[Rainymood]

>No, because other animals don't have mental capacity to truly understand the consequences of their action.

A lion knows full well that it survives another month when it kills a wildebeest and that it can feed it cubs. What more is there to "truly" understand?

[freehunter]

When a mentally capable human kills another human, they do so with the understanding that killing that human will cause other humans to grieve the death of that human, and will remove that human's productivity from the world. They've made that connection and have decided to end that human's life anyway, so they are held responsible for the outcome of that. This is why people who are mentally incapable of understanding this are not punished the same way as people who are mentally capable.

A lion is not, to the best of our understanding, capable of understanding that killing another animal will cause grief to that other animal's family. If that other animal's family is even capable of understanding and/or grieving their death. And then we'd have to prove the killing was done with malicious intent, because just merely being responsible for someone's death, even as a human, is not immediately a criminal offense.

But it's a silly argument anyway because humans are often not prosecuted for the death of non-human animals, especially when that non-human animal is killed for food. So the idea that we would prosecute a lion for killing and eating an antelope is laughable when we don't prosecute a farmer for killing a cow for food.