January 06, 2020

Let’s face it, Homo sapiens is the most widely farmed animal on the planet.

Pregnant females have their young extracted en masse at their local birthing unit. Throughout youth, they are quickly weaned away from their mothers who they cry for ever-louder to be raised on packaged feed. They are then matured in batches, with each batch scored according to international grading standards.

They grow up in cramped, polluted conditions where multiple families are stacked upon one another. Restricted movement and sunlight cause them to develop substandard limbs, extreme behavioural conditions and fatten-up much faster than in the wild.

Credit: Sangamithra Iyer and Wan Park, Wikipedia (Edit: Combined with Unsplash image) H W, Unsplash

Spot the difference.

After maturation of approximately eighteen-years, depending on the farmer's ageing policy, like products receive certification stamps and can finally begin their first lactation. The man siphons their precious milk at scale while they manage to save what they can to feed offspring of their own.

All of this with increasing levels of global conformity as the percentage of greenfield cultures globally tends to zero.

What if I told you that you are one of those farm animals?

Now, as we know, farm animals have categories, typically ranging from your battery farmed, to your free-range, and finally, your organic, non-GMO, carbon-neutral, grass-fed (you know, receiving biweekly massages, wearing health trackers, practicing meditation and transcends the self on slaughter after a large dose of psychedelics, ...only available at Whole Foods).

What is not known to all, however, is a category of food far above that of the aforementioned food classes.

Wild.

Nothing illustrates the superiority of a wild organism to its farmed counterpart than a comparison of wild to farmed salmon. Take a look:

Wild vs Farmed Salmon

While this image says enough, eating wild salmon says even more. It's different class. It has adapted to pass the test of survival (whoops! until we fished it), growing a scaly six-pack by eating other wild organisms and testing its fight or flight response in healthy doses while it can also relax with its other wild salmon chums in water that is not polluted, overpopulated, or undernourished.

The caveman was the wild human. They were exposed to the elements, they were adapted to the harshest of environments, they were educated by the world itself. They will live in the closest community imaginable and they would have understood the true meaning of love.

May this serve as an introduction, intending to whet the appetite of anyone wishing to break free from their feed-lots and migrate back into the wild.

But wait!

The bad news is that it is simply too late to all find our local cave and start lighting fires while we substitute moss for our triple-ply, lavender-scented, christmas-print toilet paper. There just simply aren’t enough caves for all of us.

An earthworm may or may not have been harmed in the composition of this photo.

While few of us might be able to get fully off the grid, capitalism and civilisation are rooted in everything we do. Our lands are scarred by monocrops, our wildlife depleted and our know-how buried with our ancestors.

Alas, what we can do is try to bring some of the wildness back into our daily lives and escape from the battery cages of modern life to the wild caves of our ancestors. That is what we teach at WildLife.

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