An email to a friend – more on food chains

Old C.,

I find it fun to talk a bit more about the food chains.

Your previous mail states that a species "eats" (you quoted) "rationally" (you quoted) another species to which it is superior.

I am not going to argue about the food chain or food web mechanism. It's part of nature's undeniable truth, and it's really too intricate.
I just have something to say about the term "superior" you used without placing it between quotation marks.

Put aside the human egoistic and arrogant perspectives, the eater and the eaten relation doesn't necessarily tell the superior species from the inferior. It is arbitrary to say that the cat is superior to the rat simply because the former preys on the latter.
The crocodile, the python and the anaconda, which are reptiles, normally prey on quite a few kinds of mammals. Given the chances, they would devour the intelligent primates, and also the pig. The primates and the pig are on the top ranks of Class Mammalia, which are definitely superior to members of Class Reptilia, according to taxonomy without dispute.
According to some researches on animal cognition, the pig is actually among the most intelligent animals, even more intelligent than the domesticated dog and cat.
It seems, in such case, neither the predators are superior species, nor is their prey weaker.