when we’re done with our overwhelming grief we’ll eat i guess

So it's occured to me that a testament to how cruel Cassie's "nonviolent" solution in book 22 was is the fact that David begs Rachel to kill him in book 48. I say this because I feel like David is someone who very much values his own skin-- we see in book 21 that he was willing to surrender to Visser Three the moment he realized that he was in a situation where he very well might die. And while that alone doesn't necessarily make someone a bad person (not everyone has nerves of steel like the Animorphs do), it does mean that David is selfish enough to value his own life over the greater good. He'd probably choose infestation in a heartbeat if it meant that he won't have to die, and especially if it meant he could get back all the creature comforts he lost when his house was destroyed. Yet there he is in book 48, begging Rachel to kill him-- and he does this entirely with the sole intention of self preservation, as he did before. What I'm trying to say here is, life as a rat must have been so genuinely fucking miserable for David in order for him to think that death was the better option.