Basic Trope: Sapient cartoon animals still eat each other.
- Straight: Alice the sapient cat wants to eat Bob the sapient mouse.
- Exaggerated: Alice eats ALL sapient animals, including humans and her own kind!
- Downplayed: Alice the sapient cat eats mice which are exceptionally intelligent but ambiguously sapient. Some may argue the mice about as smart as say a chimpanzee.
- Averted: Carnivore Confusion
- Justified: Serves as a Furry Reminder.
- Subverted: Alice gives up trying to eat Bob, befriends him, and starts living on a diet of non-sapient fish.
- Double Subverted: It was all just a ruse to lull him into a false sense of security.
- Lampshaded: "Don't eat me! I'm just as smart as you!"
- Enforced: The writers wanted Alice to still have animal instincts, despite being anthropomorphic.
- Inverted: Alice the cat is a Vegetarian Carnivore
- Discussed: "We cats can't afford to think too hard about what we have to do to survive."
- Conversed: "Wow, write animals as sapient and you get a whole bundle of fucked up implications."
- Deconstructed: The ethical issues are explored. Even if it's necessary and natural to eat other sapient beings, that doesn't make it any less horrific for the ones being eaten, or their loved ones. Cats are often morally myopic out of sheer necessity, otherwise they become too wracked with guilt to function.
- Reconstructed: Cats and mice have arrangements to soften the brutality of carnivorism; mice agree to donate their bodies upon death, much like organ donation. And when cats have to hunt, they go after criminals or mice who are close to death anyway. Alice is going after Bob either because he's a Serial Killer the other mice want rid of, or because he's already dying and she's giving him a Mercy Kill.
Head back to Sapient Eat Sapient with you for dinner? Sure, nothing could possibly go wrong!
