So basically, this is a sci-fi fantasy world with intelligent/sapient animals. Not anthros like in Zootopia, just regular animals that can all talk to each other, form societies, and develop science and technology. Obviously, predation is a massive, central issue to this world, being that it was the primary driving force of all animals for most of their history. However, they have now progressed enough technologically where even obligate carnivores like cats can get all their required nutrients without needing to eat other animals, with sufficient help from their biochemistry and chemical manufacturing prowess. Obviously, this does not mean every single species who historically did eat meat stop overnight. Actually, some would argue that the journey toward abolishing predation, a journey marked by revolution, war, and death for both sides, is almost as bloody and violent as predation itself (this is a massive logical fallacy yes, but it is an opinion held by many in-universe and I explore that in my plot).
First, some context: I will be using the terms Carnivore and Herbivore, to refer to the biochemical characteristics of animals. In their universe, those designations, when capitalized as proper nouns, have fairly straight forward definitions: A carnivore is any animal that, without access to science or technology, is incapable of deriving their complete nutritional requirements without eating meat, they cannot subsist on raw plants alone without processing and/or taking synthetic supplements. A cat is a carnivore, so is a dog, so is a ferret, so is a fox, so are humans technically but they disappeared from the planet millions of years ago. By contrast, a herbivore is any animal that can subsist on raw plants alone, like mice, rabbits, horses, and deer. This definition is purely biochemical, as in do you have the enzymes and gut structure to do it, and by design does not take into account things like preference, behaviour, culture/religion, or how practical it would be (if there was only plant that can sustain you and literally nothing else other than meat, it still counts), because, again, they have the technology to allow basically every animal to subsist on plants, comfortably at that, minus it not tasting the same. You’re either one or the other, if you’re not sure, then Carnivore is the catch-all term unless your ability to subsist on raw plants is verifiable. Omnivore isn’t really as a term in this world since pretty much every animal is technically an omnivore, as in they can eat and digest both meat and plants, including nearly every “Herbivore.” Likewise, terms like predator and prey imply behaviour and ecology, not biochemistry, and most animals fell into both categories historically, but with their technology those terms have become so fluid as to be essentially meaningless.
Which brings me to the in-universe opinions that I have come up with, they relate to both predation and interspecies coexistence in general, since those kind of go paw to paw. Note that these are super generalized and are in no particular order.
Carnivores:
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“It’s my right to eat my prey, no matter how much suffering it causes! I don’t care what technologies are available, predation is the natural order of things and should never be challenged! The role of a predator is to dominate and rule their prey. Maybe the prey would suffer less if they just accepted and made peace with their place on the food chain!” (This is called Trophism.)
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“Predation is both barbaric and totally obsolete in our current technological landscape. It is unbecoming of an intelligent, sapient species with complete control over our primitive instincts. Every species is equal, we should all live in peace as comrades and work together to take care of and benefit everyone!” (This is called Unitism.)
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“Look, I’ll concede that we shouldn’t be eating other animals and actively making them suffer. But I just can’t agree to this interspecies cooperation nonsense. My only responsibility to my own species (or taxon, which is a group of related species), no one else. I won’t hunt my prey but I won’t be helping them without benefit to myself either.”
Herbivores
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“Even though I’m low on the food chain, it is still my place. I don’t want to be eaten and will try to avoid it to the best of my ability, but if that’s what it comes to, then so be it.” (Trophism)
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“I don’t want you to eat me, in fact I want to be your friend and ally! I think every species is equal and that your evolutionary history does not define an intelligent animal, and as long as we all commit to being nice to each other, there is no reason every species can’t live in harmony!” (Unitism)
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“Those savages hunted us for generations! I don’t care if they don’t do that anymore, I don’t care how long not a single member of their species has even so much as mildly hurt another animal! Not only do I not want to ally with them, I think it’s the duty of my species or taxon, as the prey, to rise up and destroy my predators! No amount of peacemaking now can undo nature and I’d turn the tables and kill every single one of them if I could!”
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“Hey, it’s nice that you’re not eating prey anymore and all, and though I don’t harbour any active ill will toward you, I still don’t trust you and just want to be left alone with my own species or taxon. You don’t interact with me if you don’t need to and I don’t interact with you if I don’t need to, cool?”
What are your thoughts? Are there any more sides to this issue that you can come up with? And personally, which one would you most agree with if you were in this world?
There are no non-sapient animals because I really hate cop-outs of “oh well we’ll just eat the designated food animals then!” Zootopia did this with fish (implied), and Lion King did this with bugs. Even as a kid I found the the way that something like Lion King where they basically said “don’t eat us but here, eat these bugs, they’re obviously lower tier animals and nobody cares about them,” to be really hypocritical coming from an animal that is trying to convince their natural predator not to eat them. I really wanted to directly confront the entire concept of predation so every animal is sapient to roughly the same extent even though I only regularly feature a small subset of the animal kingdom. Also, I wanted the opportunity to have any animal as characters and not limit myself in that way.
However, even if there were non-sapient animals or one of our animals suddenly appeared in their world, yes the law would still protect them. Their main anti-predation treaty makes no distinction between any animal, which was the point because past attempts to limit predation did make distinctions based on species.
More lore if you’re interested: I had actually developed this idea for a hypothetical in my world of what if a regular non-intelligent animal somehow found their way there? Like if a cat from our world to their, right in the middle of Feline territory? It hasn’t happened in my plot yet, but it’s a thought experiment/ethical delima type question that does exist in-universe.
Well, Felines in their time are Unitist (anti-predation) and interact very amicably with many other species, including their former prey, if a non-sapient cat lands in a densely populated area there will be a lot of prey animals like mice, birds, etc just milling around, not really caring there’s a cat around because they’ve not had to worry about being hunted by cats. But to the our-world cat, they would be easy prey and it’ll probably pounce, a small critter or two will get eaten before the authorities get called the the is arrested and indicted by the Feline government.
But this is also when they start acting funny, obviously, since the other cats have human level intelligence while this is just a cat, so they’ll do a brain scan and a DNA test, and realize that this is one of the proto-cats before they evolved and is not, sapient, basically. They wouldn’t be able to convict them for predation or any other crime because their whole peace treaty and legislation between predator and prey is predicated on the fact that intelligence/sapience can allow an animal’s brain to shut down natural hunting instincts and give them control over and responsibility for their actions with other animals. But a non-sapient cat can’t do that, so by their philosophy, it would be both unreasonable and unethical to punish them for it.
But they can’t really let the cat out in public since it would be a danger to prey animals, and they also can’t just abandon a cat like this, they still have rights, so the government basically assigns doctors and caretakers to essentially raise it like an indoor cat in our world, giving it all the enrichment and cat to cat interactions it needs in a controlled environment away from prey. Since they already have the technology to seamlessly convert obligate carnivores to plant based foods so no problem there, they would just feed it plant based food like what the rest of the cats in their world typically eat, would still be fully nutritionally complete and healthy all things considered. The scientists in this world would be most likely be allowed to collect non-invasive data on the individual though (mainly just observations and maybe some tests that do not cause undue stress on the cat in question) since it does also present a massive opportunity to learn about their evolutionary history.