It was not until our species, SapiensWe pridefully declare it, came upon The earth and started in to use its bigger, Much more pleated brain, and its more complex Technological contrivances, And its more labyrinthian social ties, That any creature lived who could contrive To regularly control a growing number Of the other elements and species Of the world for its own use and pleasure.

And not until our species any creature Could concoct a consciousness of being Separate from nature—distant from it, And even in so many ways opposedTo it—so it could seek to dominate And use it as no other creature, not Even earlier forms of hominids, Justified in the name of pure survival. And thus began the fatal flaw of hunting.

That revolution in the human story Was no doubt in the tribal memory Of ancient Hebrews when they copied down Their narrative of how the world began. They started it with Eden, where they were given A garden “to dress it and to keep it,” where They lived in harmony with “every creature Of the field and every fowl of the air,” And foraged from trees “pleasant to the sight And good for food”—in other words, the earth Before the advent of the hunt*,* when we Survived in general harmony with nature. But then came the transgressions and we were cast From paradise and forced to wrest a living From a cursed earth, where God decreed That “every moving thing that liveth shall Be meat for thee” and “the dread of thee shall be Within every beast upon the earth.” And thus a new and adversarial role For humankind was set among the species He had laid before them in the land. And this led to the evolution of human Domination of the Earth and finally To our ability to end the lives Of all the fowls of the air, the fishes Of the sea, and all the species that The lord has ever put on earth, including Ours.

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