I always liked the way Redwall did it. Sentient animals didn't eat other sentient animals for meat, just fish and shrimp and stuff and maybe birds but some birds were sentient? And some birds ate mammals, and reptiles tended to eat sentient people too. And some animals were said to be cannibalistic. So if you ate meat you were generally a bad guy unless you were an owl or eagle or something which definitely did eat people but tended to be good guys.
Semi related but man i regret not knowing what redwall was as a kid i would have eaten that stuff up. I LOVED anthro rat based fiction as a kid thats literally what kickstarted me being a fur...id write stories ab my own mice using shit like sewing needles as a sword. Missed out by not knowing ab redwall til like, last year
Also i loved reading this ask but i havent read redwall so ths is me
