Talk:Zootopia (location)/@comment-28547359-20160525033821/@comment-1403834-20160606194925

The ratio persists for 2 reasons.

1. Sentience, intelligence or planning isn't involved in maintaining this ratio in the wild, and while the amount of food is one of the ways it's balanced, the largest and most influential is birth rate. Predators rarely mate and produce very few offspring, which then needs significantly more time to mature to a point where they can reproduce. In fact, the availability of food only really factor in when scarcity and famine hits, and predators start killing each other for food.

2. Story-wise, the predators play the role of a wrongly feared minority (probably Afro-Americans, given the country of origin), with the whole "going wild" being a metaphor for the biased and unfounded fears that a minority might be naturally savage, while everyone else is naturally civilized.