I dislike this cartoon for other reasons. Let's say that you were a factory foreman, and one of your employees claimed that he didn't work there because he was a bear. Would you ...
(a) try to convince him that he was a human being so you could force him to go back to work?
(b) tell him that if he says he is a bear and doesn't work there, he can do his exit interview, leave right afterward, and not come back?
This story seemingly takes place in the modern world, where we don't have involuntary servitude. If you have an employee who you think is making up a crazy excuse not to work, and says he doesn't even want to be employed, you don't force him to work. You let him leave. After all, if he thinks he is a bear, he might decide to start biting people or taking other dangerous actions.
Yet despite taking place in a world superficially similar to our own, the relationship between humans and animals is quite different in the film's universe. The bear speaks plain English, and for that matter, so do the bears in the zoo. Is it likely that people would keep bears caged in zoos if bears were capable of speaking in human language?
And the bear demonstrates that he is capable of doing the same kind of work in the factory that human employees do. Suppose that the foreman and the executives later realized that the bear really was a bear. Would that cause them to think that they shouldn't have employed him? They might say, "Well, he did do the work once we convinced him that he was a person, even though he was really a bear. That means that bears are capable of participating in the human economy. So if we ever find a bear on our factory premises again, we should put it to work. If the bear tells us that it shouldn't have to work because it's a bear, we can say, 'So what? We've had a bear working here before. Being a bear doesn't mean you can't work here.'"
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