the series is inconsistent, like I think the original generation treated a lot of them like animals that would eat each other and stuff, and then everything got anthropomorphized. like the reason you couldn't catch a farfetch'd in the wild and had to find the one NPC who would trade it was because it was eaten to near-extinction.
I think gen 5 or one of the later gens (or both) tried to do a tonal reset on that kind of stuff, but unless you show a predator pokemon eating the carcass of a prey Pokemon, the anthropomorphizing will always win out.