actually,your url just reminded me of the boneHILL and my quest to figure out what the fuck it's actually made of. the books say it's prey bones but like: leopardstar,tigerstar and blackstar can all comfortably sit on it,that's a fuck ton of prey bones. as a kid i just fully assumed it was actually a mix of cat bones and the bones of larger animals like deer. and also,how the fuck did tigerstar MANAGE to get enough bones to make a full mountain of them, like logistically.
So you sent me on a goddamn goose chase trying to calculate just exactly how much prey a clan would need, vs how much prey they could actually catch if they were trying to construct a bonehill
Logistically speaking there's no way Tigerstar could have cleaned those bones fast enough to use them for construction purposes. Plus, cats don't naturally pick their meals clean- if they're eating a small animal, they would crunch right through several bones. But let's make some estimates, assuming they're butchering their meat perfectly
First we'll start off with how much prey a clan needs to begin with. Let's use mice as a general metric.
I found this chart breaking down the nutritional value of rodent prey. The first result on DuckDuckGo will tell you a mouse is 30 calories and that's absurdly, hilariously wrong; a mouse is 5.25 calories per gram. A cat needs 110 calories on average a day, so an average 20 gram mouse is enough to feed a single cat. 15 clan cats per clan in TPB on average, times two to make TigerClan, that's 30 cats, 30 mice a day, 900 mice a month.
This is assuming, btw, that warriors hunt a lot less mice than the average feral cat. Irl cats kill just for sport, and can take an average of 8 mice a day (often, these aren't even completely eaten). These numbers would be higher if Tigerstar was telling them to just kill prey for vanity purposes.
So we could actually calculate this based on active hunters instead. In that case, 8 - 10 cats are usually active warriors, we're not counting queens, elders, medcat, so let's assume 8 hunters.
9 x 8 = 72 entire mice a day. This is already insane, but hit that x 30 for the month, you're looking at 2,160 dead mice, and also a pretty devastated ecosystem. This absolutely violates the rule in the code to not waste prey, and only for a construction project, but ok, Tigerstar doesn't care about the code.
Would that actually be enough bones to cover the hill?
A mouse is about 20 grams on average. I do not know how much a mouse skeleton weighs, but a human skeleton is about 20% of your weight so you're just gonna have to bear with me because my NSA agent already thinks I want to eat mice. 2 grams of bones.
Lower estimate: 2g x 900 = about 4 pounds. That's a pile, not a hill.
Higher estimate: 2g x 2,160 = 9 1/2 pounds. That is a bigger pile, but still not a hill.
I think the most realistic way he could build the bonehill would be to use the high stone as a base or construct a new one of mudbricks, and then create a "bone facade" on the outside. That's doable.
I didn't even bother with calculating other types of prey because RiverClan is already at an obvious disadvantage. They hunt fish. Fish bones are extremely thin, they would be GARBAGE for building with, not even mentioning the horrific reek they'd be letting out.
ShadowClan would be pulling all the weight, and forcing RiverClan cats to only hunt mice, water voles, etc, reducing their overall yield
But what about big prey? Ok-- what sorts of big prey can they actually hunt? We only know of two possibilities; sheep and deer. RiverClan is already at a disadvantage here, because they don't hunt terrestrial prey. What about ShadowClan? Probably also at a disadvantage here, as hunters in marshland. We have also never seen them take down an animal so large.
Scavenging, perhaps? They could find deer bones... dog bones... sheep bones maybe.
Logistically there's no way for Tigerstar to have produced enough bones to make a solid hill that three cats can perch on, however, it would be possible to cover a mud facade in bones.
In order to do that, Tigerstar had to be pushing his warriors to break the code and abuse the land they were hunting on, while forcing RiverClan to hunt unsuitable prey, and force his warriors to eat very carefully as to not break any prey bones that need to be used for building.
It may have been helpful for Tigerstar to include the bones of large animals such as sheep and deer from scavenging, or to kill large predatory animals such as foxes and badgers.
All of that said, it's ok because the bonehill was very cool and that's actually the only reason WC needs to do anything, imo.
