Carnivores

The Zero-Sum Game

Who made such a world
Where for one being to live
another must die?

This, I admit, is a recurring theme because it is a thought and a notion and a perplexity and a question that refuses to leave me alone.

Here it is expressed for the first time (well, for my first time) in a five-seven-five Wolfku, and it states my quandary quite clearly: on this planet (and for all I know, in this universe) we have to compete for food, and in this competition someone always has to die, whether that someone is a blade of grass, a carrot, a chicken, a cow, a shrimp, a bird, a worm, you name it, someone (and I used the pronoun someone because it is alive, it is a being of some sort) has to give up his, or her, or its life to feed someone else. The only life forms here on earth that are not born killers are plants (nice beings that they are) who live on sunshine and what chemicals the earth provides.

I was raised a Christian. Well, sort of. I was certainly raised to believe that God was good, not an evil bone in his Godly body. All-merciful God, the all-compassionate God, the all-forgiving God. Yet, yet, if I’m to believe that He did in fact create the Heavens and the Earth according to His plan (which my maternal grandmother — mormor — certainly drummed into me all summer long during my…