…is that Arkana mentions Matt and Rebecca, but not Bic and Bac, the two anteaters who are with them, or Tehrig (Shagshag), the ship who has all four of them within him. All of them can talk, and Arkana has actually known Bic, Bac, and Tehrig longer than she’s known Matt, Rebecca, or Spartakus. Not that this really matters.
Of course, the shows’ authors could choose to have the four humans as their main characters. That’s their choice. I mean, it’s truly their choice, and not Arkana’s, not one of their character’s. If those four are the main chars, it can mean that the story focuses more on them, the ”camera” shows more of them, even that they happen to talk more, etc. But within the story, it’s not really possible for Arkana to think, hey, I won’t mention Bic, Bac, and Tehrig right now, because they are not main chars in this cartoon. If she has a reason, it must be a different one. But then what? If she just wanted to say fewer names than five, it’d be simpler to say ”Let’s go back to Tehrig”, since he’s a location as well as a person. (I hope this sentence doesn’t have any more weirdness than what’s inherent in Spartakus.)
BTW, getting back to the first paragraph: I was unsure how to express the similarity of Bic, Bac, and Tehrig to Matt and Rebecca. I’m thinking of Jeremy Bentham’s famous (I guess) quote about animals: the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? And as Peter Singer has commented on it here: “In this passage Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration. The capacity for suffering—or more strictly, for suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness—is not just another characteristic like the capacity for language, or for higher mathematics.” (BTW, don’t get me wrong: I, personally, eat dead animals. I live in the E.U.—well, Hungary has joined in May—and the treatment of animals raised for food is pretty strictly regulated here…)
For a long time, I was used to the way Animorphs uses the word sentient. Now I’ve also seen Joan Dunayer’s book Animal Equality: Language and Liberation, and…well, she uses it differently.
At dictionary.com, I’ve found (among others), the following definitions for sentient:
1. Having sense perception; conscious.
2. Experiencing sensation or feeling.
It seems to me that, say, red-tailed hawks would certainly be sentient in this sense, no question about it. For ships, I guess it’s different, so the expression ”sentient ship” does carry new info. And Bic and Bac are talking anteaters, but that’s not what makes them sentient…language can be almost as complicated as a good sci-fi/fantasy story. |
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