Are Goombas sapient?

Question

I starting asking myself this when I remembered a part of a DIC cartoon where Goombas are treated as savage animals and appear in cages. I could forgive this, because these cartoons are not canon, and even if they are, there are moments were the Goombas take photos and other things.

Then I remembered a citation of Super Mario Odyssey who referred to some Goombas as "wild Goombas".

So I started thinking how they are not seen to talk, and sometimes not seen to have a society, indicating they are just like savage animals. They could be just like trained animals of the Koopa troop, just like Chomp Chomps. But this is contradicted in spin-offs, like Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi, but these might not be canon.

Is there any canon evidence to suggest that Goombas possess human-level intelligence, or wild animal level intelligence? Is it possible that Yoshi eats them even though they have human sapience? He eats Koopa Troopas, who are clearly sapient.

Answer 1

In the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. film, Goombas are presented as an ancestral form of the citizens of Dinohattan - sentient, but less intelligent than "modern" people. As part of the plot, we find that the current Goomba soldiers are in fact created by de-evolving modern-day political prisoners of Koopa-ruled Dinohattan into their ancestral forms.

In the film, we do see at least one Goomba recognizing other people, holding loyalties, and playing music.

Later in the film, a human from our universe is de-evolved into an ape, so the implication seems to be that Goombas are at the intellectual level of modern-day non-human primates. Whether primates such as apes and monkeys are "intelligent" enough for X criterion is a Big Question in modern zoology.