Opinion The illusion of gentle living in a predatory world
Every creature, from a lactobacillus to a leopard, is living on borrowed life. Predation is simply the returning of that loan. In nature, being eaten isn’t always a tragedy
For many Indians, vegetarianism is not just diet — it’s identity, hierarchy, morality, sometimes even politics. 
Recently, a bhai sahib very nearly scrunched up his nose when he saw me break a chicken leg, politely warning me that “you become what you eat”. If that were true, I almost told him, half of India would have turned into samosas by now.
I’ve run into this often — our favourite yoga posture: Moral superiority. Many among us look down upon meat-eaters who supposedly contaminate not just their stomachs but their souls. It all comes from old spiritual lines of thought where food wasn’t mere fuel but personality programming: Sattvic foods made you serene, rajasic made you ambitious and tamasic made you sluggish or sinful. Meanwhile, we’ve spent centuries eating rice and wheat, which have no qualities whatsoever except silently putting up with all our theories.
For many Indians, vegetarianism is not just diet — it’s identity, hierarchy, morality, sometimes even politics. Yet, this belief that a “gentle diet” equals non-violence is a pleasant myth. We love discussing it between spoonfuls of ghee sourced from an industry that treats calves as collateral damage. The hypocrisy runs deeper than a single industry. We draw a moral line at the individual act of killing, yet we’ll cheerfully destroy their homes for roads, farms, minerals and malls.
Now imagine, for a reckless moment, a day on Earth when the invisible scissors of predation go still. Nothing stalks, hunts, pecks, gulps, stings, snaps or digests. A day when every creature, including you and me — the universe’s tiniest residents — gets a ceasefire from the oldest war of all: Life eating life.
It sounds peaceful, like an interlude in a nature documentary. But peace isn’t innocent. A world without predation isn’t kinder; it’s bursting at the seams, collapsing within days. If, for one ordinary Tuesday, every frog, bird, bat, fish, lizard, centipede and other insect-eater shut their mouths, the insect world would burst like a shaken soda bottle. A housefly can lay hundreds of eggs, mosquitoes can double their numbers in days and aphids can produce dozens of young in a week without mating. With an estimated 10 quintillion insects alive at any given moment and billions normally disappearing each hour into the bellies of geckos, frogs and bulbuls, a single day without predators would tip the balance in spectacular fashion.
While this is happening, if even 0.1 per cent of insect species take advantage and reproduce unchecked, we’d end the day with roughly 100 quadrillion new insects. Nature never allows these explosions because predators are quietly doing their work every second. And we haven’t even considered the larger animals yet.
The most dramatic consequences of turning off predation would begin inside you. Your gut is a crowded city of some 39 trillion microbes, many of them lactobacilli — the friendly bacteria that help digest food and keep bad guys in check. They multiply fast but survive only because immune cells, other microbes and stomach acid are constantly cutting them down. Without this nonstop internal predation, their numbers would explode to astronomical levels.
If this internal chaos sounds abstract, consider an experience most of us have had: Taking antibiotics. It is like unleashing a controlled massacre inside your gut, a biochemical carpet bombing. The friendly microbes that have worked overtime for your well-being die along with the villains, leaving your gut barren. It’s internal predation outsourced to a pill and your stomach takes weeks to negotiate the peace.
Every creature, from a lactobacillus to a leopard, is living on borrowed life. Predation is simply the returning of that loan. In nature, being eaten isn’t always a tragedy. Often, it’s recycling. Transformation. Continuation.
A day without predation isn’t utopia. It’s a reminder that life on Earth rests on ancient, delicate balance. That life depends, paradoxically, on death. The oldest mercy in the universe is simple: Something dies so everything else can live. Even if that something is a bacterium, a beetroot, a beetle — or a belief.
Tehsin is a Colombo-based writer and environmentalist
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