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. The (not-so) gentleman went on about the violence of killing, and how the emotions of animals were also being eaten by “you people”.
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. Even onions and garlic are accused of stirring up passions. 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.
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 24 hour spiritual detox for the food chain. A day when every creature, including you and me — 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: soft music, dewdrops, a slow-motion butterfly. But peace isn’t innocent. A world without predation isn’t kinder; it’s swollen, bursting at the seams, wobbling within hours, collapsing within days and going rancid within weeks.
If nature had HR, predators would fall under “Essential Services”.
Take just one imaginary day off from this service.
If, for just 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, ever in a hurry, can produce dozens of young in a week without mating. With an estimated ten quintillion (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects already alive at any given moment and billions normally disappearing each hour into the bellies of geckos, frogs and bulbuls with worms dangling like moustaches, 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.
As my naturalist father Raza Tehsin explains in one of his talks how, under ideal conditions, a pair of chinch bugs can multiply across 13 generations into such mind-boggling numbers that when you line them up—ten per inch—a beam of light would take 2,500 years to travel from one end to the other. A pair of drosophila-like flies could turn into a compressed sphere stretching from Earth to the Sun over 25 generations. A pair of rats breeding in ideal conditions would make a line from the earth to the moon in a year. Unchecked cabbage aphids could weigh more than all humans combined. These classic ecological thought experiments drive home his point: 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 wouldn’t even start outside. They’d 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 and we’d swell from the inside like a forgotten jar of achaar on a rooftop in summers.
If this internal chaos sounds abstract, consider an experience many of us have had: taking antibiotics. It is like unleashing a controlled massacre inside your gut – a biochemical carpet bombing where saints and sinners fall together. The friendly microbes that have worked overtime for your well-being die along with the villains, leaving your gut as barren as a battlefield after the smoke clears. It’s internal predation outsourced to a pill and your stomach takes weeks to negotiate the peace.
A day without predation would bring insects in monstrous quantities, microbes in cosmic excess, rats in poetic proportions,. 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
