Reality isn't for everyone.
I've killed, cleaned, cooked and eaten animals in order not to starve...
I MUCH prefer getting them from a grocer and cooking them, or having them delivered to my table already cooked ready to eat

a case for hunting.

So, the Hyenas' favorite philosopher is Thomas Malthus...

One thing I'm going for in this story, is that the animals have a very different perspective on life and death than we humans do. They recognize that death is part of life. They accept it. They may not personally want to die, but they're not as hung up about it as most humans are.

Animals need to eat, and they have to kill to do so. The people they kill, in a furry universe, are sapient. This system requires adjustments in attitudes.

Kathy's country has created a system with vat-grown meat products (SPAM--Scientifically Produced Animal Matter), kibble, and the voluntary surrender of the bodies of the dead to be processed into food by people like Kathy's mortician father. The skins are preserved for the family to use as a memorial, the meat goes to the grocery store.

In the Maramasai, the land can only support so many grazers, and to save the grazers from starving in lean times, or being hunted wholesale, the Duchesses offer protection in exchange for a certain number of young. It's like conscription into the Army, in a way.

The one little hitch in my system, is how many babies do these wildebeests have? If they are as sapient as the hyenas, shouldn't they have similarly long lives, and therefore, smaller numbers of offspring? I admit I goofed a bit, in thinking of them like intelligent cattle. So I have to fudge it and claim that there are different degrees of sapience in this world, depending on how much pressure a species had to "evolve." Grazers have almost everything they need, so they don't have too much pressure, but predators have a lot of pressure to get smarter. They also have paws that can adapt into hands for tool use.

They're very lucky ungulates don't have fingers and could invent firearms...

Another thing I do with the grazers, is that they're generally so large that they'd be top-heavy and awkward if standing on their rear legs, so they usually amble along on all fours. I do show bipedal elephants and zebras, and Trader Horn is almost always bipedal, but usually the herbivores are quadrupedal. They also wear minimal clothing.

In my comic strip, before this Rackenroon arc, I have a family of sheep, who are bipedal. The parents works as accountants. They wear clothes, but have cloven hooves. They have magnets embedded in their clothes to serve as closure devices, as buttons and zippers would be awkward, and Velcro would stick in their fleece.

And in another comic strip I did, "Anne Bunny," the horses have prosthetic gloves that give them hands and slip on over their hooves. When the pirates want to leave the horses helpless, they steal their gloves.

Wildebeast religion sounds interesting

woo, population control! my favorite! if only the majority of properly sentient species' practiced it... (and personally i prefer hand-picking the most awful individuals for death, rather than creating new ones with a horrible destiny they can't escape)