We naturally feel empathetic towards living creatures in the lower ranks of the pecking order of food chain – usually the animals. Not many feel about the plants and fungi they eat. The imagery of cruelty of killing the animals however evokes a deep sense of sadness. We also feel sorry for the animals predated on by other animals. In the end we kind of accept it all as Nature’s law.
How about thinking a bit differently? Statistics point to in-sync fortunes of preys’ and their corresponding predators’ populations. And while the average longevity of chicken, goat, sheep and cattle have declined, their population at any point of time has grown extraordinarily because of mass consumption by humans. Tremendous proliferation of plantations of seed grains by humans has prompted the popular author Yuval Noah Harari to say that it is actually the wheat that has domesticated humans and not the other way round.
Does Nature then trick us into believing that we predators manage the future of the preys whereas actually it is the so-called preys that ‘use’ us to proliferate their gene copies? The prey species otherwise would be very vulnerable to the Nature’s fury.
Predation happens on many levels. When a cell ingests a bacteria, it’s called phagocytosis. A close example is our white blood cells which predate on harmful bacteria entering our body this way. The earliest such predation is supposed to have created us eukaryotic types when the purple bacteria and cyanobacteria entered the primitive cells to form mitochondria and chloroplasts respectively – organelles so important to the machinery of eukaryotic life. And again I ask the same question: Did that eventually prove beneficial to the cells or to the cyanobacteria and purple bacteria? Maybe to everyone involved.
Join the discussion