With all due respect to krejames, it's not awful. It's how cheetahs, and every other large predator, lives. When large predators are exterminated, a biomes health deteriorates as the herbivores, like gazelles and deer, reproduce beyond the capacity of the land to support them, as Aldo Leopold explains so eloquently in Thinking Like a Mountain. It does, however, tend to poke holes in the whole benevolent designer theory. If, as the Society likes to ask, the Creator can be seen through His creation, just what kind of "invisible qualities" are, in fact, being demonstrated?
This makes me think of James Dickey's The Heaven of Animals, a favorite poem:
Here they are.
The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling Under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood, The deepest field.
For some of these,
It could not be the place It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain
At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.
