Basically, I have a sci-fi world with intelligent animals. The story is that long after humans disappeared from the Earth, animals eventually become intelligent and made their own society to replace them. One major development in their history is that predators and prey agreed to live in harmony, signing treaties, making laws, and generally working very hard to ensure lasting peace between natural enemies.
One aspect of this is of course prosecuting animals that engage in predation. The way criminal trials work in this world is that every animal has the right to be tried by members of their own species or taxonomic group, who are also responsible for carrying out sentencing. Each animal has a taxonomic government to answer to, so if you’re a cat you are under the jurisdiction of the Feline government, mouse, Rodent government, bird, Avian government, etc. Each animal follows the same basic laws and regulations that all taxonomic governments agree on, things like prohibiting predation is one of these, but each government can also pass taxon-specific legislation, and are also able to determine criminal penalties independently.
The Felines only had their revolution a few years ago, when they overthrew their old kingdom which was very pro-predation, and made a republic that has signed the Interspecies Peace Agreement and is therefore very anti-predation. Because it’s so recent, the Felines also have the harshest punishments for a predation conviction made after the revolution. One count of first degree predation (when you personally kill then eat an animal) is an automatic life in prison without parole, the same penalty as “regular” murder without eating the victim, two or more counts is life in prison unless the prosecution requests for the death penalty at the start of trial and this is authorized by both the judge and the Feline Ministry of Security. Generally, courts stop at two predation convictions even if it’s obvious that the defendant committed more, since that’s enough to either put them away forever with no chance of parole, or kill them. Second degree predation, AKA simple predation, where you eat already dead animals that someone else killed, is treated much less harshly and sentencing options only has fixed term imprisonment possibly with parole, though with restrictions afterward like you can’t work in the government or security-critical industries unless the court lifts those restrictions on a case by case basis. The ISPA lists execution after being convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of a crime that causes the death of two or more other animals as the only exception to the no killing rule, and it can only be done by members of the same species or taxonomic entity, and is also subject to oversight and can even be blocked outright by other ISPA members through the ISPA Inter-Taxon Court, so they also do not have full autonomy on who they can execute, and taxa that have the death penalty much also must make their execution methods (which are mandated to always prioritize minimizing suffering), judicial procedures, and statistics public.
They do also use the threat of execution as a way of getting information about a predation case though. If they catch a Feline who is apart of a predation ring, it’s better than nothing but they’d obviously much rather take down the leader and the entire organization. The Feline Ministry of Security can basically tell the accused “Look, your trial date has been set, the prosecution has requested authorization to use the death penalty from us, and you know what evidence they have on you. We’re still trying to decide if we want to grant that request. It’s up to you and we can’t force you to give us any information, but is there anything you want to tell us about your organization or do you want to gamble with whether you’ll be found guilty or not?” Funnily enough most of these cats don’t care that they’re killing sapient prey animals that have lives and families and stories, but break real fast when it’s their own life on the line.
The Felines (and any ISPA member for that matter) can also arrest other species if they commit a crime on their territory or against a their own animals, but within the Interspecies Peace Agreement member species, animals have the right to stand trial and receive sentencing by their own species or taxon, so most they can do is investigate the crime, form a case with evidence, and then extradite the defendant back and forward their findings to the government that actually has jurisdiction. Most they can do to a non-Feline is detain them, extradite, and then ban them from Feline territory. However, any ISPA non-signatories, AKA predators that are actually predators and eat prey, who engage in predation, either against any ISPA member species anywhere in the world, or on ISPA territory against any animal; are not granted this right (obviously, since if you extradited them back to their own territory they’d be home free). So if you eat a cat or eat a mouse or bird or any other animal on Feline territory, you are dealt with just like any predatory cat by the Feline government regardless of what the laws by your own taxonomic government is.
I should also add that every animal is intelligent/sapient in this world. So predation really would be like murder. No copouts like eating fish or whatever.
Even in universe this is quite controversial even among prey species so I’m not trying to claim that this is the ideal state of the law, but I’m more trying to make sure if this makes sense or not. I also know that they will almost certainly have very different morals and ethics for humans, but then again I’m writing this story for humans so not sure how relevant that actually is. Is the motivation of having a death penalty despite not even allowing animals to eat meat a realistic one?
Many predators, cats included, are obligate carnivores and will die without meat. What is the food situation in these societies, and how likely is a predator to be driven to predation out of desparation?
At the point in time when my main plot starts and the modern Feline Democratic Republic starts existing, nutritional and biochemical requirements have been (at least technologically) solved, there is something called a Dietary Enzyme Supplement that supplies your digestive tract with artificial enzymes, allowing you to digest plants (including cellulose), and even directly synthesize essential nutrients only found in meat inside the digestive tract. However, access is still an issue depending in where you live and what species you are. The Feline government provides supplements (and food in general) for free at the point of use, it’s all tax funded and entirely subsidized. That is written in their constitution because it’s one of the major things the revolution fought for. On the other side, other territories and taxa, particular the Trophist (pro-predation) governments, often outright ban plant based alternatives because they see it as a threat to their ideology (though the common excuse is that it is “unsafe”), but those places obviously not only not criminalize predation, but actively encourage it. If they were going to Feline territory they would be under the jurisdiction of the Feline government, and they would need to follow the Interspecies Peace Agreement and Feline law or face criminal sentences, but, they also have access to to those supplements and food that the Feline government guarantees.
More lore if you’re interested: The progression of plant based alternatives was not a binary “from this moment on you no longer need to eat prey!” Take Felines for example, obligate carnivore and therefore one of the most difficult taxa to develop plant based alternatives that are fully nutritionally complete. Before the breakthrough invention of dietary enzyme supplements (not just any enzymes either, the ones for Felines is the most recent and represents the absolute bleeding edge of protein science and biochemistry), they had direct nutritional supplements, similar to how we have vegan cat food today. However, they were extremely expensive as you had to replace nearly 100% of your biomass intake with these artificially synthesized supplements, and the Trophist government did not make obtaining the easy and most of the plant based products available to cats prior to the revolution was from grey-market, unregulated, under the table operations from Unitist cells operating illegally under their Trophist regime. Even when sold at cost as most of them were, the cost of production and materials was still prohibitive. But even when you had access to it, it was extremely easy for a cat, especially a kitten with much higher nutritional requirements than adults, to become dangerously malnourished with a vegan diet unless you paid extremely close attention to your food intake and balanced every essential nutrient perfectly, which is predictably almost impossible to do for nearly all of the impoverished Feline working class, but even so most were still determined to not eat prey (even back then both working relationships and friendships between cats and animals like rodents and birds were not exactly uncommon, so the vast majority of cats saw them as friends and not food) and the illegal use of nutrient supplements exploded and spread to nearly everyone, much of the frustration of the Feline empire who tried to crack down on it numerous times, war on drugs style. Their go-to excuse was that nutrient supplements were toxic and unsafe for Felines (so they’ll throw you in prison if they catch you taking it because that’s how much they cared about the “health” of their cats).
My main character is a cat who was actually involved with the production of nutrient supplements, develop of a Feline dietary enzyme supplement, and the revolution. The development of an enzyme supplement that is fully nutritionally complete for Felines, which allowed them to directly digest plant based food, was actually what sparked the Feline revolution and civil war. The imperial government tried to ban its further research and development, again stating that it was unsafe (so unsafe that chemists are not even allowed to research it), but at that point the working class was just like “screw you” and decided to kill the king. This wasn’t the first time an overthrow of the empire had been attempted, but it was the time it succeeded.
The enzyme supplement for felines is the most advanced of these, called ATDP (short for the Almondtail-Dandelionpaw Formulation), after its inventors, two cats, Yvonne Dandelionpaw and Nikita Almondtail, and is a white capsule that you swallow once a week. The capsule is filled with the powdered enzymes, along with stabilizers and preservatives, and has four chambers. The outer casing dissolves in the stomach, revealing three spherical inner capsules packed in powder to fill the extra space. The first layer of powder is for the stomach. The three inner capsules all have different thicknesses of the casing, and thus will break open in the upper, mid, and lower portions of the small intestines respectively. The enzymes then literally attaches themselves to the walls of the digestive tract and starts reacting with both food and the body’s own digestive enzymes. Your body does that last part naturally by the way! They’re called brush border enzymes and attach to the walls of the gut so they aren’t wasted by getting crapped out after only one “cycle” of digestion. They are reabsorbed and recycled by the cell once they’ve become degraded from performing so many reactions. The enzyme for digesting lactose is one of these! And this is why you only need to take one pill a week instead of one with every meal. This one pill allows the body of an obligate carnivore to digest and derive nutrients from plant matter, and even synthesize essential nutrients inside their bodies. So they really have no excuse.