BREAKING NEWS: Clementine the giraffe gets the coronavirus

@Dr_Osaka  
Don’t know about literally pets. she never talked, but she demonstrably has a cold, and my last cold gave me a wicked sore throat. Perhaps non-Equestrian hoofstock go to Flutters as a sort of urgent care or when they don’t want to be treated by a vet.

You know it was a real shit knocker of them to make Giraffes in this world pets, I mean they are close relatives to horses. Just seems more appropriate

@Twilatron217  
I know we usually don’t meet eye to eye, but goddamn I have the dumbest smile in my face from this. It’s freaking true.

@RedTriangle  
If there is no correspondence between body size, body shape, and sapience, why should she restrict her practice to the nonsapient beings of Equestria?

The fandoms genuine reaction to this.
 
 

@Dirty Bit  
Well, I assume she get them sometimes since Ponyville is a small town; there’s not many non-Equines there.  
Though if she were to work in a more diverse place, she would frequently get non-Equine patients.
 
Isn’t it odd that Ponies have their own hospitals while non-Equine species go to vets.

@RedTriangle
 
With the exception of Spike five seasons ago, your guess is as good as mine.

I wonder how often Doctor Fauna get sentient patients that are Non-Equine.

@TheMasterEraser  
Concrete examples in the animation works would be nice.
 
Honestly? In the “talking animals” setting, dogs are more often non-speaking than giraffes.

I’ve always assumed the difference was between solid hooves and cloven hooves. Ponies, zebras and donkeys all have solid hooves, and all of them are treated as regular people. Cows and sheep have cloven hooves, and though they can talk, are treated like farm animals. Goats, pigs, and deer are cloven hooved, have not been heard to speak, and are anything from hired help to farm animals to creatures of the wild (excluding the questionably canon talking deer from the comics).
 
Of course, this leads to some awkward situations, like the (cloven hooved) buffalo. Very nearly fantastic racism, that. Giraffes, also having cloven hooves, would probably find themselves in the same boat. Even if they talked, ponies would probably consider them barbarians at best.

@OneOverTwo  
Ha ha, no. Giraffes were commonly thought by most Westerners to be mute animals. The usual reasoning was that their long necks made vocal cords impossible. Google “are giraffes mute?” and you’ll see there’s a long, long history to this myth, and tons of debunking.
 
I can definitely see the show going this route, since it’s grounded in myths and legends, not science facts.

@TyroneBiggums  
Same

@TyroneBiggums  
Giraffes are often silent in fiction ‘cause animals don’t talk.

@TheMasterEraser
 
@TheMasterEraser  

 
I literally never heard or seen anything like that, and im a big fan of animals in cartoons.

@OneOverTwo  
Giraffes are infamously silent in fiction. Perhaps she comes from an entire species that doesn’t talk except during ceremonies. In fact, that’s now my headcanon.

@TyroneBiggums  
Very trainable.

@OneOverTwo  
Not with uniforms and stage crew jobs they arent.

@TyroneBiggums  
Goats are treated more like very trainable animals, I think.

@WatermelonRat  
But goats have their normal rectangle pupil goat eyes and they’re sentient enough to have jobs that require uniform.  
….Then again, Equines in general are suppose to have more rectangular pupils.

Giraffes are cute  

@WatermelonRat  
That’s kinda what I’m thinking now, and best ear master accepts that as headcanon as well.

I just had a thought - in “secret of my excess” the doctor says they only know how to treat ponies and to take spike to the vet instead. Maybe that’s what happened with the giraffe.

@Firefanatic
 
It’s a bit distressing because we have been wanting to see more sentient creatures since Season 1; more specifically emphasis put on deer and giraffes due to Zecora opening up the door to African species and one of the older unused story concepts revolving around a Deer trying to find its place in the world. Deer showed up as an actual animal in Legend of Everfree, and this giraffe just raises the questions of whether they are sentient or not.

I only saw snippets of this episode just to see what the fuss was about in this picture.
 
Kinda confusing and distressing actually… I suppose we can only wait for the response from the writers about it, because this is probably getting me way more worked up than it should be.