Pokemon: Solstice

Sometime in our sci-fi future, though long ago by pokemon history, humans sent out a colony ship to settle an earth-like planet they detected. But something went wrong, and the ship crashed. When no one ever responded to their cries for help, or came for them, the colonists salvaged what they could and tried to settle a world that, much to their surprise, was already inhabited. They couldn't understand the beings who communicated only in sounds that reminded us of earth animals, so they assumed their intelligence was the same as the creatures they resembled, and captured them for labor. Maybe they recognized over time that most, if not all, of these beings were sentient, or maybe they didn't, but it wouldn't matter, because to a colonial perspective, they weren't human. They had argued human rights many times, but these creatures were not human. They couldn't even speak, right?

So life continued, and technology was developed for better capturing and enslaving the local life of this new and exciting planet. Somewhere around here, someone likely coined the term "pocket monsters" to describe these creatures. They began to train pokemon to fight each other; the wilds were a dangerous place without an equally matched being to fend off the feral ones. They were monsters, after all, and humans remembered that. There wasn't much room for sympathy, because these monsters were like horses, or dogs, or rabbits. For labor, or for defense, or for food.

It didn't matter.

They never tried space travel again; that worked out well enough the first time. Over time, the situation improved; maybe laws were put in place to regulate treatment of pokemon, but still no attempts to test the sentience of the planetary natives. And over time, humans forgot, or maybe stopped trying to remember, that they were colonists. Maybe they forgot about Earth. They had always been here, right? Where else could they have come from?

It didn't matter.