[Meta thread] Iron's PokeRole Adventure: The Skull Ruins

[Dragonstrike]

It's also possible there are non-Pokemon animals. There've been a few in the anime, and references in the games, mostly to bugs and maybe to things like fish. Plus, Pikachu is the "Electric Mouse" Pokemon - what's a mouse? Do mice exist alongside of Pikachu? Is there a milk cow you could raise if you didn't want to raise a Miltank?

On that topic, most of the real life animals are mentioned earlier in the lifespan of the Pokemon series, when there weren't as many pokemon to fill the background.  A lot of early TCG cards had actual birds and such pictured in them.  As more and more pokemon were introduced, fewer and fewer references to real life animals needed to be made to fill environmental niches without everything looking the same (not many dog pokemon in gen 1, so real dogs were shown in the anime so that Growlithe weren't literally everywhere in the background whenever a dog was needed.  Lots of dog and dog-like pokemon to fill that niche now, though!).

There's also the infamous mention of an Indian Elephant in a gen 1 pokedex entry.  And also the mention of various real world locations early in the series' lifespan (such as Mew being discovered in South America's jungles).



It is possible real life animals could exist in the pokemon world but are just few(er) in number compared to pokemon.  Or it could be that 'mouse' is just a classification rather than a reference to an animal that's just a normal ol' mouse (someone had to come up with the term somehow, somewhen, and the subject material that spawned that word probably doesn't matter a great deal since it could have easily just been a general term even if it had an adjective tacked on with it when it was first invented.  Classification systems have to be broad and flexible, after all).

That's my thoughts on that, tbh.  I'm cool with whatever interpretation, it doesn't particularly matter much to me.