Thanks, Gameb18oy,
Soerix Wrote:
Turning all humans into animals...
Which means that, since (from what I understand) animals in Housepets live double their real-life lifespans (therefore a little over 30 years, which is still pretty darn short, or maybe less in the eventuality that lifespan isn't unified for all species and that other species live less long than cats and dogs), all humans will basically see their lifespan be shortened by half or more.
Yippeeeee...
I think it's been mentioned that smaller animals like the mice and now Marion have even less time. So yeah, Marion probably will not be following King's example if he can turn back into a human, even if he grows fond of some stuff about being an animal
Also, welcome to the forum Ryan. Hope we see a lot of you here
Has Rick ever officially stated the lifespan difference? The only official source that I know of is the combination of
http://www.housepetscomic.com/comic/201 ... -lifetime/ and
http://www.housepetscomic.com/comic/201 ... ion-prize/, which state that the punishment is one lifetime and then that the punishment is 60+ years. If punishment=lifetime and punishment=60+ years, then lifetime=60+ years. As a real life fox only lives up to 13 years but only up to 10 in the wild (and usually less, but that might not apply in this world due to intelligence), we have 4.6 to 6 times (minimum) real life in the one known case. Of course, with those numbers as a minimum, if the pets have the same life differential, pets would almost always outlive their owners. Unfortunately, we have no dates on the one pet that actually did die, Rufus. We only know "lived here since my last owner bought the farm" and we don't know how long either the previous owner nor Uncle Ruben owned the farm, nor do we know how old Rufus was when the previous owner bought the farm.
All of that said, there is no concrete timeline. The comic references the passage of time as if it is passing at the real life rate, but we have had arcs that were internally short times and externally long. The animals could simply have a distorted view of the passage of time, or they could have extended times in which nothing happens of comic relevance. It would add humor to Craig and Draig's complaints about time (which they have no mortal frame of reference for) if their "years" were actually a couple of months instead of the years that had passed since the strip in which they were transformed was published. We also have reason to believe that Sabrina is fairly old and reason to believe that Tarot is older, but we have no frame of reference there either. Of course, we can analyze the 5000BC arc if we assume that Dragon maintained a constant avatar (which is likely considering that Sabrina was apprenticing to become the 151st avatar). If we go with the shortest dates (not the title of the arc) then the neolithic era in Egypt ended around 4000 BC. Therefore, with Satau being the 2nd avatar (though there is reason to believe that some avatars are concurrent), we can simply divide 6000 years by 150 and get an estimate of 40 years, which matches the maximum lifespan that I have always heard given in the forums, but we can't stop there. That is an estimated average lifespan. If we believe the arc name, we have to add another 6.6 years for the extra 1000 years, and lifespans were, on average, shorter for real life
humans in that era (and all eras until the present), which would logically apply to animals too. So we have to assume that there is a bias toward shorter lifespans in the earlier eras than later eras. This is already getting too long, so I'm not going to do the math to try to calculate the answer.
Maybe someone has a place where Rick has officially stated the the lifespan differential. The real point is that, going by the comic, animals probably have longer lifespans than humans, which I doubt was intentional. I hope that someone can refer to a spot where Rick actually answered the question or that Rick will turn up to answer the question. The answer is probably non-existent, as I doubt that any important character is going to die. I would expect that, in forty years, assuming Rick is still alive and publishing Housepets!, that most or all of the current major characters will still be alive and unaged. The only characters that are aging are Miles' kids.