All Animals Were Wild Once
This piece first appeared in the November 2025 issue of The Sun , a nonprofit, reader-supported magazine known for its long-form essays, interviews, and personal narratives. Its mission is to connect readers and writers through honest and courageous writing that often grapples with social and political realities. That month’s issue featured reflections on wild animals, and the work below was my contribution to that theme. ALL ANIMALS WERE WILD ONCE. Then we got clever and fenced some of them in. We built a system that rewards stillness and submission and called it agriculture. We bred out their wildness, and with it, all the parts of them we found inconvenient. Now we have cows that can't run, pigs that can't turn, and chickens so top-heavy they collapse under their own weight. Yet we revere wild animals for the very things we have bred out of the creatures we eat: autonomy, unpredictability, resilience. Whales and wolves and hawks follow their own rules. So we fund them, f...
