Summary

• In the early episodes of Pokémon, real animals coexisted with Pokémon, leading to questions about their disappearance.
• Animals were gradually phased out of the Pokémon world as the number of Pokémon increased.
• The omission of real animals in later episodes raises ethical concerns about food sources in the Pokémon world.

The Pokémon anime has changed a lot over the years, but one of the biggest and weirdest changes over the years has to do with something that causes some real confusion in of the series canon: the inclusion of real animals. Animals appear in the first season of Pokémon with some regularity, raising a lot of questions, especially when it comes to what happened to them.

While there are now over a thousand Pokémon, that obviously wasn't always the case; when the anime first debuted, there were "only" 151 different species available. There's also an implication, although it's never stated outright, that the existence of Pokémon is a fairly new occurrence. Instead of Pokémon existing in place of animals, early episodes instead depict Pokémon existing alongside animals. In the first episode, for example, Ash sees a Pidgey pulling a worm out of the ground and eating it.

So if animals existed in the Pokémon anime world in the very beginning... what happened to them?

Pokémon's Biggest Retcon is Eliminating Animals

Are Pokémon making animals go extinct?

While animals mostly appear in backgrounds or in minor shots like the Pidgey mentioned above, they've sometimes occupied a bigger role in the story. In the episode "The Ghost of Maiden's Peak," a Gastly morphs itself into a mongoose, as it sees a mongoose as a natural predator of snakes, like Ekans. Animals are sometimes seen in the context of food as well, with a cooked lobster visible in the episode "Battle Aboard the St. Anne." Fish are perhaps the most common animal to be seen early on, often in the background of underwater or aquarium shots, usually alongside Pokémon.

There are other moments which imply the existence of animals, such as the use of colloquial phrases that reference animals, or the fact that the Orange Islands' badges are based on seashells, which suggest the existence of clams and other mollusks. While it's rare for these moments to be central to the story, it was a consistent presence throughout the early seasons. References to real animals became rarer as the number of Pokémon increased, but it never fully went away; as late as Sun & Moon, the show would still show the existence of non-Pokémon creatures like coral and starfish.

While one could perhaps excuse a sudden disappearance of animals entirely as a retcon, or change to continuity after the fact, the continued occasional references to real animals become especially confusing. Is it possible that in the Pokémon world, animals are being slowly out-competed by Pokémon, and going extinct as a result? Could that be why animals show up so much less often in later series? The loss of animals also created some real ethical problems with food in the Pokémon world, to the point where in Horizons the characters almost exclusively shown eating sweets.

The real reason, of course, is that as the number of Pokémon have increased, there's been less need to fill in the background with real animals. Why show a cow, when you can show Miltank? This is especially obvious in the underwater shots, as there are now dozens of species of fish Pokémon, so there's no reason to show real fish anymore. Horizons has yet to reference any real animals directly at all, so perhaps Pokémon has finally reached the point where real animals are simply no longer useful.