I fully agree with you that this is how it seems from our present point of view for many reasons.
It does not help that from childhood we are constantly bombarded with the movies, tales of hapless, innocent prey destroyed, killed by evil predators. Then when those “evil” savages threaten us like sharks the surfers in Australia for example, then we set out to hunt them down, or when in forests the Wolves become a nuisance we kill them off.
It is these times we realize from our own misguided “experiments” what happens to those ecosystems when humans interfere according to their subjective, egocentric understanding of nature.
Our own nature is inherently selfish, egotistic, and exploitative so we view everything through our own “filters”. We also convinced ourselves that evolution is the survival of the fittest — meaning the strongest bully that consumes everything, to justify ourselves. But this is a tragic misunderstanding, we celebrate and promote cancer as the lifeform that can evolve and survive when we know it is not true.
If we could enter and view Nature from within above and independent of our inherently egocentric, subjective bias we would see a completely different picture. We would then see how all elements from the still, vegetative to animate levels in the system intricately complement each other, each performing a very specific, crucially important role. Then we would understand that the predators control the population of the prey by eating the weakest links and by that also promote the survival of the fittest. Moreover, they never consume more than what they need, they leave the carcasses to secondary predators and scavengers.
And if wider Nature is too far fetched, we can look at our own body with its cells and organs. If we had the ability to observe our biological body on the cellular level, we would face constant, seemingly random chaos, wanton destruction, haphazard rebuilding, constant war on multiple levels. Still — in optimal cases — on the ‘systemic level”, in our overall consciousness we enjoy health, growth, tranquility.
If Nature was not a finely balanced, mutually responsible, mutually complementing integral system life, optimal development would not be possible, we would not exist even for a moment as everything would just randomly appear and disappear like in extremely unstable systems in laboratories.
When we change ourselves and through the acquired similarity we can observe Nature ‘from within” we will all see the survival of the fittest actually means the survival of those that are fit to subdue and integrate into a single whole, into a single organism.