Educating preschool children about violence and nature and spiriuality

How did you deal with questions of violence (as in animals attacking other animals) and meat coming from animals, etc.

We eat so little meat in our house (maybe once a week - poultry or fish). Several months ago my husband took our now 3 1/2 year old son to the famous La Brea tar pits where there is a museum full of fossils of animals that have been stuck in the tar ... prehistoric animals among others. He saw a still shot he saw as part of a movie in the La Brea Tar Pits of a saber tooth tiger attacking a horse that got stuck in the mud? We've been trying to answer his questions with simplicity and yet sensitively about these subjects but they're really looping in his mind.

In nature violent things happen and it directly contradicts all that we tell him about violence at home. A few weeks ago on our annual family trip to Yosemite National Park, he saw a diarama of an Native American carrying a deer kill over his shoulders and our son has been OBSESSING about it. Moreover, he doesn't know about death so when we explained that the 'indian' (his words from school.... sigh) ate the deer he was repelled and then he had all kinds of questions about the if the deer was "sad when they were biting on him?" and where was the deers mommy and daddy? Ethan then asked.... are you ready for this one.... WHY ARE THE INDIANS BAD TO THE EARTH????

And so mommy on the spot improvises a parable about how the Native American people lived in a place where they could grow food in the summer and gather herbs and fruit but when winter time came there was no more food so they asked Mother Earth to send them some food to feed their children. Mother Earth sent them the deer and they were so grateful to have food for their whole village with this one deer that they wasted nothing... they used the fur for clothes, the antlers for flutes, the hooves for cups, etc.

He asked again if the deer was sad when they were 'biting on him' which I realized later was a response also to having seen the saber tooth tiger on the horse's back in the tar pit... finally I told him that the deer went to a deep sleep so that it wouldn't hurt and he was happy to know that he could feed the children. He's now back to the wild cat and since he doesn't understand extinct (though we've tried to explain past and present) he's confused.

I don't have clear answers but I am aware that I'm trying to give him the simplicity of very difficult concepts that many people never come to peacefully. For hundreds and hundreds of years humankind has considered these issues and tried to make themselves comfortable with these concepts let alone put them into bite sized concepts for a small mind.