Celaneo and her crew are a species related to standard griffons, but more sociable and bipedal. Capper is… well he sure is a bipedal cat…
Honestly there were so many generic furries in the movie? Sapience/language/tool-use is frighteningly common on this planet, there must be some pretty extreme selection for it to show up at so many different points on the evolutionary tree. Even a lot the non-sapient wildlife like Fluttershy’s pet rabbit have intelligence comparable to a human toddler, despite not having the ability to replicate speech.
If I had to try and explain all of this convergent sapience (without blaming it on magic) I’d say it was to compete with all the other sapient races. If I did want to blame it on magic, I’d say it’s related to how magic in MLP is generated from social connections and takes complex thought and tool-use abilities to properly use. Magic is an incredibly powerful multi-tool, so it’s understandable why so many different lineages would evolve to exploit it. Some of them even started to manipulate magic before they evolved dexterous hands! Like PONIES
Writer A: “I’ve fleshed this character out to the point where they’re more real then I am. I know everything about them, including their blood type, their thirty-first favorite song, what they did for their sixth birthday, and which brand of apples they prefer.”
Writer B: “This character exists as a full person in my head, but I know absolutely nothing about them. Once I forced them to talk about themselves, and they simultaneous lied about their past and told me accurate trivia facts I don’t remember learning.”
