A Brief, Humble Look at the Food Chain
Author: Mark Bolton. Collaboration: DeepSeek. Images: Fotor
Dear Carolynn. Another rather philosophical blog. A few days ago, I watched a crow take to the air, and in its talons was a small, twitching shape. A mouse. For a moment I had complete sorrow for the rodent. The crow, black and gleaming in the sunshine had no real focus that was obvious to me. It was simply acting on instinct–no malice, just see food, get food and eat food.
A part of me, the soft-hearted human, wanted to shout, to wave my arms, to play the hero for a creature I’d normally set a trap for if I had no other choice. But another part, a quieter, more logical voice, held me still. If not that mouse, then what? Would I rather watch that crow starve slowly? My empathy had become a paradox, a trap with no exit.
It reminded me of a night years ago. I was in my kitchen, the single bulb casting a bright pool of light out into the darkness. As hardly surprising, the moths came, tapping their dusty bodies against the glass in a frantic, silent dance. And then came the geckos, emerging urgently from the shadows as if they were aware that I would eventually turn off that light. One by one, they feasted.
I felt a growing sense of dread. I was the architect of this slaughter! My light was the bait in a trap I hadn’t meant to set. So, I did the only thing my guilt would allow: I turned off the light. The moths left to find lighter pastures. The geckos, after a few unsuccessful flicks of their tongues, retreated empty-handed to locate the next light source. I began to wonder if moths existed before fire and light came into being.
And that’s when a different, colder feeling washed over me. By intervening, by playing god with a light switch, I hadn’t stopped the cycle of life and death. I had merely redirected it. I had chosen the moths over the geckos. I had, in that moment, become the arbiter of who ate and who starved. The weight of that tiny decision felt immense. I thought of Oppenheimer’s haunting revelation upon seeing the destructive power he’d unleashed on Japan: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” My kitchen became a parable of The Manhattan Project.
We humans walk through this world with a towering arrogance. We build cities, create art, and dream of the stars. We believe we have graduated from the food chain, that we are its managers, its masters, its apex. We see a shark and call it a monster; we see a crocodile and call it an enemy.
But we are not above them. We are alongside them, yet when one of us is swallowed, we seek revenge.
We step into their world and expect these creatures to accept our authority, and for disobeying that so called authority, capital punishment of the culprit and its innocent friends must be the outcome by decree.
To a tiger, we are potential prey. To a malaria parasite, we are a habitat. To a cancer cell, we area source of amino acids. To the bacteria on our skin, we are an entire universe. Our sense of superiority is a story we tell ourselves, a fragile illusion that shatters the moment we step into the ocean or the wilderness without our tools and our technology. We are flesh and blood, just like the mouse in the crow’s talons. Or we can be just plain unlucky to become terminally ill.
So, are we here just to be food?
Perhaps that’s the wrong question. The purpose isn’t in the being food, but in the accepting with grace, and respecting that the creature in charge of its domain is well within its right to survive according to the cycle of life.
The raw truth is that life is a continuous, beautiful, and terrifying transaction of energy. One life is quite literally built upon the passing of another. The mouse nourishes the crow, which will one day nourish the soil, which will grow the grass that feeds a new generation of mice so the crows don’t die off. We human animals don’t even do this right. We fill our remains with chemicals, be placed in a box and lowered in a hole that often times is covered with concrete. Or we are cremated and our ashes enshrined in an urn or some other container to be placed in a wall, the ground, or on someones shelf at home. Hardly giving back to the Earth.
In the most literal sense, we’re passing through. Our greatness is not about denying this cycle, but in our unique ability to contemplate it. The mouse does not plan for death and a funeral service; it simply runs because it is its instinct. One day it will be food and its understanding of death might then kick in for a fleeting moment before it has a chance to think about it too much. The crow does not feel guilt; it simply hunts. because it is hungry–just like us unless vegetarian or vegan.
Our purpose isn’t to be more than food. It’s to be more than just food. We are also the beings who can watch the gecko and the moth and feel a profound connection to both. We can choose to protect, to conserve, to show compassion even within the unbreakable rules of nature, but that is not nature working as it needs to operate for all life to survive. It’s weird, death is life, and life is death and let’s hope we don’t seek immortality, because immortality will for certain destroy life.
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