The Flintstones has a weird case with their animal appliances. The animals talk and are apparently sentient. There's also non-intelligent animals as well, though, such as Dino.
In a strange Flintstones episode called "The Snorkasaurus Hunter", Fred and Barney hunt a Snorkasaurus who turns out to be intelligent and able to speak. Wilma and Betty befriend the creature, who becomes the Flintstones' servant. Wilma refers to the Snorkasaurus as "Dino". Previous episodes had already established the Flintstones pet, Dino, who looks very similar to the talking Snorkasaurus Dino that most viewers are familiar with.
Subverted very nastily in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures: The gang spends the episode hung up on the moral quandary of eating hamburgers and other foods made of meat (all the major characters are animals). In the end, they resolved to simply become vegetarians. This works out fine until Buster sits down to eat a carrot. The carrot suddenly sprouts a face and limbs and begs not to be eaten. Buster, realizing there's no way to win here, just sighs and eats the carrot anyway. Herbivore Confusion anyone?
Another episode (or was it the same one?) had Plucky show what Thanksgiving is like at his home. Yes, the whole family, Ducks all, is shown about to have turkey.
Overcome in The Animals Of Farthing Wood by the Oath of Mutual Protection, where the animals promise not to frighten, bully or eat each other during their journey to White Deer Park.
However what happened before and after they got there is depicted as a brutal fact of life; in the cartoon series when we first meet the leader of the group, Fox, he is asked a question by a group including a rabbit and has to put down a dead rabbit he is carrying in his mouth before he can answerer. And when they get to White Deer Park, whilst the Farthing Wood animals continue to uphold the Oath amongst one another, the other animals of White Deer Park are not bound by the Oath and as such many of the smaller Farthing Wood animals are killed and eaten during the series.
And, as Adder is quick to point out, the Oath doesn't apply to eating the animals of White Deer Park either.
In some stories, human/animal shapeshifters angst over eating meat. Beast Boy in the animated series Teen Titans said it best: "I've been most of those animals!"
...And then later he threatens to eat some talking tofu. Because he's a vegetarian.
Coming at it from another direction, there are characters who pointedly avoid transforming into livestock...
There's also Aqualad, who gets sick anytime someone eats fish next to him...
The Futurama episode, "The Problem With Popplers" has addresses this several times. First, there's a bunch of hippies trying to enforce vegetarianism. Leela points out eating meat is a part of nature, and the hippies point to a lion they taught to eat tofu. It's sickly and looks like it'll fall over dead at any second. Also the main characters casually bring up a few animals they eat in the future that are not usually thought of as food here in the present, such as parrots.
The real meat of the episode however focuses on popplers, which resemble popcorn chicken, and are apparently delicious. Everybody happily devours the things until one hatches, and they realize that popplers are the eggs of the Omicron Persei 8 people.
"When my species grows up, we eat our moms!"
Interpersonal relationships in some children's series sometimes get a little...odd...if adults think about them too long. For instance Franklin, where the cute turtle and goose and rabbit are bestest buddies with the equally cute bear and fox, or Little Bear, in which the titular hero hangs out with a duck and a chicken...and a cat, and an owl. (Also a human girl, but that's a whole 'nother story...)
While the characters are anthropomorphic to an extreme, it's still rather odd to realize that, in Arthur, Sue Ellen, a cat, is taught by Ratburn, a rat. But they seem to get along just fine.
The excellent Looney Tunes short "Birds Anonymous" may be the earliest example of the "predators can just quit eating animals" trope. Sylvester joined the titular group, then suffered hard while going cold turkeys due to lack of bird flesh. In the end, the president of Birds Anonymous ends up chasing Tweety as well.
Sylvester decides to stop eating birds in at least one other cartoon, but only birds go off his list. Considering how much trouble Tweety hands him, it's hard to fault his decision.
Even though Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are sapient, humanoid animals, a massive chunk of their cartoons involve people trying to murder and/or eat them. They don't usually succeed, but it's still disturbing when one thinks about it, and it makes one wonder why this aspect of the Looney Tunes mythos hasn't been deconstructed yet.
In Daffy's debut, Porky's Duck Hunt, Daffy is closer to a Talking Animal as opposed to Porky being a Funny Animal. Daffy went through an Anthropomorphic Shift later on, but WB directors still did cartoons where Porky was out to hunt Daffy for food in spite of them both being Funny Animals.
Speaking of, in the The Looney Tunes Show episode "Sunday Night Slice" Bugs and friends go to a BBQ restaurant after their favorite pizzeria closes. Daffy orders pork ribs and pulled pork sandwiches, which offends Porky, but he doesn't catch on when Daffy points out that Porky himself eats pepperoni.
Later in the episode, Porky actually finds out the truth about pepperoni and is horrified...but still has a hard time ordering plain pizza.
Brandy & Mr. Whiskers handles this in a surprisingly brutal way for a Disney TV series. While predators are usually handled as villains, not all of them are entirely bad. Some are just annoying or indeed just doing what they were born to do. Even more startling is that some of them actually succeed. In a particular unexpected example, a rodent family is eaten by a crocodile in a slightly anviliciousaesop - but it's still played for laughs.
In both his SatAM and Archie comics incarnations, Sonic the Hedgehog has a prominent fondness for chili dogs. As non-sapient animals are rarely portrayed in the series, where the meat comes from is a bit of a mystery.
"Non-sapient animals" is limited to Muttski. Who's a robot now. Possibly this explains where the meat for his chili dogs comes from.
There are multiple episodes showing non-sapient rats, birds, and fish. There are also the terrapods (though intelligent, they're non-sapient). And in "Ghost Busted", Sonic mentions the headless ghost rides a non-sapient buffalo.
The guy running the chilidog stand is a pig, in both of the episodes featuring chilidog stands.
Assuming it even is meat...The lack of livestock in the village and the presence of a chilidog machine that produces edible chilidogs 10 year after the city was abandoned/taken over, combined with the food replicator from Sonic & Sally all tend to point to the idea that the chilidogs are either Star Trek food constructed atom-by-atom, or are vegan hotdogs and vegan chili.
Or, maybe that's what really happens to the biological components when someone is roboticised...
Father Of The Pride plays with this. The main character is a lion who's best friend is a Gopher who's name is "Snack". At one point, Snack's girlfriend (also aptly named "Candy") dumps him, and to protect his feelings, tells Snack that he ate his girlfriend instead.
In an episode of CatDog, Dog tries to answer the question of where meat comes from. He explains how there's a guy who plants meat plants — meanwhile, Cat just explains slaughter. Dog goes crazy at the idea of eating sapient beings, who he thinks are friends, and turns vegan. Then, Dog starts to become delusional as he imagines that vegetables are his friends. After all that, Dog then tries to eat Cat, because he's not his ''friend'' but his ''brother''. Fortunately, the guy who plants meat plants appears and solves the problem.
To make things more horrifying, Cat and Dog share bodies. So if Dog eats Cat, he eats his own body.
Well, they only felt pain in their half, so they have their own bodies, but they meet in the middle, 'coz they're conjoined. So Dog would have only eaten Cat, which just leaves Dog and his half of the body...
Addressed in a rather interesting manner in one episode of the new George of the Jungle cartoon series; George proclaims himself to protect the animals of the forest, which frequently results in the "Predators Are Mean" approach, with them being beaten up by George. However, in one episode he rescues a bird from a snake that was strangling it, causing the bird's family to reward George by carving his face on the mountainside. However, near the end of the episode, we hear the snake's side of the story, and it turns out that the bird was going to steal and eat the snake's eggs, and the snake's actions were thoroughly justified. The bird family promptly reverses the carving and flees once their facade of innocence is ruined.
On another occasion, George helped the carnivores give up meat, turning them into hippies. By an unfortunate coincidence, Ursula and Magnolia were teaching the herbivores to stand up for themselves, turning them into a vicious gang. Luckily, when it's pointed out that there won't be enough vegetables for everyone, the carnivores snap and the food chain is restored.
In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Fluttershy has to gather food for all the animals under her care, including fish for a group of otters. In an earlier episode she's seen waving to a bunch of smiling fish, indicating the fish have some variant of sentience. One wonders how she manages that kind of dissonance.
The IDW comics show she has "a fact of life" mindset and she doesn't really seem to mind seeing two packs of animals fight to the death in other to see which gets to eat the mane six! "Nature is so fascinating".
The ponies supposedly eat hot dogs. Applejack's farm raises pigs. Let's hope we never find out the connection between these two things.
Lauren Faust eventually explained both of those: vegetarian hot dogs and the pigs work for the ponies because apparently ponies like truffles. This is fine and good, but it doesn't explain how in "A Bird In The Hoof", you clearly see a sandwich with a pink slice of...SOMETHING. One hopes it's Jello or something.
Which could get awkward considering what gelatin is sometimes made from. Also, most of Ponyville's population are at least accidental carnivores thanks to the Baked Bads from "Applebuck Season."
The buffalo are based on Southwest Native American tribes. Which made their tipis out of buffalo hide.
The ending of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving has Snoopy and Woodstock, the latter of whom is a bird, sitting down to have a turkey dinner. The bonus feature on the special's new DVD release has Bill Melendez admitting even he thought that scene was rather morbid.
Wonder Pets tends to go out of its way to avoid this issue entirely. No matter what animal the Pets save, they are given a gift of celery, implying that everyone eats celery. It got to the point where, in the Circus episode (which was already plenty weird) a lion cub was seen eating nut cereal and celery.
In Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends, Spiderus is the only spider that is known to have eaten other bugs. He seems to have dropped the practice after getting married to Spindella. Additionally, the kids encounter a frog named Felix who refuses to eat bugs and enjoys eating berries. Though Felix's parents, particularly his father, are not happy about this ("Bugs are food!"), they eventually settle things with the community of Sunny Patch, the father even agreeing that he might try some of those berries.
The Fairly Oddparents ' "Crash Nebula" episode has the hero, Sprig Speevak, tell his alien classmates a story about the time he rescued an alien princess, which included a part where his kid sister Sprout calls him in for dinner, which is turkey, and it makes the alien turkey mad, so Sprig revised that part to Sprout telling him that their mom made the turkey a sweater.
The Goode Family subverts the vegan carnivore subtrope. Rearing the family dog on a soy-bean diet has made it so starved for meat that he takes to eating all of the neighborhood pets.
Confused? Not if you're watching the new Henson series on PBS Kids, Dinosaur Train. This series seems to go out of the way to talk about the differences between herbivores and carnivores. The dinosaurs that are carnivores, however, do seem to have come to an unspoken agreement to not eat fellow dinosaurs.
While they're alive, anyway. Buddy, on discovering he's a Tyrannosaurus, also discovers that he likes carrion, and in another episode, Annie explains that the T-rex family migrates to follow the herbivores, because "they eat plants, and we eat them".
Actually, the carnivores do mention that they hunt and eat other dinosaurs. Some episodes even discuss predator-prey relationships.
In an episode of Krypto The Super Dog, Krypto and his cat friend Streaky (who also has the same powers) are exposed to red kryptonite and turn into fish versions of themselves. Not only are the sharks portrayed as being mean bastards preying on innocent fish, there's actually a DOLPHIN who is APPALLED that Streaky eats fish, and has the nerve to call him (along with a bunch of other fish who find out the truth) a "fish eater". Both Carnivore Confusion AND Artistic License - Biology since both dolphins and whales are treated as if they are related to fish. It's even worse when you consider that Dolphins feed primarily on fish.
Back At The Barnyard - the fact that some of the cast of barn animals include a dog and a ferret, tends not to bother the others at all. However, Freddy the ferret does very frequently fantasize eating his best friend, Peck (who happens to be a chicken), but tries to maintain a vegetarian diet (the producers seem to disregard the fact that ferrets are obligate carnivores and completely lack the ability to derive nutrition from plant matter). In one hilarious scene, Otis the cow is seen EATING A SALAMI SANDWICH, but later turns out it's just veggie salami.
The fact that the cast are intelligent, talking animals raises the further question about the morals of human meat consumption, and why other equally intelligent barn animals don't try to avoid this fate.
The farmer is a vegan.
There's even an episode where Freddy, who can't remember the night before, is put on trial and banished for allegedly eating Peck.
The Christmas SpecialChristopher The Christmas Tree uses the Predators Are Mean model. A group of Woodland Creatures take up residence in the eponymous tree, specifically seeking shelter from foxes and weasels. The only time said fox and weasel show up, however, all the other animals are out looking for food, so they simply taunt Christopher and leave.
Drives the whole plot of The Penguins Of Madagascar episode "The Falcon and the Snow Job". Kitka the falcon crash-lands in the zoo and instantly catches Skipper's eye; however, everyone else is uncomfortable due to her diet. To allay their concerns, Kitka swears not to eat any of the zoo's residents, but still ends up accused of snatching Julien. In the end, Skipper successfully Clears Her Name, and she insists she only ate one squirrel outside the zoo...then coughs up Fred. Cue Skipper's "I think we should see other people..."
Vuk The Little Fox is one of the most brutal aversions in the history of children's cartoons: many animal characters, even those who have spoken lines, or even names, are killed and eaten by the main character, a fox.
One episode of Tom And Jerry Tales had Tom enthusiastically meeting a group of lions during an African safari. Unfortunately for him, the lions thought their "cousin" would make a good meal.
Utilized throughout almost the entire series plus the original shorts. Despite the constant cat and mouse chase, only a handful of instances depict Tom with any interest in eating Jerry. One short further confuses the matter by having a dog trying to eat Tom!
The inhabitants of the Candy Kingdom in the Land of Ooo in Adventure Time are sentient candy. Every building and the streets are made out of candy too.
More specifically referenced in the episode 'Hitman' where Finn and Jake are making sandwiches with slices of meat.
Finn: "What kind of meat is that?"
Jake: "That's Meat Man's meat"
Finn: "Do you think it hurts Meat Man when he gives us his meat?"
Later in the same episode, after a bad dream, Jake resolves to "stop eating Meat Man".
In Thundercats 2011, Third Earth's World of Funny Animals depicts Thundera's Cats not as obligate carnivores, but omnivores like humans. They eat meat, presumably non-sentient species, but the Fishmen sailors from "Ramlak Rising" have no qualms about eating other sentients...like the Cats. Indeed, the ship's cook has designs on stuffing the Thunderkittens, and when the Fishman Captain Tunar says he would have let the Cats eat his own first mate had he known they were such competent fighters, he's not entirely joking. In a subsequent episode, the Cats leave nonanthropomorphic fish-skeletons as food scraps, while an enemy Lizard Folk muses on the idea of eating the Cats roasted.
A stunningly brutal aversion in a one-off gag on Tuff Puppy. When looking into Kitty's past, they see her sixteenth birthday where her mother hired a very sentient (yet normal sized) mouse magician, Kitty ate him without even a second thought, understandably squicking out the partygoers.
Veggie Tales has a world populated by talking vegetables and fruits, in which there are pies and popcorn balls as food, and apparently "apple choppers". It was confirmed in the commentary for Duke and the Great Pie War (and demonstrated in Jonah) that there are non-sentient fruits and vegetables in their world as well.
In their version of Daniel and the Lion's Den, a cucumber is tossed to lions.
Diego in Go Diego Go often has to help a prey animal evade a predator (the reasons aren't specified) though he's also helped predators to live, and has no qualms about anyone eating fish. In one episode, he helps a llama outrun a puma until he realizes that he personally knows the puma, and it's a "nice" putma who only wanted to borrow a book.
The King of Great Waterland is a lion, who in one of the early episodes is shown hunting in the forest. With a rifle. In a land full of talking animals. His servants are later shown taking dead pheasants with them.
Even the fish talk, and at one point ask Alfred for help because they are afraid that they'll be hunted to extinction by a new high-tech fishing boat.
The character Krabnagel is a dangerous criminal and known to eat others (including little children). He is never charged for this, when he ends up in prison it's for other crimes.
Dr. Weird takes this trope to it's (il)logical conclusion.
