People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
To be fair, real life Koalas are easily one of the dumbest animals going, with the actual smoothest brain of any mammal.
And the reason for that is their primary food source, Eucalyptus leaves, are so nutritionally poor that they can't afford the extra neurons.
Hell, they're so built on instinct that they'll only recognise Eucalyptus leaves if attached to branches.
So if any mammal was going to be depicted as non-anthro, they're a pretty good candidate for it.
So you are suggesting everyone is crowding around to meet the new special needs student
Minimum Viable Marsupial.
In Koala's defense, I've heard people say that the "won't eat picked leaves" thing is an evolutionary advantage to stop them from eating rotting leaves off the ground. Of course, there are other ways to distinguish fresh and rotting food, but like you said, limited neurons.
I have to think that if it evolved this way, then probably there are not better ways, meaning perhaps there is a pathogen that occurs on downed leaves that is invisible and odourless. Or perhaps it just takes them out of the environment where they are at least minimally adapted to survive. Evolution is cruel but it's not stupid, and if it seems stupid it probably just means I'm stupid.
Koalas are the only animal I know of that regularly die from bursting into flames. Eucalyptus oil is highly flammable and they are covered in it all the time, so occasionally they just immolate if the sun hits them the wrong way
Okay but as often as humans cover themselves in something highly flammable and then accidentally immolate? I bet we take the prize.
They are the animal equivalent of animals, got it.
It’s because god knows how smart they’d be if their brain was developed and had to gimp them. After all, the koala is the creator (at least according to Lower Decks)
I never understood people being confused by anthros and ferals co-existing.
In real life we have apes that drive cars and talk, and apes that climb trees and eat banana. No one has any trouble differentiating between the two. I'm an ape posting on Lemmy right now.
Honestly, I only ever care about this sort of thing if the setting makes a big deal out of it. If the author never addresses the cast eating a ham sandwich or whatever, then I’m not going to pull that thread. If they try to rationalize it on the other hand, we’ll them I expect them to do a good job of it.
I think they're going off Disney rules here. Anthro animals are just the equivalent of furry humans.
Also, are we just forgetting Arthur owns Pal and DW's encounter with a deer? The characters being animals is just a stylistic choice.
Bojack Horseman plays a little bit with this, a guy orders a burger and apologizes to the waitress who took his order who is a cow. And chickens are chemically altered in ovo to be as dumb as real chickens, which makes it OK(?) to eat them.
Bojack Horseman is in the top 3 of best cartoons.
What are the other 2?
It's barely addressed outside of Chicken For Dayz, which is a shame.
It's pretty crazy that meat-eating is so normative that we can more easily accept a world where all animals talk than a world where those animals are all vegetarian.
We can be convinced that literally anything is "normal." We're social animals and we live in a socially-constructed reality. It's more important to our individual survival to agree with the group delusion than to be objectively correct. In the 80s and 90s it felt like people had started living in a reality constructed by TV commercials; if people didn't do it in a TV commercial it was weird, and if people did it on TV then it was normal. I guess we probably get our cues elsewhere now but clearly we don't get them from our evolutionary social sources and there is a lot of reality hacking going on.
It's the equivalent of chimpanzees and humans. Just because we are a species which uses advanced tools and language doesn't mean that other related species all died out. We're Just very distantly related cousins.