A recent news segment showed a man with a very friendly croc, which one could call either a pet or a friend, although a 17 foot, 950 lb animal doesn't really fit the definition of a pet.
While I have no doubt that should I dive into that croc's favorite river, it would have me for lunch without the slightest hesitation, it was shown nuzzling the man who had found it as an injured baby and had taken care of it. It was clear these two vastly different creatures had bonded. This is just the most extreme version of many incidents of interspecies bonding I have seen, but that's a separate issue.
There is a fundamental and probably instinctive moral code at work here, and it is best summed up as, "don't eat your friends." After all, there is plenty to eat out there, but no creature has all the friends it can use.
Humans, not being exclusively predators and having much more complex minds and social systems, have nuanced this basic moral code and have extrapolated from the fundamental. From "don't eat your friends," we've evolved "don't kill your friends," and since we're social animals, we extend it to "don't kill members of your community, your tribe, your country and even your country's friends. We also extend it to not only don't kill them but don't kill their livelihood, thus, "don't steal." With a bit of effort, we could likely extrapolate the rest of our human moral code from this starting place.
The essential thing is that crocs, like humans, seem to need and value friends. We might also suspect that we can extend not eating friends to protecting them from someone else eating them. I would not want to attack the man in question in front of his croc friend in an effort to check this theory.
I'm becoming convinced that there are deep, fundamental principles at work in nature, principles that are independent of species. Apparently "don't eat your friends" is one of these.
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