Illness, and what answers to poverty in animals--continued hunger--are quickly followed by unanticipated and almost painless extinction.

Where we err is, in giving to animals feelings and emotions which they do not possess.

To us the very sight of blood and of torn or mangled limbs is painful, while the idea of the suffering implied by it is heartrending.
We have a horror of all violent and sudden death, because we think of the life full of promise cut short, of hopes and expectations unfulfilled, and of the grief of mourning relatives.

But all this is quite out of place in the case of animals, for whom a violent and a sudden death is in every way the best.

Thus the poet's picture of "Nature red in tooth and claw With ravine" is a picture the evil of which is read into it by our imaginations, the reality being made up of full and happy lives, usually terminated by the quickest and least painful of deaths.
On the whole, then, we conclude that the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the truth.