Like, any gui will try to eat any gui, and if they succeed, good for them, and if not, they get eaten instead. :P

Which, I can kind of see why everyone else went "ick" and locked them away at that point, and why Shen Wei has shame about the whole thing. If there's a continuum of sentience, but everyone just eats everyone regardless, that hits the cannibalism taboo pretty hard imo.