The conviction that humans are more than food runs so deep that, even while being eaten, a person may reject the event as not just unlikely but unjust and unreal. The disbelief is moral as well as factual: the world is not supposed to work that way. Someone who already knows better in theory can still refuse it in the moment, and take a lifetime to fully absorb it.
Western thought sets people outside the food chain: animals can be our food, but we can never be theirs. Yet being edible, a juicy and nourishing body, is not a minor or inessential feature of human existence. Facing a predator exposes this as an illusion, reducing a complex person to just another edible being in an indifferent world.
A strict veganism that holds neither humans nor animals should ever be seen as edible quietly keeps humans outside nature, reinforcing the very divide it means to challenge. The better alternative rejects turning living things into mere meat or commodities while accepting that all creatures, including us, live by eating and being eaten. It also respects cultures where food animals and plants are treated as kin, and where use and respect are not opposed.
Treating the self as separate from nature makes death look like a loss with nothing given back. Seeing life as circulation, a gift from a community of ancestors in which bodies return to feed others, breaks the human-nature split. Consumption is a precondition of life, and being consumed is the return payment.
Whether a diet harms fewer animals depends on the land, not on whether it contains meat. Where grain farming clears habitat and carries heavy ecological costs, eating a wild, low-impact grazing animal can do less harm to animals and ecosystems than eating the grain.