>>46569257>equal, with respect, and honest trustIs it supposed to be the optimal and common way to treat pokemon to achieve greater goals? Old humans were punished by pokemon for abusing them on self-interest.
Most trainers (even the insane and unhinged ones) continuously show interest about the happiness of their pokemon, like doing their best to win senseless battles for them.
After all, trainers do treat humans worse than they treat their pokemon team, not like a tool, but as a mutual extension of themselves. In addition, trainers do very weird things to satisfy those pokemon, and those pokemon start to assimilate their trainers behaviour and values day by day. "Pokemon grooming" would be extremely rare and more frowned upon than grooming a human person. Of course there are exceptions to the rule like people abusing/stealing (or killing for energy) pokemon on the game/series/manga but those are plot related, doesn't reflect the experiences of the common folk on those universes.
There is a thing that always bother me is that a few times a bad person can get a pokemon to be bad like its trainer if treated fairly, like a reflexion. But pokemon lore show us that pokemon can rebel to their masters (and make them wait 3000 years).