A couple of questions concerning canon

[indri]

I've checked All Things Philosophical and peasant_'s The Gate but can find nothing to definitively answer a couple of questions. Depending on the answers, I may have to rewrite a key passage or two of the long fic I'm working on. Is anyone able to help?

Did Spike's chip prevent him from injuring or attacking nonhuman animals?

As far as I can tell, all the evidence is equivocal.

(i) Shortly after the chipping, he turns up starving on Giles' doorstep. There's no evidence that he's tried and failed to eat the local domestic animals but there's no sign that he's not tried to.

(ii) Harmony at one point claims that Spike can't even pick flowers, but I am inclined to dismiss this on the grounds that (a) it's Harmony, (b) Spike begs to differ and most importantly, (c) Spike turns up with some wildflowers for Joyce on her death and he presumably picked these himself.

(iii) Spike plays for kittens in poker, but it's unclear whether he eats them or simply uses them as currency.

(iv) Riley says at one point that Spike can't injure any living thing, but see (ii). Also, it's hard to see why this would benefit the Initiative and we don't know if the chip worked exactly as expected.

Can vampires choose not to breathe?

We know that vampires don't need to breathe in the sense that they have no need of oxygen; this was demonstrated early on when Angel was able to turn off the gas in the high school basement. Also, Angel clearly wouldn't have survived his later undersea adventure otherwise. Vamps talk, smoke and pant so they do use their lungs on a daily basis. But can they choose to suppress the urge to breathe? This is what I am not sure about. When The First tortured Spike by dunking him underwater, did this in fact provide us with a demonstration that vampires retain the urge to breath even though they don't need air?

Comments

[binsoup.livejournal.com]

Hi Indri. In Beneath You, there was a shot of Spike about to pounce on a rat though it was not shown if he killed it or not. At that time, I took this to mean that he survived in the high school basement on rodents’ blood without his chip activating. Ergo, he could harm/kill/eat life forms that are not homo sapiens.

I don't know why but I've always seen the Jossverse as having a very anthropomorphic viewpoint, to the extent that living things are almost equated exclusively with humans. The rest of carbon-based organisms (sentient or not) are fodder. Even season 7 Willow harking on the connectedness of things (somewhat an echo of the rhetoric of the environmental movement) or Tara portrayed as "mother earthy" are not enough to convince me that the Jossverse does not privilege human life above all other forms of non-demonic life. Not a problem for me since I watched Buffy for the slayers and the monsters, and not for the flowers and the amoeba.:-)

As for vampires choosing not to breathe, Angel's underwater entrapment is a good argument for this.

[indri]

In Beneath You, there was a shot of Spike about to pounce on a rat

Yes, of course, I knew I was missing somthing obvious. How else would he have survived?

As for vampires choosing not to breathe, Angel's underwater entrapment is a good argument for this.

He could still have been breathing, though, just taking in the same stale air over and over.

[rahirah]

Unfortunately we never saw him bite the rat, which would have settled the question for once and all...or maybe not, since it's arguable that Spike's chip was beginning to malfunction by then.