To be honest, I'm a little disturbed by the "colonialist" perspective that seems to be dominating this tangent. Murder is a human concept. Teddies are not human, therefore can we really apply our morality to their existence? Time and again here on earth certain cultural practices have been deemed barbaric and attempts have been made to eradicate them to "benefit" the participants with the somehow unpredictable result of total societal collapse. Why do we know better than the Teddies?
I may have not conveyed myself unclearly, but I wasn't trying to say that that protagonist was correct. Especially when dealing with an alien species, our understanding may have no basis whatsoever. Speaker for the Dead was very good at conveying that ambiguity and it's one of the reasons I liked that story and this one.
I think the protagonist thought she was doing good by trying to prevent teddies giving themselves up for death. I can understand why she believes that. I don't necessarily think that she is doing a good thing thing, and like I was trying to say about her behavior being dictated by the church's desire to expand (a kind of colonialism as you say) but which isn't necessarily in anyone's best interest.
But, I also don't think it's clear cut that just because a teddy has asked for death, that it means that the teddy WANTS death. Those are very different things, and I feel like, in her position, that would at least be a thing worth thinking about and discussing with the teddies. For instance, that starving teddy's purpose is to starve, but when offered food it snatched that food up and ran. If that teddy really WANTED to starve, then why does it do that? From that it seems to me that it's at least possible that none of the teddies (or just some subset of the teddies) want to die any more than I want to die, but that they feel obligated to seek death by social pressures acting upon them.
If one supposedly wants to starve but finds it very difficult to starve because your body makes you want to eat, is it okay to feed you? Maybe the teddies would view that act like giving a recovering alcoholic a shot of whiskey--something that would be hard to resist but is ultimately going to wreck you.
I'm not really taking a stance on any of this, just saying that I think there's a lot of interesting ambiguity and I love that about this story.