ingredients for a regenerative serum.
• In A Memoir by Lady Trent, a scientist discovers a chemical process to preserve the fast-decaying bones of dragons. Isabella and Tom realize that this would lead to dragons all over the world being hunted to extinction for their bones, which once they're preserved are extraordinarily strong and light. They try to keep it a secret, but the research is stolen and eventually becomes an open secret. They then shift to funding research into synthesizing artificial dragonbone, to obviate the need to kill dragons.
• In Perdido Street Station, the slake-moths are a source for the highly addictive drug called dreamshit, and were being milked of this substance before their escape.
• The Relic: At the end of the book, the monster-creating reovirus is used by one of the survivors to concoct a new street drug, Glaze. It turns out to have some nasty side effects in the sequel, and its derivatives are even worse.
• In Relics, by Tim Lebbon, the protagonists fall afoul of black marketeers who covertly trade in fantastical creatures' body parts and discover that such creatures are so rare they're considered mythical because humans have been butchering them for their body parts for thousands of years.
• Repairman Jack: In All the Rage, blood from Scar-lip the rakosh is the sole source of the Psycho Serum Berzerk.
• In The Shattered World, by Michael Reaves, dragons are hunted through the Abyss between fragments by "dragoneers", who harvest their hide, flesh, bones and oil. This is dangerous yet profitable, as only dragon-derived materials can be enchanted to stay on course and maintain Artificial Gravity within the Abyss, so there's no other way to build flying ships.
• A Simple Survey: One story revolves around this. The narrator is a professor who specializes in researching monsters that become pests to human society. By finding ways to profit off them, he can create an incentive for peasants to hunt the monsters and keep their populations in check. In the story, he and his assistant dissect a troll and discover uses for its stomach acid and liver. But releasing this information doesn't have the intended effect. The peasants, instead of killing the trolls, gather the materials non-lethally (by forcing the trolls to vomit out acid, and cutting away pieces of the liver at a time). On top of that, they've even started setting out food for the trolls, increasing their population.
• In the firefighters-vs-dragons novel Smoke Eaters, a derivative of dragon blood proves to have remarkable healing properties, and to immunize humans who receive it via transfusion against the choking effects of dragon smoke. Once this is demonstrated, the titular anti-dragon crews shift tactics from exterminating the ferocious beasts to capturing them alive as blood donors.
• Star Wars Legends: One novel has a spider monster that produced a spice called glitterstim, which needs to be harvested in complete darkness. The spider uses it to make its webs, while other creatures use it for some kind of mind reading (and also just to get high).
• The Stormlight Archive: The chamsfiends (essentially carnivorous lobsters the size of skyscrapers) have a massive gemheart, which is even more valuable because gems are the only way of storing the titular Mana. While hunting adult chasmfiends is quite dangerous, they have a pupal stage in their life cycle, during which they are briefly helpless.
• In Updraft, skymouths (invisible flying tentacled maws) are highly dangerous, but also provide useful materials; in particular, sinew which allows the construction of bridges between the towers which constitute the city. Singers, who are responsible for protecting the city, maintain some of their clout thanks to the prosperity this sinew brings them. It's eventually revealed that the Singers are secretly breeding a horde of captive skymouths rather than killing them in the course of protecting the city, as they claim.
• World War Z: An accidental example occurs. Due to the Chinese government committing wide-scale Organ Theft and not understanding the nature of the Plague Zombies in the novel, one of the first avenues by which it escapes China via organ donations harvested from Zombie Infectees.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. reveals the Project T.A.H.I.T.I. that revived Agent Coulson revolves around draining the fluids from a Kree corpse. One of those was the regenerative serum that causes terrible psychological consequences unless the test subject's memories are changed. And this was apparently the least horrific serum.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the story "Nightmare of Eden", part of the plot involves the spread of a new addictive drug, and another part of the plot involves a pack of alien monsters roaming around after escaping while being transported by a zoologist. It turns out that the zoologist is the kingpin of the drug operation, and the drug itself is derived from the alien monsters.
  • Much, much later in "The Beast Below", we get Spaceship UK built around the monster and using it as an engine. Turns out it's a nice, helpful monster. It doesn't mind being used as an engine and will happily take the spaceship where it needs to go... but the operators of Spaceship UK didn't know this, and thought they had to torture the poor thing to get it to move. This ends once the Doctor shows up, and the creature begins moving much faster when the torture stops.
  • In "Thin Ice", the villain arranges for people to get pulled through the frozen Thames's ice to feed a giant sea monster that's chained to the riverbed. Then he has its poop dredged up as fuel for his steel mills. The Doctor says this poop is potent enough to power starships.
• Farscape: "Home on the Remains" sees the crew of the Moya, desperate for supplies, landing on a mining colony established on the corpse of a Budong, a gigantic Space Whale. The insides of a Budong carry deposits of valuable minerals... as long as you stay clear of the acid eruptions from its vesicles.
• Forever Knight. In "If Looks Could Kill", a vampire doctor used injections of her own blood as a "miracle youth-restoring treatment" marketed to elderly rich women. Unfortunately the users suffer from homicidal outbursts, and Rapid Aging if the treatments stop.
• Jekyll has a secret society that is trying to recreate the circumstances that caused Henry Jekyll to transform into Mr Hyde, in order to revolutionise medical science.
• In Lexx, Kai was animated by "protoblood", a secretion from the last of the Insects. Re-animated assassins like him were part of how His Divine Shadow maintained his tyrannical grip on power.
• Stargate SG-1: In "Cure", a civilization keeps a Goa'uld queen (actually the dying Tok'ra queen) captive in a tank so they can harvest her symbiotes to make an elixir that can cure any illness.
• The 10th Kingdom has rather literal fairy dust, as in the dead remnants of a fairy, which is recreationally snorted by trolls.
• Torchwood: In one episode, a small group of humans exploit a Space Whale with a Healing Factor stranded on Earth; they use it for a cheap source of meat to wholesale.

Tabletop Games

• In Aberrant, there are several illegal drugs (most of which will temporarily give a baseline superpowers) made out of the organs of novas.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Up through 2nd Edition, the game had extensive rules for using monster body parts for creating various magic items. By 5th Edition, the only remaining remnant of this is Dragon Scale armor, which as its name implies is armor forged from the scales of actual dragons.
  • Salamanders naturally generate intense heat from their bodies, leading some to summon and bind them to forges and ovens to use as endless heat sources.
  • A article details how a variety of dragons can be eaten. Red dragons in particular take a great deal of care to eat, or else the consequences can be dire.
  • It's not uncommon for some players to just decide their characters want to cook and eat various monsters. Darkmantles are like magic squid and chuul are crustaceoan in appearance, why not try a bite?
  • Exandria: The town of Tomb of the Worm was founded by settlers who found part of an Eldritch Abomination's body poking through the ice of the tundra, and discovered that its meat could be harvested and eaten as it quickly grew back. The abomination, Quajath the Undermaw, tolerates being eaten in this manner since it makes the townsfolk susceptible to being mind controlled and becoming his cultists.
  • Forgotten Realms:
    • Dwarven settlements sometimes keep captive deepspawn as a food source, feeding them livestock so the aberrations will make numerous copies of meat animals. This can easily backfire on the deepspawn-keepers, if one of their captive monsters ever manages to sink its teeth into something more dangerous than cattle.
    • Elminster's Ecologies details a number of practical uses for hydra body parts — their teeth can be used to make plows and saws, their hide dried and used as a cover for cold-sensitive crops, their tongues hung like flags to tell the weather from how they change color, their ground bones used as a desiccant, their fat mixed with cornmeal to serve as rat bait and their heads used as scarecrows.
• Exalted: First Age bioengineers created a breed of dinosaurs that can consume plants containing useful substances, process them in their bodies and pee out the refined chemical, which they farmed as living chemical refineries. Many breeds were created, each meant to produce a different substance, but most went extinct after the fall of the First Age civilization. Some still exist, however, and are farmed in the same manner as they were bred for — the most common is one that eats poppies and pees out heroin.
• Pathfinder has several examples:
  • Enterprising, foolhardy adventurers can extract daemonic spinal fluid and alchemically process it into a potent drug. If you don't mind drinking a fiendishly addictive concoction that's Made of Evil and the digested remnants of damned souls, it gives quite a boost.
  • Wealthy, foolhardy clientele can snort Mummy paste if they don't mind the risk of spontaneously transforming into an undead monstrosity. Mummy powders and extracts were used as drugs on and off for centuries and as late as the 1920s, albeit — so far as anyone knows — without that particular side effect.
  • Cacodaemons can create soul gems when they consume a living being. This ability is valued by fiends and evil spellcasters alike, who often keep cacodaemons as living soul gem manufacturers.
  • The bodies of faceless whales naturally produce several alchemical reagents, and their teeth and bones are useful materials for making weapons and armor. Consequently, they are often pursued by whalers seeking to harvest their bodies' valuable resources.
  • Shulns, gigantic rodents native to the Darklands, naturally produce two very valuable resources — the adamantine deposited within their teeth and claws and their potent paralytic drool. They're consequently often hunted to harvest their claws and fangs by people wishing to extract the valuable metal within or to collect their venom, although this needs to first be treated alchemically to avoid its normally rapid decay.
  • The bodies of furcifers, immense chameleon-like beasts with flowers growing from their backs, are extremely rich in valuable materials — their pollen and nectar can be used to make psychoactive drugs, their bones can be used to magic items related to acid, and their skin fashioned into cloaks and robes with illusory properties.
  • In the fifth part of the Agents of Edgewatch Adventure Path, Belly of the Black Whale, the main villain is revealed to have captured and enslaved his former kraken master, whom he has spitefully hooked up to a complex machine that constantly drains his ink to use to produce the tabloids that the villain is using to secretly control society.
  • Lunar nagas produce a soporific venom which some jaded buyers use as a narcotic. While a few nagas might deign to sell their venom, most dealers "milk" this substance from unwilling captives.
• Salt in Wounds is a third party Dungeons & Dragons setting based on the idea of the Tarrasque — an immense, effectively unkillable behemoth that serves as D&D's iconic "top monster" — being bound in a canyon with enchanted harpoons and then used as a source of eternally regenerating meat, horn, bone and magical reagents. An entire city grew around the trapped beast, with entire orders of butchers arising to carve away into its flesh to then sell off across the world.
• Shadowrun: One supplement's shadowtalk includes posts by a sicko who'd kept an Awakened leopard with a Healing Factor captive for years, periodically skinning it alive and selling the pelts. The same poster speculated about the possibility of catching a giant regenerating species of shark and selling its meat over and over again.
• Warhammer: While the Empire is normally intolerant of monsters, as they're seen as expressions of Chaos, they have discovered certain monstrous species like the griffin have stabilized into essentially natural animals and are fantastic for riding into battle. As such, the Empire either has them privately housed at a Lord's manor or keeps in the Imperial Zoo (which even includes a dragon for the really desperate battles).
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Imperium hates aliens and usually deals with them by a lasgun shot to the head. However some aliens have proven themselves useful and so certain Imperial factions have corralled them for their own benefit. One example are the Jokaero, a barely sapient species of orangutan-like aliens who are somehow master engineers and technologists. The Jokaero can be used to upgrade existing equipment or produce unique pieces of technology, such as rings that pack as much firepower as their pistol equivalents.
  • The Imperium hates Chaos with a passion, and for good reason, but they won't admit that humanity needs Chaos to function. The Warp is a very effective Faster-Than-Light Travel option^note background lore notes that they tried a different FTL method only to go back for Warp Drives as it's the most reliable; makes you wonder how bad the other FTL method was, and the Chaos-catalyzed mutations that lead to Psykers are necessary to train Navigators and to keep the Astronomican running. There's also the practice of creating Daemonhosts, a forced Demonic Possession that results in a Sealed in a Person-Shaped Can situation for the Demon, who can then be interrogated.
  • One main source of Imperium food is Grox meat. Grox are dangerous lizard cow dinosaurs who need to be lobotomized to keep them from just eating their handlers. Ambulls, who are strong enough to basically be a superboss in the Blackstone Fortress tabletop game, can also be quite tasty (as pointed out in a Ciaphas Cain book and The Regimental Standard publication), and some of them are raised to be used as biological components and materials for the mechanical Ambots as well.
• World of Darkness:
  • Hunter: The Vigil: Five groups actively use the monsters they hunt in one way or another:
    • Ashwood Abbey sees monsters as good fun. One of their common reactions to meeting some new supernatural creature is "Is there any way I can get high off of the internal processes of this being?"
    • The Cheiron Group treats monsters as sources of medicinal products. Their agents have access to Endowments that consist of supernatural transplants or chemical augmentations, all harvested from captured creatures of the night. Some are even put on the market as pharmaceuticals for public consumption.
    • The founder of the Malleus Maleficarum, Padre Ambrogino Baudolino, is a ghoul. He has Hunters bring him vampires from which to feed.
    • Utopia Now is a group of tech-heads who believe that they can use the Infrastructure of the God-Machine for parts to make a true city of the future. And, failing that, they'll resort to hunting down demons and using them for magical scrap.
    • The Faithful of Shulpae believe that the various monsters that inhabit the world (especially mummies) are gods that must be honored and regarded with awe. And the best way to do that is to eat them and take their divinity within yourself.
  • Mummy: The Curse has Last Dynasty, Inc, which has found that Sekhem, the energy that reflects the strength of a mummy's connection to life and magic, can be used to create healthier steroids, life extension treatments, and vaccines. They have become a pharmaceutical firm dedicated to making the world a better place, even if it means they have to reap this energy from mummies and the sacred artifacts they protect.
  • Promethean: The Created introduces Insatiate Alchemists in its second edition, mortal practitioners who are capable of working alchemical miracles... by harvesting the substance that naturally accrues in Prometheans as they make progress on their Pilgrimages, effectively robbing Prometheans of some of their successes, if not killing them entirely.

Video Games

• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has The Eye of Helios, a Wave-Motion Gun powered by the remains of the final boss of the first game fueled by Eridium slag. It is destroyed by Moxxi, Roland and Lilith to keep Jack from abusing its power.
• In Chrono Trigger, the Kingdom of Zeal used Lavos as a power source once they discovered it, instead of the sun energy they had been safely using for years.
• City of Heroes has the island of Cap au Diable, named for an oddly-shaped mountain which resembles a pair of horns. Local legend claims that a holy man sealed a demon under the mountain centuries ago. When the resident Mad Scientist goes to sink a geothermal tap, he discovers that the legends are true... and runs the tap right into the bound demon, producing vast quantities of cheap electricity. What could possibly go wrong?
• Disc Creatures: One chapter focuses on a gang killing bubble-like creatures known as Babool to harvest their tears.
• In Doom (2016), the Union Areospace Corporation solved a worldwide energy crisis through the discovery of "argent energy" on Mars, which happens to be harvested directly from Hell itself. On the side, the UAC also dabbles in various ways of militarizing Hell, such as weapons that utilize argent energy, captive demons augmented with cybernetics, and undead super-soldiers animated by argent radiation.
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's revealed that the Qunari have captured the Ataashi, a poisonous High Dragon, for this purpose. They're extracting the venom as an ingredient in gaatlok, a form of gunpowder. The Inquisitor can either kill the Ataashi themselves, or release it and let it have its revenge on its captors. Either way, the production of gaatlok is stopped.
• Dwarf Fortress: With some careful effort and luck, it's possible to capture a giant cave spider. With even more, very careful effort involving a cage-deconstructing mechanism, a drawbridge, a penned animal, fortifications, and other things it's possible to set up a safe giant cave spider silk ranching operation. Giant cave spider silk is an enormously valuable cloth, but risky to gather in the wild (what with the giant cave spiders that produce it still about) and this method mitigates that danger.
• Fallout: Ghouls, humans heavily scarred and deformed by radiation, are healed by further exposure to radioactive emissions. Consequently, in Fallout 3, the Chop Shop infirmary keeps a pair of caged glowing ones — ghouls so irradiated that they became mindless and feral and literally glow green — around as a source of radiation with which to heal ghoul patients.
• Far Cry 5: In Lost on Mars, Hemoleum — a material you collect to turn into weapons and other equipment — is produced by the Arachnides in a way that's compared to honey as it's made by bees. ANNE has been harvesting Hemoleum from them for who knows how long, which might explain why the crabs are so pissed at her.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • It is revealed that one of the many ways in which the magiteknology of Allag was advanced was in their ability to harness primals, semi-sentient masses of aether in the form of ancient gods, as power sources. The artificial moon of Dalamud was part of a project to harness the power of the imprisoned Bahamut to power the entire Allagan civilization through the Crystal Tower, but it only resulted in the sixth Umbral Calamity. The Ultima Weapon, similarly, can increase its power by absorbing primals, although this has the unfortunate side effect of priming the Weapon's Fantastic Nuke.
  • On a lighter note, Alchemy (and crafting of many weapons and medium armor) often involves drops from various monsters. Of note is that one such alchemical reagent is blood, usually taken "secondhand" from mosquito-like enemies and (vampire) bats. One example is listed as "Spoken" Blood, i.e.: blood from Hyur, Lalafell, Roegadyn, and the other "civilized" playable races in the game.
• The insect-sized survival game Grounded uses the remains of enemy invertebrates as crafting materials for armor and weapons, building materials, and cuddly plushies.
• Lobotomy Corporation: The profit margin is entirely based on using horrific abnormalities to harvest Enkephalin from them, which can be used as both as an energy source and a Fantastic Drug.
• Minecraft has pretty much every type of mob drop useful items. Experienced players will even build mob farms to automatically slaughter mobs and harvest their drops.
• Monster Hunter: The games' monster are hunted because they provide nutritious meat, they have body parts with supernatural properties for crafting, there's useful research to made from their remains or else their populations need culling. There's always plenty of zenny to be had when you take down a monster.
• Pokémon Sword and Shield: the source of power for the Galar region, in addition to the source of the Dynamax phenomenon, is Wishing Stars, mysterious stones that emit Galar particles. As it turns out, Wishing Stars are actually fragments of Eternatus, an ancient and powerful Pokémon that nearly destroyed Galar in ancient times before being laid low by Zacian and Zamazenta. Rose, the Chairman of Marcos Cosmos and the game's Big Bad, wants to harness Eternatus as a perpetual power source for Galar. It doesn't work.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: Every single monster giblet you collect can be sold to the R&D lab to be turned into a component for new armor or weapons.
• Ultima VII had Silver Serpent Venom as the local super-steroid of choice; The Avatar could discover and ransack the facility where the Silver Serpents were being milked.
• World of Warcraft: The Undercity has an engorged Blight Worm chained up that periodically vomits out some green goop, which is collected and used by the Apothacarium in developing Blight and maybe other useful concoctions.

Webcomics

• Kill Six Billion Demons: Black Glass is a unique narcotic that can give a high to any species, even angels and devils. It's refined from the corpses of gods.
• The Order of the Stick: A head-regenerating hydra which was incapacitated by the Order has become the source of meat for an enterprising goblin's hydra-head sandwich franchise.
• This Is the Worst Idea You've Ever Had! has Nai'ka blood, which gives the imbiber magic power, at the cost of "burnout". Nai'ka are a race of naive cat-folk who usually don't comprehend hurting people. The practice is illegal, but, since they're not considered people, it continues relatively unchecked.
• Unsounded: Almost all Senet beasts have some parts that retain their Firstness even after being slain, and in some cases parts that can be harvested from the beasts without killing them. As First Materials are very valuable this makes hunting them profitable, and all first materials come from Senet Beasts, it's just that most are mined from the corpses of the mountain ogres which have been dead since before humanity evolved.
• Zombie Ranch: Zombie blood turns out to have a myriad medical and industrial uses, leading to the existence of extensive farming operations where herds of zombies are corralled, fed and harvested to ensure a steady stream of high-quality undead blood.

Web Original

• THE MONUMENT MYTHOS has a likely case in the first episode of its second season, MAIZEMOVIEMAKER, which introduces viewers to a recurring technology conglomerate named Maize Machines. It's technically never fully confirmed, but the heavy implication is that their products used energy derived from a massive interdimensional organism underneath the United States known as the Horned Serpent. This did not end well for anyone.
• Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The titular Mystery Flesh Pit is an indescribably vast, sessile macro-organism inhabiting the Permian Basin in west Texas. Up until 2007, Anodyne were extracting fluid from the Pit's ballast bulbs, mining building materials from its skeleton and marketing the whole thing as a tourist attraction, including guided tours into the thing’s interior.
• One episode of Natural Habitat Shorts, "Frotion", depicts a waxy monkey frog's secretions being used by a beauty store to make lotion.

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