>>37926940>I'll just superimpose the ability to talk and consentYou're missing the point of the Harkness Test. It's not that you're superimposing the ability to talk, it's saying if a being displays full sapience, not just sentience, and is of legal sexual age of consent, then it's okay.
Basically, in a world where say cats could talk and displayed the same range of thought and emotion as humans, then there'd certainly be people that'd fuck those cats. In which case, there'd certainly be laws made about age of consent for said cats since their aging process is different from humans.
This all comes back to Pokemon, which is a world FULL of animals that demonstrate human level intellect and emotional depth. Shit like having honor and a drive to accomplish a goal without evolution is a more complex system of thought than any non-sapient creature.
The only issue is that there's a problem with communication so clear consent is hard to determine. But some pokemon scientists are straight up researching how to understand the words Pokemon speak, so they're on their way in that regard.
