(Cisspecies) Meltcat labor is probably pretty fucking cheap compared to humans. They can "breed" at ridiculous rates because they can just split off parts of their body. Feed a meltcat until it's big, then split it into multiple smaller ones. Rinse and repeat. With sufficient food you could probably multiply a human-sized meltcat by 100x in like a week. Meanwhile a new human takes a whole nine months and occupies a whole other human during that time. But that newborn human is far from being able to do any productive labor. You need to raise them for at least around 15 years in general education, and then depending on the complexity of the work train them for months, years or even a whole decade (think of surgeons, for example), before they are fully productive. They'll be a *drain* on labor for the first 20 years of their existence basically. Meltcats, as (partial) shapeshifters, very likely had enough evolutionary pressure on them to adapt quickly to a new form and (re-) learn skills and how to use body parts. So they probably have very malleable and fast-learning brains. You can probably teach a cisspecies meltcat a human job in less than a tenth of the time it would take to teach a human. But humans won't be productive forever. Like many Earth species they have degenerative aging, so after around 40 years of working they'll be too degraded to continue working and will be a net drain on labor again for the next 20 years until they die. Meltcats, meanwhile, can constantly regenerate their cells by melting down old tissue and growing new ones. So they'll stay fit enough to work basically forever. Humans are also pretty much stuck in their default shape, two hands, two feet, two eyes and two ears, about 150 to 190 centimeters tall once fully grown. Any configuration deviations like missing limbs or senses are usually involuntary and unchangeable. Meltcats can take almost any size and shape and highly specialize their body to their job, almost like a dedicated machine. They can also recover from pretty much any injury that doesn't immediately kill them. (But even then they aren't very expensive to replace anyway…) They can probably also arbitrarily scale up their brain size. That all also implies meltcats can be used for many jobs where hiring a whole human would be way too inefficient. Breeding and training a meltcat for a low-complexity task would be extremely cheap, probably on a similar level to a machine. But they can also do human-level (and beyond!) jobs just fine. And they're cute and fluffy! #MeltcatLore