>>20745877>>20748183>What about starter pokemon?Did you know the first pokeball was created out of Apricots within the Johto region sometime between 700 and 400 years ago? And that even today using similar traditional methods that Apricot pokeballs usually take an entire 24 hours of work to make? Capturing and Training pokemon is something we've been doing for hundreds of years, but "modern" pokemon training is something we've only been able to enjoy for the past 30 to 40 years.
At any rate, what you youngsters don't realize is that as soon as Modern industrialization made it possible to mass produce pokemon: it made it possible to capture them en masse. The "starters" were the most lucrative and sought after pokemon in their respective native regions due to their unique natural abilities, the sheer number of them, their three stages of growth and development, and their strength combined with the ease of raising them. Everyone caught them and they kept catching them until we very quickly found out that we were running OUT of bulbasaurs, treekos, and chimchars in the wild, why? They dominated their environments in such numbers because they practiced "quality" over "quantity": each "starter" Pokemon exhibits extended periods of child care with slow, but steady development to more mature forms, i.e: the three evolution stages.
What you see today with only licensed Pokemon trainers receiving starters is a combination of heritage and a breeding back program. Starter pokemon are now only found in breeding programs and are usually kept in private reserves where their juveniles are sent to licensed pokemon trainers whom show enough promise to make it into the nationals.. It's become something of a tradition and the various regions are no strangers to nationalism and dick waving contests: the more trainers that show up with their regions "starters" the better those regions look.
