@zanonyn @SweatyBrie
True, we are accustomed to applying our ethics and our way of thinking to any other living creature (and even to natural events) cataloguing everything in the range between “good” and “bad”, when in fact good and bad are just our social inventions.
To give a simple example, the hamsters. Lovely and soft creatures that make us tenderness.
Hamsters, especially mothers, eat own puppies.
From our point of view, this is a terrible gesture; one of our worst taboos, which sends hamsters from the paradise of cute animals to the hell of bloody monsters. But that if we see it from a human ethical point of view.
In nature there is the principle of race balance. This one, in order to survive in a given place, must remain stable over time. So, if we put as life span of a hamster 5 years (they are not real data, I am using them to simplify it), at the end of this time there MUST be a pair of hamsters to take their place.
If there are too few of them the breed will die out, if there are too many there will be overcrowding and they will starve to death.
The problem is that hamsters have children all the time, and as many as 10,000 can be born to a couple in those five years.
But nature only needs two. And all the other 9,998?
Sacrificable among illnesses, accidents, becoming food for other creatures... and even for one's own parent, in order to recover the forces spent to give birth to them.
9,998 small and soft hamsters born only to make two survive. Does it look monstrous and unacceptable? And yet it works, it is the best possible method that nature has found to make its principle of equilibrium work.
(Often and willingly, indeed, it is the animals that we consider to be the sweetest and most innocent that behave as criminals; like hamsters other vegetarian animals eat their offspring systematically. The lovely doves, the very symbol of peace, if locked in a cage and unable to escape, are able to kill themselves by peck. In comparison predatory animals, having invested more on the quality of their offspring than on their number, have much more “human” behaviours - e. g. two tigers locked in a cage roar at each other and compete against those who are bigger and stronger, each remaining in their own corner, but will hardly reach the point of attacking. As if they knew that fighting against a mortal creature does not gain anything, even if they win)
Until a century ago, it also worked for us humans, among other things. They gave birth to six, seven children... even more, with the only hope that at least one or two would be able to reproduce themselves. Of course, with the development we have now seems a horror story more than the truth... but it was so (grandma gave birth to eight children, but only four became adults). Now practically every child (at least in the developed countries) born has the opportunity to grow and reproduce... and in fact now we are almost eight billion of us, with all the problems of overcrowding and sustainability that this entails.
What's wrong with that? Is Mrs. Hamster really a monster, or is she just doing what nature made her for?
As long as we use pareidolia for the behavior of creatures who are not human, it will seem wrong. As soon as we move away from this thread of thought (and the concept of abstraction is why we are hand beings, the ability to think as if we were someone else) we realize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Just like the demons aren't wrong... only dangerous to us humans.