"Of course, I love families! They're so much more filling!"

Lindsay rolls her eyes. "Haha, Rox, very funny. I do think about it from time to time, but the truth is, most prey families just aren't very close. That might seem strange, but think about it: some prey species, especially mice and rabbits, practice explosive breeding as a survival strategy. They have big litters, and usually shorter gestation periods, too. If you had literally hundreds of kids, would you be all that close to any of them? Most prey ship the majority of their kids off to government-funded schools that help with the raising, and they almost never see their parents after that.

"In addition to that, there's also survival rates. Preds only make up something like 5% of the population, But with each pred eating maybe one prey every two weeks, that adds up quick. I'd have to look up census numbers to get an exact amount, but I think, like, each new prey only has a 20% chance of surviving past 25? When you've got so many births and such a low survival rate, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to get... super attached to anyone. Not that prey families don't care about each other -- littermates are usually a pretty tightly-knit group, as I understand it -- but when you know that four out of five of your siblings aren't gonna be around forever, you've already mentally prepared for it when they vanish.

"So, a prey's early life tends to go like this:"

"As a child, they live for a while with their parents in a house that's probably pretty crowded already. Then, they get shipped off to one of these prey schools and live there. They study, they make friends, they're close to their littermates, but in general, they don't form any really strong relationships, or at least not any relationships that are expected to last after they're out of school. Everything's got kind of an 'it's temporary' vibe to it. They're also pretty sheltered during this period -- there's technically no rule against eating kids, but it is illegal to hunt at those schools, so children in general are pretty safe.

"Then, they graduate from school, and they enter the 'danger zone.' See, most prey who get eaten are between the ages of 18 and 25. The prey who survive past 25 are the ones who are smart enough to not end up in some predator's belly, which means if it hasn't happened by then, it probably isn't going to. So it's that age where they've just gotten out of school, they're out on their own, just tasting freedom for the first time: that's when they're in the most danger. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because preds will specifically target that demographic, too, since we know that they're the ones who are young and stupid and will probably be easy meals. So they don't form a lot of deep friendships during this period, because they all know that the other prey around them could be eaten at any moment. (They always assume that they will be the exception, of course.) This is the age when the breeding instincts kick in, too, so you see lots of casual hookups that neither party expects to last very long.

"The end result is that most prey don't form really strong familial bonds as children, and then they don't usually form lasting relationships as young adults, either. It isn't until prey get a little older that they start actually looking to make lifelong friends, and even then, those are friends that they choose, rather than family.

"I can be reasonably sure that they prey I eat aren't going to leave behind anyone who will be too distraught that they're gone. It is, after all, just a part of the world we live in."

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