I am going to first time attempt and participate in FreeWriting conducted by @mariannewest. I don't know why I was not aware of it before but you might also want to check her post
Day 823: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: cannibals
Cannibal is not something which does not exist at all, and a human-animal relationship is a true value, one which would not exist if all the various values of life had to compete. If we are to tell the story of the relationship between the human being and the nonhuman being, a first requirement is that it must be intimate, or that in some way the human can feel it.
By this I mean the relation has to be based on an understanding that is no less profound than that of friendship. It is this sort of intimate human-animal relationship that we have to mark as essential to our understanding of the values of life, and to work with in deciding what those values will be. We cannot say that everything valuable in the world has to have a value of its own