Why so stingy for selling monster bits?

Last session, my players had their characters drag home a dead young chimera/stone bull hybrid to try to sell it in town as a curio. It did not sell, and they were forced to dump it.

In generally, monster bits are a tertiary form of loot in DF, behind actual found money and cashing in empties - selling weapons and armor.

Why is that?

First off, it's in the books that way.

The DF books highlight the valuable monster bits that can be sold. There are not a lot of them, and they rarely sell for much. A few monsters have very valuable bits - dragons, for example - but most have nothing especially valuable and a few have some moderate value.

So suddenly turning every monster into a pile of bits requires either a generic ruling about value, or assigning specific values to each and every monster. Then, logically, I'd have to apply a percentage off of that based on type and amount of damage. If you reduced the Baby Mira to -8xHP (for example), with -5xHP being auto-death and -10xHP being total destruction, that's going to reduce the value. But what about it dying right away at -1xHP due to a failed HT roll, but, say, you killed it with fire? I could just wave that away, sure, or apply broad-strokes rulings, but again, I'd need to generate a value system for monster corpses.

The next bit is that it would change the game. It would go from "Finding the monsters and kill them, and hopefully find loot!" to "Harvest the latest crop of monsters." The goal goes from exploring a huge dungeon at great risk for wealth and to fight evil, to find any monster and kill it in the most corpse-preserving fashion possible and probably leave enough to repop for next time because they're valuable. I know the arguments about how people used all the bits of whatever animal, and animal tails and furs are useful commodities, and so on . . . but this doesn't sound fun.

Additionally, it would result in a lot of mechanical logistical annoyance. Kill the monster, have a specific weight for it, figure out how to carry it out, and repeat. On top of that, people who wanted to maximize the value might just take the valuable bits - surely the meat of an owlbear is not as valuable as its pelt, and does anyone really want the beak? If not, now we're looking at a system for that, too - how much does the skin weigh, how much time to get it off, which bits are worth which amount, etc.

I talk not from some abstract theory of what would happen, but what has happened repeately in my games even in the face of failure. Even knowing - being flat-out told - it's unlikely anyone would want anything that isn't already highlighted in the books as especially valuable, players tend to try to eke out just a bit more loot with dragged home monster bits not known to be valuable.

So, in my experience, allowing monster bits to be sold as a matter of course would add headache to my end as the GM, and change the nature of the game from "Get rich and fight evil!" to "Farm monsters." And I don't want to play the latter, so I skew the rules to the former even if that annoys players who know real-world people buy bits of dead animals all the time.



So for now, and for all time, 95 to 99 times out of 100, dragging whole monsters home isn't going to pan out. The 1-5%? Live ones, intact, and the special bits called out. If the rules - mine or published - don't say it's valauble, it's not, and no Merchant rolls, Charisma levels, or whatever will change that. Leave the dead lie and keep looking for gold.