In environments that have not been destroyed by cyber-industrial techno-capitalism, every moment of the day is scored by subtle, elegant, and multilayered birdsongs specific to the hour, the season, and the place, such as the haunting melody a wren sings at dusk in the deep woods
The ruminant family, and the one job each member does that nothing else can:
Cattle: turn a wet hillside into milk and beef, and build the soil while they stand on it
Sheep: grow a fireproof, compostable fibre every year on grass and rain
Goats: eat the scrub, bramble and invasive weed that chokes everything else out
Water buffalo: make the milk that becomes real mozzarella, on marshland a cow would sink in
Yak: live and give milk at altitudes that would kill any lowland animal
Reindeer: feed and clothe whole peoples above the Arctic Circle, on lichen and moss
Bison: engineer an entire prairie ecosystem simply by grazing across it
Seven animals, one gift each, none of them replaceable by a machine or a crop.
Every one of them classed, this decade, as a liability.