Context: This is a world inhabited by intelligent, non-anthro animals, some of which have decided to outlaw hunting and eating prey in favour of living in harmony and cooperating.
They have a zero tolerance policy for predation and it is criminalized extremely heavily. Depending on what species or taxon you are (all animals have the right to be tried by members of their own species and taxa, and they are responsible for carrying out sentences of their own kind too), First Degree Predation, where you personally kill then eat an animal, is the only crime that formally carries the death penalty. Regular first degree murder where you "merely" kill an animal without intent to eat them only has a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole. Second Degree Predation (aka Simple Predation) is where you obtain meat with the intention of eating it without personally killing anything, carries only a mandatory fixed term prison sentence in addition to losing certain freedoms post release.
However, their laws on the issue is very much based on intent as that is their philosophy, that because they are all sapient and no longer bound by their natural hunter instincts, they are responsible for their own actions. You don't have to actually eat the prey you killed to have committed First Degree Predation, and the inverse is technically true as well, where if you kill an animal for some other reason and only after they're dead do you decide to eat them, then you're technically only guilty of murder and Second Degree Predation instead of First Degree Predation. There are also legal ways that certain animals can obtain animal tissue, for example, as skin grafts and organ transplants, autopsy and forensic investigations, or for general research. Because animals handling tissue in these cases don't intend to eat it, it does not fall under Second Degree Predation. However, if you buy animal meat and later decide not to eat it, that's still considered predation.
Especially with the nature of eating and digesting food, law enforcement only has a very small time window to order a suspect to undergo lab testing of what's in their belly where it will actually show a positive hit for animal tissue, so my original thought is that the intent clause is meant to make prosecuting predation easier, since they wouldn't need to actually prove that the accused has animal tissue in their digestive tract at any point, just that they wanted at some point for some form of animal tissue to end up inside them.
I know there are many real life laws that use intent in a similar way, but I don't know how courts actually prove intent beyond a reasonable doubt. Can anyone who's delved more into the legal side of worldbuilding comment on how the courts in my world might prove (or disprove) that someone intended to eat another animal when they do not have direct evidence that the animal was indeed eaten?
Thank you so much!
If I'm being honest I do handwave the ecological issues (ironic considering I literally studied ecology in university, this may or may not also be in small part my way of pretending those rules don't exist while staying up all night cramming for ecology courses). I do use some real environmental science as part of my lore of how the animals keep their ecosystem healthy without predation though, things like techniques for stewardship of plants and actively maintaining forests since they live in them.
Actually, there are several major aspects that are kind of ambiguously addressed: why every single animal is sapient, how they can all cross communicate, and it's implied that they have human scale lifespans mainly because a 15-20 year lifespan for a cat isn't very conducive to complex character growth, and of course, since prey aren't being eaten yet haven't gotten horrifically overpopulated, they have lower birth rates or have better control over their reproduction. My more favored possibility is that because this world canonically takes place millions of years after humans mysteriously disappeared from the Earth, the humans might have been experimenting with modifying animals to be sapient, with a longer lifespan and generally more human-like with something like a gene-editing retrovirus that could spread to other animals. When the humans evacuated or went extinct the virus got out and eventually infected every animal, giving them all sapience, long lifespans, and all the other "glue lore" that make this world work. Maybe just out of curiosity as to whether an animal like a cat or mouse can gain these traits, or maybe, they knew that their time on Earth was coming to an end, and passed on the gift of sapience to the animals so that maybe they can start a better and longer lasting society than humanity, so the Earth can have another chance at complex intelligent life. I talk more about it here (Reddit link).
Also, since the humans left plenty of ruins and plenty of things containing information that the animals eventually deciphered, it gave them a huge boost in their own science and technology when they otherwise would have had to redevelop everything independently. In the process, they also adopted a lot of the standards that humans have developed. It's already there, it's already been well thought out, why not just use it? It's how I explain why they're a non-human society using things like meters, kilograms, a 24 hour day, and other human constructs and also generally just think a lot like humans with some animal traits. This is more glue lore, mainly because I didn't want to add yet another layer of complexity that readers have to keep track of by inventing their own constructs, measurement units, etc.