Try thinking about how much more frequent people would try to have sex with pokemon than with real animals. As you've said, at least some of them are more intelligent than normal animals. But the defining factor, in my oppinion, is that you can go in the forest, catch a thing, and now it's yours and you can make it do whatever you want. Of cource you can use it to go around and scam little children off their pocket money, because they can't not challenge you if you end up walking in their vicinity, something a normal person would do. But this is not a perfect world. A thought-provoking theme indeed. Good thing I'm not going to think about it too much, thanks to my shitty short-term memory.