Admittedly my attempt at this isn’t too far from the typical “they just eat fish” solution, but I thought it would be interesting to play with how they acknowledge their respective statuses as predators and prey.
The two species have different but complimentary funeral rites. When a prey animal dies, it is ritually butchered and its meat consumed by a predator. When a predator dies, seeds are buried with the body so their remains fertilize crops that are eaten by members of the prey species. Specific individuals or families are chosen by the deceased in their will to carry out this task, and the relationship is treated like being a godparent.
(Apologies if this ends up a double post. I replied to this comment in my notifications and it just fell into the abyss. Lemmy is weird like that. I’ve sometimes seen things I’ve only posted once show up two or three times in a row, too)
Anyway, I love the idea of a sapient species having a closely related nonsapient species. Yinrih have nonsapient congeners called tree dwellers. Humans often compare them to chimps, and while their intelligence is about on par with chimps, tree dwellers look indistinguishable from yinrih, at least to humans. Yinrih traditionally consider themselves to be sapient tree dwellers, even though they are different species, and there is a faction of yinrih that wants to shed their sapience and join their cousins in irrationality.
How big are these tardigrades?
Roughly cow sized and pretty chunky.
After rereading your post and given the context of the thread I realize you didn’t specifically say the cattle weren’t sapient
Yeah, the whole species is the prey animal in the thread context. They just have a subspecies they are willing to sacrifice.
How does this subspecies handle the situation?
they don’t have a say in it. They have been bred into pretty much being cows.
When I came up with them I wanted to figure out how out a species that evolved from something that used numbers strategy to survive. Its probably in the realm of edgy grim dark stuff, but I wanted a setting where if you where to zoom back out far enough the relationships between the species should feel almost like a nature documentary with individuals acting sort of like cells in a body. One of the quarks of their evolution is that almost any species can gain nutrients from eating them. So sometime sthey will just eject a bunch of their cattle into space in order to escape more predatory species. Trade acts as a sort of symbiotic relationship that they share with some other species in exchange for minerals and the like as they kind of suck at mining.