Even more baffling, sometimes the two animal character types are mixed within one fictional world. Take Disney: Goofy is a doglike humanoid character. Pluto, in the same world, is a non-verbal pet dog.
There's a Thanksgiving episode of Minnie's Bowtique in which Daisy Duck gets her head stuck in the cavity of a raw turkey and honestly it's nightmare fuel.
They are not even consistent with some of the characters. Pluto is always a pet but sometimes Chip and Dale are intelligent vermin and sometimes they are fully sentient and civilized.
The one that baffles me is Scooby Doo - he's a dog, but he seems to talk in a mumbly way, and he only seems slightly less intelligent than his human best friend, a cowardly teenaged stoner.
And there were other talking dogs on Scooby Doo (including some that spoke more clearly than Scooby), but no other talking animals, right? There were occasionally just regular cats on the show. And Scooby appeared on Laff A Lympics, which had all the other talking animals characters from Hanna-Barbera.
A Spot book (very inconsistent series to begin with for this) for the Australian market that I own has Spot and family run into several Australian animals - including a dingo, possibly the same species as Spot, but clearly depicted as non-anthropomorphic animal!
Oh this is my favorite topic ever. I talk about this often, one of the reasons being that I gave up on writing an "animal-people" story as a child just because of these struggles.
I don't know if anyone's mentioned it in the comments but the biggest perpetrator of this nonsense is Maurice Sendak's Little Bear series (books and cartoon). Little Bear is naked but his parents (Mother and Father Bear) are fully clothed and have jobs. HOWEVER Little Bear's friends are all ADULT animals who are nevertheless naked, like himself, a baby bear. None of them have jobs besides being cats or ducks or owls. And there is one human child character included in his friends. Then there is a pet robin featured in an episode, but despite being a bird, does not speak or have sentience in the way friend Owl or Duck have. There is no consistency whatsoever. It's mind-boggling.
In Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis actually explained that Aslan (the Lion God of this Universe) had given the gift of speech and sentience to certain animals in Narnia, but not to others. The human-like animals grew larger and in one case a talking horse even sprouted wings.
So I applaud Lewis laying down this explanation lest he be included on the list of inconsistencies compiled by a neurodivergent thirtysomething substacker.
Narnian society even clearly makes a distinction between animals and TALKING animals. Talking animals are about equivalent to humans in terms of how they're treated.
THANK YOU I have been making a speech about this re: the show Arthur to anyone who will listen for DECADES. Arthur is an aardvark, ok, and his best friend is a rabbit, sure, and one of their classmates is a dog who wears clothes and goes to school, but Arthur ALSO has a pet dog who he walks on a lead?? Make it make sense.
Found it. There's this clip of the animators of Cars talking about how they struggled to make Lightning McQueen hold up a map and then decided, fuck it, he doesn't need to.
This actually does get addressed in the show. The final episode reveals that Arthur and his friends were humans the entire time, and that the talking animal versions of them we see are in-universe drawings made by the future adult Arthur, rather than the characters' real appearances.
However, there was no explanation for the inconsistency in the books that the show was based on.
Pokemon is the most disorienting version of this. Pokemon are like animals, but somehow more than animals, but not people, except when they are basically at human levels of intelligence (Mewtwo) -- but wait! There are also just regular animals in the Pokemon universe (if you watched the anime).
I think it is supposed to be more analogous to combat sports like boxing and MMA, where there are strict rules to reduce risk of death and severe injury. Trainers are supposed to withdraw Pokemon if there is a risk they could get really hurt. During Ash's fight with Blaine he withdraws Pikachu for that reason. Blaine states that if Ash hadn't withdrawn Pikachu he would have been disqualified for pushing his Pokemon too hard.
I just saw a video making the point the reason why the only live-action Pokemon movie is Detective Pikachu is because otherwise you get into the dogfighting problem if you make a straight live-action Pokemon movie.
As a kid I got confused because back in the original season, they were bigger on saying that the powers they had were for hunting or defense from predators. I was like, “so they do eat each other?”. I haven't watched the series since like season three or whatever but I feel I remember them not really using the terms “predator” and “prey” much after the show blew the fuck up
The recent games sometimes still refer to Pokemon hunting prey. Some Pokemon (Gengar, Victreebel, and Cacturne that I can recall) are also implied to eat humans.
What about Meowth? I think that might be the only pokemon who verbalizes something other than their name (other than Mewtwo). Meowth and Mewtwo, what a combo
In the series it's explained he learned to speak at the cost of not being able to do the money generating fight move meowths usually can do, which somewhat implies any Pokémon could be taught to speak if they weren't being trained to fight.
I am 100% on board with your Peppa Pig "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" hate.
I'm fairly certain in the TV show there were also non-verbal kangaroos in the zoo - which does align with your point about them being more "primitive" animals - marsupials being an ancient clade of mammal, and roos being renowned for being stupid as all hell.
That aside, the real sins of Peppa Pig are the continual fat-shaming of Daddy Pig, it's disgusting, and, even more egregiously, the "Haha, Daddy Pig is incompetent and we should ridicule him, silly Daddy Pig, thank goodness for Mummy Pig, at least there's one adult in the relationship" motif.
Bluey's Dad Bandit is one of the few good animal representations of fatherhood on screen.
And yep, I'm a grown arse man who has Very Strong Opinions about children's television, and yes, I've massively overthought the emotional abuse Daddy Pig endures. I acknowledge that.
But I object to it because I think it perpetuates harmful and outdated gender stereotypes around parenting.
The 80s called, they want their Incompetent Sitcom Dad trope back.
And the fat-shaming can piss right off, don't be teaching kids to ridicule people/animals because they're overweight.
I will not stand for Daddy Pig slander. He's a respected architect with expertise in concrete renowned all over Europe, but he is humble enough just to be a dad with few airs ("im a bit of an expert at xyz") when he's around the fam.
I feel like none of the people complaining watch much Peppa Pig at all. I rather like the show and enjoy it better than Bluey which feels much more moralizing and telling you what to think.
Yeah, my son only likes Peppa Pig and Little Bear, so I've seen Peppa several times over. I genuinely enjoy it! I did discover recently that there's a B tier of Peppa on YouTube (I think it's called Peppa Pig Tales) with different writers and voice actors. I've never watched those, but I always wonder if the Peppa haters are seeing that and not the flagship
Oh I'm not saying he's incompetent, he's certainly a loving father, although I was unaware of the full extent of his career, but after googling it, I'm impressed - but he is treated as incompetent by his family members routinely - the phrase "silly Daddy pig" is thrown about far too often.
All I'm saying is that if Daddy Pig leaves Mummy Pig after an emotional affair at work with Mummy Cat, I would fully understand - if one episode he hits the gym and loses the big belly, Mummy Pig better be careful.
I don't see that at all. Daddy pig seems very secure in his body and his career as a respected architect, concrete researcher, and puddle-jumping record-holder. Kids say insensitive things, but his confidence allows him to take it, especially since he knows they love him.
Mummy pig may be a respected children's book author and skier, but she isn't portrayed as hyper-competent. She can't manage a trampoline without getting stuck in a tree and needing to be rescued.
I always wonder if this is a US vs UK thing. Yes, there are sometimes comments about Daddy Pig having a big tummy, but they're just matter of fact and not meant to be unkind. (I mean, he's a pig!) I think Americans are just more sensitive about body talk. And I say that as an American who was SHOCKED by how frank the hosts were on the original British what not to wear.
This has been a serious issue ever since Pluto and Goofy, who are ostensibly the same species.
Also, I love the Mo Willems Pigeon books, but there’s one where the Pigeon and the Duckling casually debate whether hot dogs taste like chicken, and it’s one of the darkest things I’ve ever come across in a kids’ book.
The movie Madagascar struggled with this issue, where it was actually central to the plot. The lion is a carnivore, but he's run away with animals he is inherently supposed to eat and is slowly starving. In the end the animals figure out that they can feed him fish, which are apparently not anthropomorphic . . . except that early in the movie a bug shows evidence of sentience. It was a total copout.
On the other end of the spectrum, David Sedaris' "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" contains some fairly bleak content because of the ramifications of sentient beings eating each other. Sedaris gets it, and should produce all children's entertainment.
I mean, we're equally inconsistent when it comes to *real* animals. Why are dogs and cats quasi-anthropomorphized companions while equally-smart pigs get crammed into factory farms and slaughtered? A little more consistency could prevent a lot of suffering.
It's pretty simple; Both are predators that are not very efficient to breed for meat anyway and who could do useful services for us. Insofar as we had a positive relationship with pre-dog wolf ancestors, it was a cooperative "we hunt together, you get a share of the food". And later we literally bred them to specifically be good at being our companions.
Pigs, on the other hand, have always been primarily hunted for meat in their wild, and at some point we realized we can catch them now and just eat them later (especially in winter or other difficult times). Which allowed us to realize further that we can actually keep a bunch of them and breed them to be even more efficient meat-generators.
Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer a world where we just generate meat directly for consumption and forego all possible ethical concerns entirely, but treating them *differently* seems perfectly sensible to me.
Descriptively, I think you're spot-on. But normatively, I still think it's wrong to lavish attention on a dog but then buy pork chops from a factory-farmed pig who's just as smart and emotionally-rich as a dog. I appreciate your thoughtful take, though.
"Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food...till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs. Then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you."
According to many philosophers and religious leaders. E.g., the Buddha’s teaching “Do not kill or cause harm to sentient beings” is often interpreted to promote vegetarianism.
Yes, it's illegal to slaughter horses for meat in many US states. I have no problem with people rescuing horses from slaughter, but I don't think this should be a law.
I believe horse slaughter for food has been illegal since 2006 nationwide. Back then, the GOP majority in the House needed the vote of a Representative from a major horse racing district in order to pass the budget and he made a horse slaughter ban a requirement for his vote.
>monkeys are far more evolved and intelligent than most mammals
Gaaaahhhh! No, no, no! That’s not how it works!
More intelligent? Yes. More evolved? No!
All modern animals are descended from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) that lived sometime over half a billion years ago, and all animal lineages have had the exact same amount of time to evolve since then. The idea that more complex or intelligent organisms are more evolved is one of those misconceptions that drives evolutionary biologists nuts! Evolution rewards reproductive success, not complexity, and if a simple, dumb earthworm or beetle is good at reproducing, guess what, its descendants a hundred million years later will still be dumb earthworms and beetles! It doesn’t mean they’re somehow less evolved!
Don Rosa, one of the writers of the "Donald Duck" comics that the "Ducktales," cartoon was based on, has said that he always considered "talking animals" just another way to draw human beings. He considered all the animals he drew that could talk to basically be humans. He said that if Donald Duck was ever in a situation where he needed a feather for something, it would never occur to him to just have Donald reach down and pluck it off of his own body.
The Ducktales cartoon mostly follows this logic. There are a lot of dog people in the show, like the villainous Beagle Boys, but also some regular pet dogs. The 2017 version of the show does a gag where the anthropomorphic ducks feed some regular ducks in a park while a space alien character looks on in confusion. The one time the animal nature of the characters has any impact on the plot is when Della Duck leaves on a space mission before her children have hatched from their eggs, and as a result returns and is upset that Donald gave them the wrong names after they hatched. It's hard to make that analogous to humans, humans generally aren't physically fit for space missions right after giving birth, but we also don't wait to name our kids until months after they are born.
So the anthropomorphic animals are like the animal version of Rachel Dolezal? They just so firmly think of themselves as human that it doesn't occur to them that they are animals?
It's more like their being animals is non-diegetic. The audience is the only one who sees Donald as an animal, the same way we are the only ones who see the word balloons in his comics and hear the background music in his shows. In-universe he is a human being whose surname happens to be "Duck." He looks like a duck to the audience, but not to himself.
I think it's best to understand these as being dystopian futures in which furryism has become the dominant cultural form. They aren't really animals, just humans that constantly dress like them, and real animals still exist alongside them. Also solves the disturbing aspects of interspecies romance.
Even more baffling, sometimes the two animal character types are mixed within one fictional world. Take Disney: Goofy is a doglike humanoid character. Pluto, in the same world, is a non-verbal pet dog.
There's a Thanksgiving episode of Minnie's Bowtique in which Daisy Duck gets her head stuck in the cavity of a raw turkey and honestly it's nightmare fuel.
Imagine a world where some humans are humans and some are subhuman pets. Walt Disney, you kinky dog, you!
They are not even consistent with some of the characters. Pluto is always a pet but sometimes Chip and Dale are intelligent vermin and sometimes they are fully sentient and civilized.
Yes! Mickey Mouse is the most egregious example of this phenomenon
Pluto: don’t kink shame me!
The one that baffles me is Scooby Doo - he's a dog, but he seems to talk in a mumbly way, and he only seems slightly less intelligent than his human best friend, a cowardly teenaged stoner.
That's excused because dogs start to resemble their owners and vice versa.
And there were other talking dogs on Scooby Doo (including some that spoke more clearly than Scooby), but no other talking animals, right? There were occasionally just regular cats on the show. And Scooby appeared on Laff A Lympics, which had all the other talking animals characters from Hanna-Barbera.
Scrappy was full on sentient with a human-like voice and full human-like cognition.
A Spot book (very inconsistent series to begin with for this) for the Australian market that I own has Spot and family run into several Australian animals - including a dingo, possibly the same species as Spot, but clearly depicted as non-anthropomorphic animal!
Oh this is my favorite topic ever. I talk about this often, one of the reasons being that I gave up on writing an "animal-people" story as a child just because of these struggles.
I don't know if anyone's mentioned it in the comments but the biggest perpetrator of this nonsense is Maurice Sendak's Little Bear series (books and cartoon). Little Bear is naked but his parents (Mother and Father Bear) are fully clothed and have jobs. HOWEVER Little Bear's friends are all ADULT animals who are nevertheless naked, like himself, a baby bear. None of them have jobs besides being cats or ducks or owls. And there is one human child character included in his friends. Then there is a pet robin featured in an episode, but despite being a bird, does not speak or have sentience in the way friend Owl or Duck have. There is no consistency whatsoever. It's mind-boggling.
In Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis actually explained that Aslan (the Lion God of this Universe) had given the gift of speech and sentience to certain animals in Narnia, but not to others. The human-like animals grew larger and in one case a talking horse even sprouted wings.
So I applaud Lewis laying down this explanation lest he be included on the list of inconsistencies compiled by a neurodivergent thirtysomething substacker.
Narnian society even clearly makes a distinction between animals and TALKING animals. Talking animals are about equivalent to humans in terms of how they're treated.
With the notable exception of the Telmarine dynasty, of course 😊
THANK YOU I have been making a speech about this re: the show Arthur to anyone who will listen for DECADES. Arthur is an aardvark, ok, and his best friend is a rabbit, sure, and one of their classmates is a dog who wears clothes and goes to school, but Arthur ALSO has a pet dog who he walks on a lead?? Make it make sense.
You either have the smarts to be treated as an equal or you sleep on the floor and get walked naked on a leash. Elwood City is a harsh world
Is that the show where he has long animal ears but still wears human style headphones that dont pipe the music into his long ears?
I wonder if halfway through, the animator went "wait, what the hell am I drawing?"
Found it. There's this clip of the animators of Cars talking about how they struggled to make Lightning McQueen hold up a map and then decided, fuck it, he doesn't need to.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yusZ__hr7x4&pp=0gcJCcQBo7VqN5tD
Im sure the artists have like a dozen concepts for headphones that would make sense for each animal but decided to not complicate it for the kids lol.
This actually does get addressed in the show. The final episode reveals that Arthur and his friends were humans the entire time, and that the talking animal versions of them we see are in-universe drawings made by the future adult Arthur, rather than the characters' real appearances.
However, there was no explanation for the inconsistency in the books that the show was based on.
Pokemon is the most disorienting version of this. Pokemon are like animals, but somehow more than animals, but not people, except when they are basically at human levels of intelligence (Mewtwo) -- but wait! There are also just regular animals in the Pokemon universe (if you watched the anime).
Pokemon really upset me bc how is it not basically dogfighting but with more intelligent and emotional dogs
I think it is supposed to be more analogous to combat sports like boxing and MMA, where there are strict rules to reduce risk of death and severe injury. Trainers are supposed to withdraw Pokemon if there is a risk they could get really hurt. During Ash's fight with Blaine he withdraws Pikachu for that reason. Blaine states that if Ash hadn't withdrawn Pikachu he would have been disqualified for pushing his Pokemon too hard.
I just saw a video making the point the reason why the only live-action Pokemon movie is Detective Pikachu is because otherwise you get into the dogfighting problem if you make a straight live-action Pokemon movie.
But they really, really like the fighting! That makes it completely different, you know.
The pokemon yearn for the bloodsport mines.
As a kid I got confused because back in the original season, they were bigger on saying that the powers they had were for hunting or defense from predators. I was like, “so they do eat each other?”. I haven't watched the series since like season three or whatever but I feel I remember them not really using the terms “predator” and “prey” much after the show blew the fuck up
Plus, if you run out of pokemon while travelling you... fall unconscious. For reasons.
The recent games sometimes still refer to Pokemon hunting prey. Some Pokemon (Gengar, Victreebel, and Cacturne that I can recall) are also implied to eat humans.
I vaguely remember a newish ghost Pokémon stealing the souls of kids.
Well, pokedex entries are strange and frankly shouldn't be considered reliable
Also a very funny universe where even being a vegan has moral consequences, since flowers and plants are pokemon too sometimes
What about Meowth? I think that might be the only pokemon who verbalizes something other than their name (other than Mewtwo). Meowth and Mewtwo, what a combo
Imagine being Mewtwo and the only fellow Pokemon you can speak to us Meowth.
In the series it's explained he learned to speak at the cost of not being able to do the money generating fight move meowths usually can do, which somewhat implies any Pokémon could be taught to speak if they weren't being trained to fight.
That makes it all much darker.
The early seasons had regular animals, but subsequent ones retconned it so humans were the only non-Pokemon animals.
Mew-two was a science experiment creation like Frankenstein so his existence is still consistent with Pokémon are animals.
I am 100% on board with your Peppa Pig "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" hate.
I'm fairly certain in the TV show there were also non-verbal kangaroos in the zoo - which does align with your point about them being more "primitive" animals - marsupials being an ancient clade of mammal, and roos being renowned for being stupid as all hell.
That aside, the real sins of Peppa Pig are the continual fat-shaming of Daddy Pig, it's disgusting, and, even more egregiously, the "Haha, Daddy Pig is incompetent and we should ridicule him, silly Daddy Pig, thank goodness for Mummy Pig, at least there's one adult in the relationship" motif.
Bluey's Dad Bandit is one of the few good animal representations of fatherhood on screen.
And yep, I'm a grown arse man who has Very Strong Opinions about children's television, and yes, I've massively overthought the emotional abuse Daddy Pig endures. I acknowledge that.
But I object to it because I think it perpetuates harmful and outdated gender stereotypes around parenting.
The 80s called, they want their Incompetent Sitcom Dad trope back.
And the fat-shaming can piss right off, don't be teaching kids to ridicule people/animals because they're overweight.
I will not stand for Daddy Pig slander. He's a respected architect with expertise in concrete renowned all over Europe, but he is humble enough just to be a dad with few airs ("im a bit of an expert at xyz") when he's around the fam.
Hard agree. I feel like it's become a meme to complain about Daddy Pig being incompetent, but really he's more of an absent minded professor type.
I feel like none of the people complaining watch much Peppa Pig at all. I rather like the show and enjoy it better than Bluey which feels much more moralizing and telling you what to think.
Yeah, my son only likes Peppa Pig and Little Bear, so I've seen Peppa several times over. I genuinely enjoy it! I did discover recently that there's a B tier of Peppa on YouTube (I think it's called Peppa Pig Tales) with different writers and voice actors. I've never watched those, but I always wonder if the Peppa haters are seeing that and not the flagship
Even peppa pig tales are fine tbh. They just don’t have complex plots and are heavily filler.
There's a fantastic article that takes Daddy Pig's portrayal even more seriously than I do... https://thespinoff.co.nz/pop-culture/11-01-2017/for-gods-sake-daddy-pig-get-your-shit-together
Oh I'm not saying he's incompetent, he's certainly a loving father, although I was unaware of the full extent of his career, but after googling it, I'm impressed - but he is treated as incompetent by his family members routinely - the phrase "silly Daddy pig" is thrown about far too often.
All I'm saying is that if Daddy Pig leaves Mummy Pig after an emotional affair at work with Mummy Cat, I would fully understand - if one episode he hits the gym and loses the big belly, Mummy Pig better be careful.
Do americans have trouble with the portrayal of a dad who doesn't say "because I said so" or something?
" the "Haha, Daddy Pig is incompetent and we should ridicule him, silly Daddy Pig, thank goodness for Mummy Pig"
I banned some books from this. I think it was some of the versions of the Bernstein Bears.
We quite clearly wouldn't accept sexist books where the mom was always an idiot but the wise dad would have to come in to save the day.
I don't see that at all. Daddy pig seems very secure in his body and his career as a respected architect, concrete researcher, and puddle-jumping record-holder. Kids say insensitive things, but his confidence allows him to take it, especially since he knows they love him.
Mummy pig may be a respected children's book author and skier, but she isn't portrayed as hyper-competent. She can't manage a trampoline without getting stuck in a tree and needing to be rescued.
I always wonder if this is a US vs UK thing. Yes, there are sometimes comments about Daddy Pig having a big tummy, but they're just matter of fact and not meant to be unkind. (I mean, he's a pig!) I think Americans are just more sensitive about body talk. And I say that as an American who was SHOCKED by how frank the hosts were on the original British what not to wear.
Yeah I think I'm more on board with British TV show sensibilities because I watched a lot of it growing up in India.
CHH really needs to watch Bojack Horseman, especially that one episode where the anthropomorphic chicken runs a poultry farm.
I feel like Bojack Horseman is highly CHH-adjacent and she would either love it or despise it.
This has been a serious issue ever since Pluto and Goofy, who are ostensibly the same species.
Also, I love the Mo Willems Pigeon books, but there’s one where the Pigeon and the Duckling casually debate whether hot dogs taste like chicken, and it’s one of the darkest things I’ve ever come across in a kids’ book.
The movie Madagascar struggled with this issue, where it was actually central to the plot. The lion is a carnivore, but he's run away with animals he is inherently supposed to eat and is slowly starving. In the end the animals figure out that they can feed him fish, which are apparently not anthropomorphic . . . except that early in the movie a bug shows evidence of sentience. It was a total copout.
On the other end of the spectrum, David Sedaris' "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" contains some fairly bleak content because of the ramifications of sentient beings eating each other. Sedaris gets it, and should produce all children's entertainment.
Imagine if Madagascar and Finding Nemo existed in the same universe...
I forget the exact details but this also bothered me in The Wild Robot.
When a writer goes off on a minor peeve with the same intensity they address world shattering events, this is my favorite genre
I mean, we're equally inconsistent when it comes to *real* animals. Why are dogs and cats quasi-anthropomorphized companions while equally-smart pigs get crammed into factory farms and slaughtered? A little more consistency could prevent a lot of suffering.
It's pretty simple; Both are predators that are not very efficient to breed for meat anyway and who could do useful services for us. Insofar as we had a positive relationship with pre-dog wolf ancestors, it was a cooperative "we hunt together, you get a share of the food". And later we literally bred them to specifically be good at being our companions.
Pigs, on the other hand, have always been primarily hunted for meat in their wild, and at some point we realized we can catch them now and just eat them later (especially in winter or other difficult times). Which allowed us to realize further that we can actually keep a bunch of them and breed them to be even more efficient meat-generators.
Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer a world where we just generate meat directly for consumption and forego all possible ethical concerns entirely, but treating them *differently* seems perfectly sensible to me.
Descriptively, I think you're spot-on. But normatively, I still think it's wrong to lavish attention on a dog but then buy pork chops from a factory-farmed pig who's just as smart and emotionally-rich as a dog. I appreciate your thoughtful take, though.
"Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food...till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs. Then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you."
-Benjamin Franklin
https://www.ushistory.org/Franklin/autobiography/page18.htm
But carnivorous fish don’t have a choice. They must eat other fish or starve. Humans can thrive on a vegetarian diet with B12 supplements.
Because we should hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than animals do? :)
Should according to who?
According to many philosophers and religious leaders. E.g., the Buddha’s teaching “Do not kill or cause harm to sentient beings” is often interpreted to promote vegetarianism.
Generally we tend not to eat predators. Probably because of the risks of parasites? I'm unsure as to why.
But there's plenty of people who don't eat pigs for similar reasons.
Part of it is parasites, but it's also really hard and inefficient to raise predators for food.
I think all the tasty ones went extinct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions
Yes, it's illegal to slaughter horses for meat in many US states. I have no problem with people rescuing horses from slaughter, but I don't think this should be a law.
I believe horse slaughter for food has been illegal since 2006 nationwide. Back then, the GOP majority in the House needed the vote of a Representative from a major horse racing district in order to pass the budget and he made a horse slaughter ban a requirement for his vote.
That's how the sausage is made, I guess
Well certainly it's not made out of horses.
https://tastehungary.com/journal/chomping-at-the-bit-a-hungarian-horse-sausage-primer/
If you crack open the history books, you'll find we're also pretty inconsistent about assigning personhood to *real people*.
>monkeys are far more evolved and intelligent than most mammals
Gaaaahhhh! No, no, no! That’s not how it works!
More intelligent? Yes. More evolved? No!
All modern animals are descended from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) that lived sometime over half a billion years ago, and all animal lineages have had the exact same amount of time to evolve since then. The idea that more complex or intelligent organisms are more evolved is one of those misconceptions that drives evolutionary biologists nuts! Evolution rewards reproductive success, not complexity, and if a simple, dumb earthworm or beetle is good at reproducing, guess what, its descendants a hundred million years later will still be dumb earthworms and beetles! It doesn’t mean they’re somehow less evolved!
/pedant hat off
Thank you! That was driving me up the wall.
Also all of these shows/books are fully aware of the incongruity and having fun with it, and I'm not sure all the commenters here realise that?
This is apparently the Goofy vs Pluto phenomenon, where both are dogs but one is humanized.
I excuse everything away in SpongeBob by saying Bikini Atoll is where they conducted nuclear experiments, so everything got just a little weird.
But in some episode I saw they had a campfire. A CAMPFIRE ON THE OCEAN FLOOR.
Then in Peppa Pig, Emily and Edmund elephant are the same size as all the kids, as is Mandy Mouse, but somehow, Gerald Giraffe is famously tall.
Don Rosa, one of the writers of the "Donald Duck" comics that the "Ducktales," cartoon was based on, has said that he always considered "talking animals" just another way to draw human beings. He considered all the animals he drew that could talk to basically be humans. He said that if Donald Duck was ever in a situation where he needed a feather for something, it would never occur to him to just have Donald reach down and pluck it off of his own body.
The Ducktales cartoon mostly follows this logic. There are a lot of dog people in the show, like the villainous Beagle Boys, but also some regular pet dogs. The 2017 version of the show does a gag where the anthropomorphic ducks feed some regular ducks in a park while a space alien character looks on in confusion. The one time the animal nature of the characters has any impact on the plot is when Della Duck leaves on a space mission before her children have hatched from their eggs, and as a result returns and is upset that Donald gave them the wrong names after they hatched. It's hard to make that analogous to humans, humans generally aren't physically fit for space missions right after giving birth, but we also don't wait to name our kids until months after they are born.
So the anthropomorphic animals are like the animal version of Rachel Dolezal? They just so firmly think of themselves as human that it doesn't occur to them that they are animals?
It's more like their being animals is non-diegetic. The audience is the only one who sees Donald as an animal, the same way we are the only ones who see the word balloons in his comics and hear the background music in his shows. In-universe he is a human being whose surname happens to be "Duck." He looks like a duck to the audience, but not to himself.
Well that describes all humans doesn’t it?
Hahhahaha indeed.
Now these are the takes I come here for.
I think it's best to understand these as being dystopian futures in which furryism has become the dominant cultural form. They aren't really animals, just humans that constantly dress like them, and real animals still exist alongside them. Also solves the disturbing aspects of interspecies romance.