Today I’m going
to talk about something I care about passionately and something that
I toyed with in my childhood but quickly grew out of. These things
are Pokemon and animal rights, respectively.
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| This is what they do for fun. |
Pokemon is a game
developed by Nintendo where your goal is to wander through towns as a
ten year old, obtaining creatures equipped with special abilities and
various game stats, such as the ability to withstand physical damage,
and battle them with other Pokemon obtained by competing NPC
trainers. (The careful balancing of types and statistics, plus the
side quests in Pokemon breeding, are excellent introductions to the
wonder of the Sciences, especially economics and biology, but that
can be the subject of a later post.)
An imaginary
reader might now ask: if Pokemon are forced to do battle, does this
make them victims of animal cruelty?
Consider this:
animals fight each other all the time. They fight with members of
other species when they feel like their life is threatened, and they
fight with members of their own species when competing for food or
mates. Often, these fights can result in death or worse. (For
example, it is well known that a male lion, when taking over a
defeated male’s pride, will actually murder all the cubs and any
lionesses he thinks is pregnant. This fact actually made me more
disturbed with The Lion King than when I realized Simba and Nala were
siblings.) The great thing about Pokemon is that the Pokemon are not
allowed to kill each other in battle! The rules of Pokemon battle are
as careful and elegant as the rules of Sumo. They, in fact, actually
restrain and temper the natural violence of animals, so battling with
them is both a release and a safety net for the Pokemon involved.
(Any comparison to cock fights is logically invalid because the real
illegal part of cock fights is taking bets on the outcome. This is
because those bets are difficult to regulate and tax, and the
government is worried about all the money exchanged under the table.)
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| Deep Play: Notes on the Kanto-ese cockfight |
The benefits don’t
end there. In the anime based on the game, the characters seem to
bond very closely with their creatures, even though these creatures
are incapable of holding a conversation as they can only futilely
communicate by repeating their names. This is the bond of warriors,
forged through the heat of battle, similar to what you see in
equestrian training and with competitive show dogs. I don’t have as
much time to play Pokemon as I did in halcyon days, but I still dream
that we could all reconnect with animal-kind by making a society that
treats them more like Pokemon. By battling real animals against each
other, we as humans can gain a sense of kinship with them not felt
since cave times.
I dream of a world
where the Humane Society would not need to kill thousands of cats and
dogs every year because they could be put to good use: competitive
fighting.
Pam is a merciless biologist. She takes apart animals all day just to see how they look on the inside.
[Illustration borrowed from Smogon University.]
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