Your point that larger consumers tend to graze on smaller prey or vegetation is an interesting one, thanks for posting.
Consumption in essence, is energy consumption.
The largest consumer in nature has to be plants, as a collective.
They get their energy directly from the sun.
Humanity has to be the next largest consumer in nature as a collective.
Because we get our energy from further down the food chain than plants, so far, our energy requirement has to be much less, otherwise we would have destroyed ourselves and the planet by now, since we are dependent on what plants can produce.
But we seem to be at the point where our burden on the energy product of plants is becoming critical, existential, hence the global physical and economic problems we are seeing.
So the solution is not to become like a larger mammal consumer, but actually to become like the collective of plants, which feed directly from the sun.
By that we can remove our burden from the energy product of plants.
Thanks for prompting me to think about this, it provides yet another perspective of the energy problem, and the only solution - to go fully solar.
I write in my own stories mostly about how we need to change the way money works, to make this transition - it can't be done using money issued only as debt. There are fundamental physical reasons for that.
Money has to be issued for free to have real utility from the energy of the sun, this is the only way we can monetise solar product, compared with plant product. Plant product requires work per Joule to obtain whereas solar product does not (the work of solar infrastructure creation is not per Joule received, since the energy returned can be made practically infinite by further scaling up the means to receive, like growth of a tree)
So the issue of free money representing solar product already received (450 Bn in UK since 2005,for example), would be the catalyst in all countries for rapid transition to 100%+ solar capacity, backed by hydrogen to give a hydrogen ecology replacing the old oil ecology..
Issue of that money would remove all predatirial instincts from humans I think.
(Would lions still hunt if it rained meat? Probably not)