>>55420890They're often shown - in the games, in the various anime, and in pretty much every spinoff - to have far greater intelligence than an animal, so this is closer to xenophilia than anything else. Hell, in the original RGBY, real animals actually existed, and Pokemon were a relatively new thing that recently appeared in the world, hence why they were such a mystery - there were many implications that they actually came from space and were literal aliens that were worming their way into the world's natural ecosystems, with things like the fossils and the Ruins of Alph in GSC deepening the mystery by implying that they've shown up before in the past, apparently in waves.
The direction seems to have changed around Gen 3, but the original vision was clearly that hey were more than just dumb animals, especially since it was established at that point that the games took place in the real world circa '96-'97 and actual animals already existed. They don't act like animals, they can comprehend human speech (even in the games), many 'dex entries point out that they do things a normal animal wouldn't (like how the Clefairy worship the moon and literally keep track of the day of the week so they can come out and ritualistically perform a dance, something you most definitely wouldn't catch an animal like a dog or cat being able to do. You've also got pokemon who train to actual martial arts, and later games have pokemon who are stated to literally be the ghosts of humans, among other weirdness). The things are very distinctly different from animals and pets, and very clearly have human-lever intelligence in most cases, regardless of what the PR guys have to say about it.
