I’ve stated a few times that vampires, like people, are different from one another. They have their own personalities, goals, interests, desires, cultural upbringing and even religious beliefs. Also like people, the ideas they have may be wildly different and in many cases may even run contrary to one another. There is however one specific interest that all vampires have in common – the thirst for human blood.
As humans, we too need to find sustenance. In ages past we would spend our days foraging for nuts and berries or gathering in large groups to hunt dangerous animals that don’t want to be hunted. If we weren’t strong, fast, clever, cautious, and in many cases lucky, then it was possible that the very things we hunted would in turn hunt us. Now jump forward a few thousand years and look at the change. When I get up in the morning, I go to the cupboard and pour out a bowl of cereal. Later, when I want a steak for dinner, all I need to do is drive down to the supermarket to buy one. If I’m feeling particularly lazy and self-indulgent, I can even make a phone call to have a delicious pizza delivered to my door. I am not at risk of coming back from the grocery store empty handed after a long day of shopping and I’m not at risk of my Chinese takeout getting the upper hand and killing me during a moment of carelessness. Sure I still need to work and earn money so that I can buy my meals, but on the whole we’ve done about all we can to make the process of acquiring food as quick, easy and safe as we possibly can.
Now the question I have is: Why wouldn’t vampires do the same thing? If it’s in our best interest that we work together to ensure a safe, clean and docile food supply, then wouldn’t it follow that it’s in their best interests as well? Here are a few more questions, a comparative balance of extremes, to give you something to think about when it comes to the idea of you being food.
- Is it in a vampire’s best interest that the majority of human society be well armed and well trained in personal defense or that we’re helpless to the point where we wouldn’t know what to do if we were physically attacked?
- Is it in a vampire’s best interest that the majority of human society is financially secure, able to provide for themselves and their families and exercise the choices allowed by financial independence, or that we’re poor and needy; dependent upon others for our daily bread the way chickens depend on the ranch hand for their daily corn?
- Is it in a vampire’s best interest that the majority of human society be mobile; able to walk, drive or fly wherever we want, whenever we want, or that we’re confined to a cage under the watchful eye of a jailor, unable to stray too far from the rest of the herd?
- Is it in a vampire’s best interest that the majority of human society be intelligent, creative, well educated and confident; able to make our own decisions and exercise our own judgment about what’s best for us and our families or that we remain stupid, uneducated, uninformed, unable to think for ourselves and receptive to outside instruction?
- Is it in a vampire’s best interest that the majority of human society be clear headed and aware or spend the majority of their time drunk or high; oblivious to what’s going on around them?
- And here’s a simple one: Is it in a vampire’s best interest that we have one or two children per family, or that we breed like rabbits and triple our numbers every generation?
Crushing human society back to a dark ages feudal system where 99% of the population is poor, hungry, overworked, tired and vulnerable isn’t evil per se (assuming they’re not doing so for the pure enjoyment of it) but it does make good sense for the standpoint of protecting their food supply. Vampires may not see eye to eye on much else, but cultivating an abundant source of easy prey is something that I’m sure they can all agree on.
Here's a human blood farm from the movie Daybreakers. I can't think of a source of fiction that summarizes what vampires would do with us if given the chance better than this.