Continuing the question of animal suffering, and what Rav Kook’s writings on vegetarianism actually contribute to it.
Q. But why does the order have to be full of pain, I’m not talking about humans who have free will but animals who don’t have a destiny and can’t change their lives. why do they suffer even at a small level, you can answer that predators are lowering the population and that it’s in perfect order, is the answer to the problem is that we don’t know. I hope this doesn’t sound condescending.
Rav Kook deals at length with your questions, and you should study his “Vision of Vegetarianism” (part of which has recently been translated into English). Nevertheless, in short, he explains that just as the prophets suffered unpopularity, and even were sometimes assassinated as a direct outcome of their rebuking, so too, the Jewish people have paid a heavy price for our role as the “Nation of Prophets”, the “Conscience of Mankind” and the “Light to the Nations”. Similarly the rest of mankind and in fact all of creation is based upon the framework of Free Will for mankind, to choose between good and bad. Part of which is to hear rebuke, and see examples in life, in history and in the animal world as well, which educate man to differentiate between right/moral and wrong/evil when he sees it.
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