All creatures must pay.

The difference is that all animals pay directly by labor.

A wolf that doesn’t hunt starves.

A cow that doesn’t move when the pasture is overgrazed starves.

Just because money doesn’t exist for them doesn’t change that fact that the requirements of life—food, shelter, water, reproductive partners—are bought by labor.

And sometimes that labor is fighting. A male rhinoceros beetle that doesn’t fight for his mate will lose to the one that does.

Likewise for people, our food is bought with labor (that of the farmer/rancher that produced it). Without the farmer that raised food or the hunter/forager that finds wild grown food, you have none.

Without the person that felled the tree for lumber and the carpenters that nailed it into the shape of a house, you wouldn’t have one either.

Humans are not exceptional cut-outs from nature. ALL values to ALL animals are won by some form of labor on the part of that animal. We are no exception to that rule.

No animal lives for free. We cannot live for free either. We simply possess the symbolic intelligence to impose an intermediary—a symbolic representation of value called money—between labor performed and goods/services received.