Who decides?

Watching Madeline's little TV shows with her sometimes, I've begun to notice a strange phenomenon in children's television: animals that not only speak the same language, but whose language of choice is English.

However, I've been wondering lately who decides which animals get to speak. Sometimes animals lower in the food chain cannot speak -- like insects, etc. Sometimes animals higher on the food chain cannot speak -- like the lion just roars instead of saying "I'm going to try to eat you now", etc. This makes a marginal amount of sense, though I think if you're going to let the animals speak, you should really let them all speak.

There are a few shows, however, that just have no rhyme or reason to who can speak. For example in "Little Bear" (this has also happened in the "Berenstein Bears" & "Franklin"), Little Bear was begging his parents to get him a pet puppy. This strikes me as totally bizarre, since Little Bear's friends are a duck, a cat, an owl, and various other animals. It's not like his going to ask his friend "Cat" to become his household pet, so why can he have a puppy? Does this make sense to anyone?