Life eating other life.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Look at it this way: Predators are actually doing the natural world a great service. Without being eaten, prey animals would soon outstrip their own food supply and consequently suffer malnutrition, disease, starvation and death. Being eaten is a relative quick, painless way to go.

Boru

1.  I believe it has been observed that on a typical ecosystem, even with predator species present in their normal numbers, majority of the members of most prey species still die of malnutrition, disease and starvation rather than predation.

2.   In any ecological catastrophe,  it is the obligatory predators that go first.  If the ecological catastrophe is severe enough, often only prey species remain. 

3. If the predator species are removed,  prey species would only outstrip their own food supply for a short time while their feeding, breeding, and migratory habits and other ecological adaptions still remained powerfully influenced by the former presence of the predators.    

If predator-less condition were to persist for a long period of time, then the   prey species would tend to evolutionarily adopt by diversifying into more specialized species that subdivide the available food and environmental resources.   The more particular food requirements and narrower ecological niches of each daughter species then serve to keep the numbers balanced with resources.   

If predator-less condition were to continue to persist, eventually some of these daughter species will diversify from herbivorous niches into the predatory niche to address the lack of predators.

  

Did you feel your hair rustle as Eleven's point flew right over your head?

His hair rustles all the time so he has become inured to the condition and ignores it totally.

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I dunno
..

I think I' d rather eat my gun than have a lion eat me.

Better yet - shoot the lion and eat a pizza....

But lions are merciful.  They will euthanize you by crushing your windpipe and choke you first so you won’t even feel it when you are eaten.

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Would you rather die from having a lion break your neck and asphyxiate you, or spend months/years in pain from debilitating cancer, every breath an agony?

Boru

It has been suggested some behavior of sick or injured animals is “looking to be eaten”.

I don’t disagree, but 37 seemed to have been especially distressed (or at least triggered) by a particular pod of orcas hunting a particular whale calf. My response was in regard to that.

If a single animal (a deer, a whale, a monkey) could express a preference for a manner of death, they’d likely prefer a quick one to a lingering one.

But, as I said, I agree completely with your description of predation at the species level.

Boru