Pokemon used to eat each other back when they fully emulated animals, but once they went Full-Singularity, they began to synthesize proteins out of inorganic materials. Notice how Magnemites have the same eyes as Unown, and Unown is the oldest known pokemon? Unowns are large, self-perpetuating life-forms that are like nanobots, which were set loose and slowly took over all of nature, and magnemites were probably a clunky, early prototype. The Gigasses are ancient robots that used to be guardians before tiny robot technology was invented. Pokemon were once regular animals, but once augmented by micromachines with the desire to serve humans, became domesticatable, virtually indestructible beings, some combining together into super-animals and combination-animals, others coming back from extinction, and others still amalgamating with space and time itself, to the point where they could command nature. And also Space and Time.
You can tell that people don't treat pokemon like actual pets. The people in the Pokemon world trade their named "friends" for other animals that they would rather own. Hell, they battle them all the time and it's considered no big deal. Gruelling training, according to pokemon masters, looks like you've built a strong friendship, when really you've just been running around in the woods telling your pet to beat forest animals to death. "Loving" pokemon is likenable to loving an item rather than a creature... Which makes it all the more interesting that a pokemon's happiness can be increased most easily by winning fights. In other words, it's happy that it's served its purpose. Now, let's have a comparezy here:
Pokemon people say "You have a strong bond with your pokemon!" if you use them often, not necessarily if you have any genuine relationship-developing moments with them.
Any interaction you have with a video game, say, Dark Souls or something like that, might not be very friendly, but if you spend a long enough time playing it that you've become considerably accomplished in the game, or "Strong", one might say you have a strong bond with Dark Souls.
Everyone loves their pokemon, but you're free to trade them away for ones you think might be better.
Don't you do the same thing with video games and shit? You regard them as more of technology than a genuine friend, so you can trade them away.
Pokemon live to fulfill their owner's purpose for them.
Aside from the occassional cartoon-story where a Pokemon spends the episode trying to get an unattainable food or something for teh comediez, Pokemon have no personal impetus. No goals in life beyond making their owner happy, and they're happy about that. Pokemon start to act like their owners! When have you ever seen a pokemon in love (IN CANON. LINK TO DEVIANTART AND I WILL COMMIT A MURDER.) aside from the ones Brock owned? They're trying to emulate their owners so they can empathize with them. Pikachu and Ash are much the same, optimistic and ready to take on the world, even if they're obviously shitter than the creature they're competing with. (Have you SEEN Pikachu's base stats? Clearly the worst of the available starters in Pokemon Go, at least!) It's almost as if they're... *Gasp* Programmed to serve...
Not to mention, the very happy and nonchalant nature of the Pokemon world itself... People have no problem letting a 10-year-old keep ANY ANIMAL THEY FIND IN THE WILD as a pet. Even if it's a potential WMD. Last I checked, Lugia was a tornado-stirring whalebird that lives in the ocean because VIBRATING ITS WINGS THE WRONG WAY IS STRONG ENOUGH TO LEVEL BUILDINGS AND CAUSE NATURAL DISASTERS. It's no problem to talk to any old stranger, give gifts out to random people, or let your child go off on years-long journeys across regional borders.
And the entire method of conflict resolution is nothing but Pokemon Battling. Nobody uses any other method of combat. The rough counterpart equivalent of the mafia did a HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF A RADIO TOWER, and NOT A SINGLE HUMAN BEING WAS INJURED. The badass Final Four Dragon guy interrogated bad guys not by hurting them, but by beating the shit out of their pokemon. The level of crime is stupid. All the antagonistic teams are horrendously misinformed and short-sighted. Your rival has no idea what's wrong with his training methods even after you beat him several hundred times. (I've taken to calling him "Ryder" cuz he misses the point so goddamn much.) You rarely see any real weapons that aren't being taught for martial arts and other cultural purposes. So, what the fuck happened to those?
The population is extraordinarily small, for a game that's supposed to be covering entire cities and countries, you're not actually seeing that many people... And those people, for the most part, all have one routine, and they all do everything they want. Nobody in the pokemon world hates their job. (Sure, some people are having a bad day when you talk to them, but it's like having one of those "Cute" fights with your girlfriend or something. A collection of minor annoyances and analytically insubstantial.) Everyone fits in somewhere. I don't think there's a single homeless person in the streets of any city in all of Pokeland.
What I think happened, was that Pokemon was our world thousands of years ago, but during an arms race or something, somebody made nanobots and started a technological singularity that rewired brains and genetics (Hence all the unnatural hair colors, whole groups of people looking the same, everyone magically ending up doing the job that they like doing.) There was an apocalypse, all of nature broke down and became PokeNature, and after everyone came out of their vaults and shit, there were extremely low populations, but supertechnology, so people built tiny cities in the middle of immaculate forests and wildlife.
Technically, Pokemon don't need to eat, so there is no cohesive food chain. If a Pokemon eats, it'll eat what it thinks it should be eating since it looks like the type of animal that would eat this kind of other animal. Hell, humans don't need to eat. The protagonist almost never eats or sleeps in any of the games, ever.
