God's Love and the animals?

I'm watching an animal documentary again, and the beauty and ferocity of Nature are awesome as always. But I'm also asking myself how a supposedly perfect, loving God could have created situations where a lot of animals are senselessly suffering. Example: a baby seal loses sights of his parents, doesn't find back to them, gets rejected by the others and then slowly and painfully dies of thirst and hunger because it's not yet ready to survive alone. And that's just one example. Zillions more could be found.

Since such animals live and die far away from humans and since they haven't done anything 'wrong', why do they have to suffer? They're innocent in a sense, or is there an animal Original Sin as well? Why would God create this beings only so they could more or less rapidly die a painful death again?

Or are they just puppets/robots who can't really experience pain? Or does God use them to teach us a lesson?

How do Christians see this?