Schnip schnopps are large livestock animals that are kept for their milk and wool. About five feet tall at the shoulder, and up to eight at the head, they're quite large.
Their long, lanky bodies are covered in a soft, downy wool. They have knobbly legs, small tails, and their long necks are "bare" up until just before the head, where a ring of the finest wool grows. The head is also bald, adorned with two "horns" (more like ossicones) and large saggy ears. "Bare" areas are actually covered in a very short
layer of fur, though it looks more like skin from afar. Tanned and treated, schnip skin makes excellent clothing, bookbindings, decorations, and more.
Mainly grazers, schnips will eat most roughage and grass, but can also be seen eating bushes and treebark, thus they are very useful to clear shrubland. Their diet is best supplemented with hay and fruit to ensure healthy, quick growing coats. A well cared for schnip schnopp can be shorn twice a year.
Schnips give birth in the spring to one or two naked kits, though their fur quickly grows in. At this age, they have not "grown their necks in" yet. A wooly schnip with no neck or a short neck are referred to as Beep Bops. Females raise them until they're nearly full size in a year. Schnips are shorn in early spring once they can survive the weather without their coats, usually just before the females begin to give birth. Schnips are highly social creatures, rarely seen alone, and are best kept in flocks of a dozen or more. Complex social relationships are found among large flocks, and
grooming is one of their main methods of communication. Using their blunt teeth and long, nearly prehensile tongues, a schnip that isn't eating is most often found grooming either itself or another schnip, making their wool exceptionally clean.
Females make great quantities of milk once they've had their first kit, and continue to produce happily and readily so long as they're breeding. The milk is rich and nourishing, though flavors vary from aromatic and spicy, to sweet, to pungent, depending on diet, health, and breed. They generally will make more than enough milk for two kits, so they often can nurse their young as well as act as dairy stock. Their wool is obviously used in most of staxie's fabrics.
Their meat is... edible. Schnip schnopps tend to carry a potentially deadly bacteria called trichinoodle, which can be cooked out to make their meat safe. Their meat is gristly, greasy and much like a beef steak,
is best eaten when it hasn't been cooked all the way grey. Schnip schnopp meat is often seen as the poor stax's food for this reason: it is either kind of tasty and unsafe OR difficult to swallow and safe. Schnips produce wool reliably up until their death. They're usually found dead in the field rather than killed at a younger age for food.