Compensating for Killing with Even More Killing

This news story has me confused. A Buddhist man in Thailand spent years cooking and selling scorpions as food.

But after years of serving up scorpions, Suang Puangsri, a practicing Buddhist, felt it was time to befriend them instead.

"Although I was happy to have money, I felt suffering deep inside as they were being harmed by me," he told Reuters. "I felt scared that I was committing a sin."

I was with him to this point. And if it turned out he was now committed to saving scorpions from that fate and releasing them into natural habitat, this would be a lovely story. But the 4,600 breeding scorpions are actually living in a dedicated space on the first floor of his home.

And to keep them there, he personally has to do what?

Suang buys up to one kg of live cicadas and other inspects [sic] daily to feed his pets.

I'm baffled. If the worry, as a Buddhist, is over being directly responsible for harm to another (any) living being, shouldn't the astonishing number of cicadas and other insects be a concern? I don't plan on campaigning against the gentleman, and obviously, the scorpions would eat these smaller creatures on their own out in the world, but the logic here regarding this man's direct participation in and perpetuation of the process, in terms of keeping and personally feeding an ever-growing number of scorpions himself, is lost on me. I fail to understand why ahimsa stops with the scorpions.

As I write this, I'm realizing that on another level, this reminds me of when people stop eating cows and pigs for voiced ethical reasons, but instead of cutting back their animal consumption overall (or ending it altogether), they just replace their cows-turned-steaks and pigs-turned-ham with chickens and turkeys, which ultimately means being responsible for the suffering and deaths of even more animals (i.e, consider the size of the animals and how many more birds must die for the same amount of flesh).

Odd.