Actually many chimp groups don’t eat much meat. Bonobos, gorillas and orangs are mostly vegetarian too.
Gaiman said he wanted to be a wolf. I think this may have been discussed upthread but this is a bit from his journal in 2004 which you can see online:
‘When I was a boy, when I grew up I wanted to be a wolf. I never wanted to be a wolfman. I didn't really want to be a werewolf, except for a few years in my early teens. I wanted to be a wolf, in a forest or in the world.
Later, as an adult, I remember encountering the story of Red Riding Hood in its original form, a French version that predated the cleaned-up ways of telling the tale I'd already encountered, and the bleak sexuality of the story came through: when she encounters the wolf in her grandmother's bed, he eats and drinks her grandmother with her, then tells her to take off all her clothes and throw them on the fire -she wouldn't be needing them any more, -and, finally, she joins him in the bed naked. And then, with no more ado, he eats her. And there the story stops, sometimes with a direct moral -not to talk to strangers -and sometimes without it. The story disturbed me, and I put it into Sandman, in the Serial Killers' Convention story, where it represents a number of things at once, and is also itself.
The wolf defines Red Riding Hood. He makes the story happen. Without him, she'd just be another girl on her way to her grandmother's house. And she'd leave her goodies behind, and come home, and no-one would ever have heard of her. But he's not just her wolf: he's all the wolves on the edge of the world, all the wolves in all the stories, all the wolves in all the dreams of wolves; flashing green eyes in the darkness, dangerously honest about what he wants: food, company, an appetite.
And if I could be any literary figure, I think, today, I'd be strangely happy to be him.’
So the girl is only a minor character to his exciting wolf - he really makes the ‘dangerously honest’ bit dangerously clear.