Isabella

You’re unique and one of a kind

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Going plant-based means nothing has to die for my dinner."

Farmer: "Ever walked behind a combine?"

Activist: "No."

Farmer: "Follow one across a wheat field in August. Mice, voles, leverets, ground-nesting birds that sat tight instead of running. The buzzards learn the timetable and sit on the poles waiting. Then there's the rat poison round the grain store, the slug pellets on the oilseed, the pigeons shot off the brassicas, and whatever dies against the rabbit fence."

Activist: "That's incidental. It isn't deliberate."

Farmer: "It's annual, and it's on the invoice. The vole hasn't got an opinion about your intentions. You've drawn a line between the death you paid for and the death you paid for and didn't have to watch."

Activist: "It's still fewer deaths than eating meat."

Farmer: "Depends on the field. One bullock off a hill that's never seen a plough feeds a family for months and cost the wildlife the grass and nothing else. A hundred acres of arable gets combined, sprayed and baited every year to make your bread."

Activist: "You can't seriously claim veganism kills more."

Farmer: "I'm claiming nobody eats without something dying. You've chosen the version where it dies out of sight and called that innocence."

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Everyone's favourite line is that we're omnivores, like the pig.

Right. Let's get the pig out and have a proper look.

Pig:

- A spiral colon and a substantial hindgut, where bacteria ferment fibre into short-chain fatty acids the pig then absorbs and lives on. It pulls real energy out of material we cannot touch.
- Will eat roots, tubers, acorns, grain, grass, carrion, eggs, and given the chance, you. That is what omnivore means. Genuine, wide, mixed, and equipped for all of it.
- Roots. Physically roots, with a purpose-built snout, because a meaningful part of its diet is underground and it has the hardware to go and get it.

Human:

- Colon: 17 to 23% of gut volume. No meaningful fermentation capacity. We get at most 10% of our energy that way, and 10% is generous.
- Small intestine: 56 to 67% of gut volume. Absorption. Dense food, straight through the wall.
- No snout, no cellulase, no vat, and a stomach at pH 1.5, which is not a pig's number. It is a scavenger's number.

The pig is the omnivore. Look at the kit. It has the equipment for both halves of the word.

We have the equipment for one half and a marketing department for the other.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Charles Darwin worked out the whole thing in the 1830s and then wandered off to think about finches.

He is riding across the Pampas with the gauchos. Days go by. He has eaten nothing but meat and he writes it down, slightly surprised at himself, because he does not mind it at all. He notes that back in England, patients ordered onto an animal diet with their lives on the line could barely stand it. And yet, he says, the gaucho on the Pampas touches nothing but beef for months on end.

Then comes the line that nobody quotes, because for a hundred and ninety years nobody has known what to do with it.

He notices that the gauchos eat an enormous proportion of fat. And that they will not touch dry meat. He specifically names the agouti, a lean little rodent, as the thing they turn their noses up at.

Darwin, in his twenties, sat on a horse in Argentina and identified the exact hinge of human nutrition: it is not that these men eat meat, it is what proportion of what they eat is fat, and they will refuse a perfectly good animal for being too lean.

He then quotes Dr John Richardson, of the Arctic expeditions, who had observed the same thing from the other end of the planet: feed a man on lean meat long enough and the craving for fat becomes so violent that he will eat straight fat, in quantity, oily and unmixed, and not feel sick.

Two men. Two continents. The Argentine grasslands and the Canadian Arctic. Neither of them had a word for macronutrients. Both of them wrote down the same finding, which is that the human animal, given a free run at a carcass, goes for the grease and leaves the lean.

Then we spent the twentieth century removing the fat from the meat and selling it back to people as the healthy option.

Darwin had it in a footnote. We had it in a footnote for two hundred years.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In the 1900s the sun was medicine, prescribed for rickets and sent to sanatoria.

In the 1920s the sun was glamour, and a tan meant money.

In the 1960s the sun was leisure, oiled up in a deckchair.

In the 1980s the sun was suddenly lethal, and you covered up or paid for it.

In the 2020s the sun is a threat to be blocked before you so much as check the post.

Five verdicts. One star. It has been burning at the same temperature for four and a half billion years and has not revised its opinion once.

Everything that thrashed about was down here, on the advice, chasing whatever the era was selling.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Argentina did not trust America to feed them, so they put half a ton of their own beef on an aeroplane.

Lomo. Vacío. Entraña. Matambre. Peceto. Asado de tira. Months of planning, sanitary paperwork, customs clearance, all so a squad in Kansas City could eat what they eat at home. The world champions treated beef and a fire as something worth a cargo hold and a lawyer.

The grill belongs to Diego Iacovone, at his seventh World Cup. Seven. He has outlasted managers, presidents and whole generations of player, because whatever else changes in Argentine football, the asado does not.

Ask Scaloni about it and he does not mention protein. He talks about union, about collective chemistry. Men who eat together round a fire become a team. Every family in Britain knew that once, before we started eating over the sink with a phone in the other hand.

Argentina gets through around fifty kilos of beef a head each year, better than double the rest of the world. The country of the gaucho and the parrilla, where the man at the grill is given a title. Tonight it stands ninety minutes from another World Cup final.

Meanwhile we get lectured. Cut it down. Swap it out. Try the pea protein. Meat is a footprint to be shrunk, an indulgence permitted twice a week if you have been good.

Nobody told Argentina. Biggest tournament on earth, a title to defend, a nation watching, and their federation's answer to the pressure was to make sure there was enough beef and a proper fire to cook it on.

Watch what people do when it matters, not what they say when a sponsor is listening. With everything on the line, the champions of the world filled out customs forms for their steak.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Gut volume, by compartment.

Human:

- Stomach: 10 to 24%
- Small intestine: 56 to 67%
- Colon: 17 to 23%

Chimpanzee and orangutan:

- Stomach: 17 to 20%
- Small intestine: 23 to 28%
- Colon: 52 to 54%

Same body plan. Same ancestor. Same basic parts list: acid stomach, small intestine, small cecum, sacculated colon. The plumbing has simply been swapped end for end.

The small intestine absorbs. Fat, protein, the finished article, straight through the wall and into you. The colon ferments. It is where an ape rents out bacteria to break down the leaves it has no enzyme for, and waits.

So look at which chamber got big in them and which one got big in us.

The energy accounts finish the argument. A wild chimpanzee pulls 21 to 33% of its daily energy out of the fermentation vat. A wild western gorilla, 30 to 60%. A human on a western diet gets no more than 10% that way, and 10% is being kind.

They built a brewery and sat in it.

We built an absorption tube and went hunting.

Guess which one gets told to eat more fibre.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The banana in your fruit bowl is a sterile clone.

Wild banana, Musa acuminata: a hard green finger, mostly stone-like black seeds you would crack a tooth on, with a smear of pulp around them. Edible in the sense that a rock with jam on it is edible.

Modern banana: no seeds. That little black line up the middle is the ghost of them. It has no seeds because it is triploid, three sets of chromosomes, which means it cannot produce viable gametes and cannot reproduce. At all. Ever.

So every Cavendish banana on earth is a cutting. A clone. Genetically identical to the plant next to it and to the one in Ecuador and to the one in your bowl, which is why a single fungus can end the whole crop, which is exactly what happened to the previous variety. The Gros Michel was the banana until Panama disease ate it in the 1950s. The Cavendish is the understudy, and the same fungus is currently working its way through it.

Which means the fruit is kept alive by fungicide, aeroplanes and a global corporate effort, because left alone it is an infertile freak that would be gone in one generation.

You are told this is the natural snack. Nature's own convenient packaging.

Nature's version had teeth in it and wanted nothing to do with you. This one is a hospital patient we keep breathing because it is sweet, and we like sweet, because we are apes.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Last Friday a CBS reporter sat down to eat what Erling Haaland eats in a day, on camera, for a laugh. She got as far as dinner.

The segment ran on CBS Mornings ahead of Norway playing England, and it was billed the way these things always are. Raw milk, tomahawk steaks and bone marrow. The Viking diet. Six thousand calories. Come and gawp at the strange Norwegian and the things he puts in his mouth.

Breakfast went down without trouble: four eggs, toast, yoghurt, raw milk. Lunch was an enormous Italian sandwich, Parma ham and burrata and sun-dried tomatoes and rocket and truffle oil and pesto, and that went down too. Then dinner arrived, because Haaland is known to get through two and a half pounds of steak and the bone marrow with it, and that was the end of the experiment. She had to ask the crew to help her finish. Fair play to her for trying it in front of a camera. Very few people reading this would have managed the sandwich.

But look again at the list they filmed, because the joke did not land where they thought it did. Eggs. Milk. Ham. Cheese. Steak. Marrow. There is nothing strange on that list at all. Every item of it would have been recognised as dinner by a farmhand in 1900, or by your own great-grandmother, and the whole lot came off an animal or out of a dairy. A butcher could assemble it in about four minutes.

What defeated her was not the strangeness. It was the volume. That is the entire story, and CBS filmed it without noticing.

Because here is what the segment accidentally documented. A grown adult in a rich country cannot eat the amount of real food that hard physical work actually requires. Not because the food is exotic, but because we have spent sixty years replacing it with things engineered to slide down without effort, and the machinery for handling proper food has gone soft from disuse. Give a modern stomach two and a half pounds of steak and it panics.

The desk needs it to be a freak show, mind, because the alternative question is a great deal more awkward. If eggs, milk and beef are just food, and the best striker on the planet is fuelled entirely by things you can buy at a butcher's counter, then what exactly is the rest of the aisle for?

They set out to film a man eating strangely. They filmed a nation that has forgotten how to eat.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Gordon Banks got himself ready to keep goal for England with a large steak, peas, potatoes done both boiled and roast, and a big bowl of rice pudding to follow.

That comes from Jimmy Greaves, writing in his own autobiography about how the men around him ate before a game. Greaves had his own arrangement. He took his pre-match roast beef at Moody's cafe in Canning Town, then went out and played for England.

Tonight, in Atlanta, England play Argentina for a place in a World Cup final. The last time they reached one was 1966, and they got there by knocking Argentina out in the quarter-final on the way. Sixty years have passed. Sixty years of trying to get back to a match those men walked into on beef and pudding.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, the plate changed. The modern England squad travels with its own chef, and the match-day menu is built on lean protein and extra carbohydrate. The rules loosen after the whistle, when the burgers and the pizza come out so the players can refuel.

Sit with that a moment. The steak went before the game. The pizza comes after it. They kept the junk and binned the beef.

Now ask the only question that matters, which is who benefited. Nobody ever got rich selling a man a steak, some spuds and a bowl of rice pudding. There is no margin in a butcher's counter and no patent on a potato. But a gel, an isotonic drink, a recovery shake, a powdered carbohydrate blend with a rugby player's face on the tub, a certification course teaching a young coach to be frightened of red meat, a whole industry standing between a hungry man and his dinner, telling him the food his grandfather ate is too heavy, too slow, too crude for modern sport: that is a business. That is a very good business indeed.

Every one of those products needed the steak to be a problem first. So the steak became a problem, and the science arrived afterwards to explain why.

The men of 1966 had no dietitian, no macro split and no window. They had a cafe in Canning Town, a plate of roast beef, and a manager who told them they would win the World Cup, which they then did.

England fly to Atlanta tonight with a chef, a nutritionist and a pizza order, still trying to get back to where the rice pudding took them.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Everyone's very excited about solar panels. Nobody's noticed we've had them for ten thousand years.

Grass. That's the panel.

It installs itself. No German developer, no Development Consent Order, no substation within ten miles. It arrives. Men have devoted entire careers to stopping it arriving and it is losing.

It repairs itself. Hail doesn't crack it. Branch through it in February, fine by May. The warranty isn't twenty five years, it's indefinite, and the claims process is rain.

Storage comes as standard. The problem the industry has spent billions failing to solve. Grass had it sorted in the Pleistocene. The unit weighs 600 kilos, walks to the energy, and is called a cow.

No end-of-life problem either. The cow is dinner, then soil, then more panel. No landfill. No decommissioning bond. No clause about removing components to three feet below ground grade, because the components had the decency to be alive.

And the supply chain. Sit down for this one. It's a cloud.

No polysilicon. No Xinjiang. No forty percent of the world's supply coming out of one province that a Sheffield Hallam report described in terms your MP voted 309 times not to read. You can stand in a British field with your hand on the panel and be entirely confident that nobody was transferred anywhere to grow it. It grew because it rained. The ethical audit is: look, it's grass.

Output isn't 9.5% of rated capacity in the second worst country on earth for sunlight. It's beef, milk, butter, a hide, a family fed six months off one animal, on ground where the tractor would be in the hedge by lunchtime.

So the plan is to bolt a worse panel eight feet above the working one, fence the field so the storage can't get in, photograph a sheep next to it, and call that agriculture.

Ten thousand years. No recorded failures. No slaves.

Nobody's ever taken the meeting.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The first low-carb diet book was written in 1825 by a French lawyer, and everything the internet argues about this week was settled in it before your great-great-grandparents were born.

His name was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Magistrate, mayor of Belley, a man who fled the Revolution with his head still attached and came back to write about food.

His book was The Physiology of Taste. He finished it two months before he died.

In it he asks a simple question. What makes people fat? He had watched it happen, dinner after dinner, across a lifetime of good tables.

His answer, two centuries ago: flour and starch, and worse still when sugar is added to them.

The specific foods. Bread, pastry, potatoes, sweets. His prescription for the waistline was rigid abstinence from anything starchy or floury.

A man in 1825, with no laboratory and no funding, watching what happened to bodies at dinner, named the bread basket and the sugar bowl and got it right.

Then a century of experts, richly funded, put a pyramid on the wall with his two culprits forming the base and told you to eat eleven servings of them a day.

The Frenchman had it in a book you can still buy. They just needed you not to read it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Body fat at birth, by species:

- Human: about 15%
- Guinea pig: about 11%
- Harp seal: about 10%
- Chimpanzee: about 3%
- Nearly every other mammal ever measured: under 2%

We are the fattest species on record at birth. Not the fattest primate. The fattest species, full stop, tied roughly with a seal that is born onto pack ice.

And we keep going. Human infant adiposity peaks somewhere between four and nine months at around 25%, which is more body fat than a fit adult man carries. That is a mammal that has never been cold, never hunted, never done a single thing, and has a full-sized adult carrying it about the place.

Nothing else in the class does this. Seal pups get fat after birth, on milk. Piglets and puppies do the same. The human arrives pre-loaded, having spent the whole third trimester quietly laying down subcutaneous white fat while the mother eats for the project.

Evolution does not gift-wrap a metabolic emergency and post it out to every member of the species.

That fat is there because the human brain is a ruinous, always-on fuel bill that will not negotiate, and when the milk is late the baby runs on ketones off its own back.

You were born a fat-burning animal with a fortnight of fuel strapped to you.

Then someone told you fat was the problem

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Half the people having heart attacks have the cholesterol your doctor is aiming for. This is not a fringe line. It is nearly 137,000 of them.

A 2009 study looked at almost 137,000 Americans hospitalised with coronary heart disease and checked the cholesterol they walked in with.

- Average LDL on admission: about 105, comfortably 'normal'
- Nearly half had LDL under 100, the 'optimal' target
- Around three quarters had LDL under 130
- But 55% had low HDL, and raised triglycerides were common

So the number the whole system chases, LDL, was sitting on target in half the very people it was meant to protect, while they had their heart attacks anyway. The markers that were genuinely off were the ones tied to too much sugar and refined starch: low HDL, high triglycerides, insulin resistance.

They check your LDL, tell you it looks fine, and wave you home toward the coronary the LDL never saw coming.

The steak barely touches the number that matters. The cereal wrecks it.

Stop chasing the number they sell the drug for.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"I could never eat something that had a face."

Right, but the wheat had a field.

And the field had roughly sixty of them: wood mice, voles, shrews, leverets, a nest of skylarks in the tramline. Then a combine came through at fifteen miles an hour in August and took the whole roof off their world in one afternoon.

"That's not the same. Nobody chose to kill them."

Nobody chose them individually, no. The farmer chose the field. The field had a population. The combine had a schedule. The mice were not consulted and were not counted, because nobody counts the ones you didn't mean.

"You're being ridiculous, that's just incidental."

Yes. That's my point. It's incidental. It doesn't bother you.

"It's not comparable to slaughtering a cow deliberately."

So the moral difference is intention.

"Yes."

So the mouse under the blade is fine because the driver was thinking about lunch.

"..."

And the cow in the field, who lived four years outside eating grass on a hill where nothing else grows, is the atrocity, because someone meant it.

"That's twisting my words."

I'm repeating your words. The twist was already in them.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.

Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.

The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there's the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn't. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it's rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.

Now the other column.

The ground we're bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.

So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.

And we've had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.

Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The crime they see: 15,415 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef. Every campaign, every documentary, every leaflet through the door since about 2012.

The crime they do: not reading the paper.

The figure is real. It comes from Mekonnen and Hoekstra at the University of Twente, and it is careful, peer-reviewed work. What the campaigns strip out is that the same authors split that number into three parts, because the three parts are not the same thing at all.

Green water is rain. It falls on the grass. The cow eats the grass. For beef, green water is about 94 per cent of that headline.

Blue water is the stuff that matters. Rivers, lakes, aquifers. The stuff that gets pumped, metered, fought over in court, and does not come back.

So here is the blue water, in litres per kilogram, from the same authors, same method, same units.

- Pistachios: 7,602
- Almonds: 3,816
- Walnuts: 2,451
- Dates: 1,250
- Cashews: 921
- Beef: 550

Read that last line again, then go and look at what is in your granola.

The 15,415 counts rain that fell on a Welsh hillside as a cost, against an animal that was standing in it, on land where nothing else grows, in a country where rain is the one thing we have never once been short of.

The pistachio is drinking fourteen times more of the water that actually runs out.

She is outside in the rain right now, getting blamed for it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The hill farm made a loss. On farming. Last year.

Not an opinion. Defra's own arithmetic, sat in the Farm Business Survey, the most damning document in British agriculture and nobody has opened it.

Take the average Less Favoured Area grazing farm. Uplands. Sheep, some cattle, the ground you drive through on the way to the Lakes and call unspoiled. In 2024/25 its Farm Business Income averaged £40,300, and when that figure reaches a newspaper it is used to prove farming is doing nicely.

Open it up.

Of that £40,300, some £23,600 arrived for hedges, margins, habitat and paperwork. Another £7,500 came from the barn conversion and the caravans. And agriculture, the production of food from grass, the entire nominal purpose of the place, the reason the family has been on that hill for a hundred and forty years, returned an average loss of £2,700.

The farm lost money farming. It made money being scenery.

We wanted cheap food and a pretty view and we declined to pay for either at the till. So the state pays him separately to stay in position. Not to feed you. To maintain the backdrop, count the birds, stand in the photograph.

We turned shepherds into park keepers and then congratulated ourselves on the parks.

Here is the part that should frighten you rather than annoy you. A man paid to be scenery is one budget line from being nothing. That £23,600 is a policy, and policies get reviewed. This year's forecast already has him down 8 per cent to £37,000. He cannot lose the sheep money, because there wasn't any. He can only lose the reason he is still there.

Then the ground goes to whoever bids, which is a fund, or a forestry play, or a carbon offset for an airline in another hemisphere. And the flock is sold.

Understand what leaves with it. A hefted flock is not livestock, it is knowledge held inside animals, of which shoulder of that hill is survivable in a January wind and which one takes you, learned by ewes teaching daughters for two hundred years, passed down in the dark, on the ground, in weather. Buy a thousand sheep tomorrow and they will wander off the mountain by Thursday, because nobody has told them where the mountain ends.

You cannot restock that. There is no scheme for it. It exists in one flock, on one hill, until the day it is loaded into a lorry, and then it has never existed at all.

The Guardian will not run this. No villain in a hat. Only a survey table, a loss of £2,700, and a country that stopped buying its own dinner and started buying the postcard.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

They tell you your steak is eating the Amazon. Here is the part they leave out.

Soy is grown, overwhelmingly, to be crushed for its oil, the very vegetable oil in the processed food they would rather you ate.

The mash left over after the oil is pressed out is what gets fed to animals. It is a byproduct, not the reason the crop exists.

British beef cattle are raised on grass and never touch Amazon soy. What soy is fed to livestock goes mostly to intensive pigs and chickens, much of it abroad.

The soy that clears the rainforest is driven by demand for the oil and for cheap factory-farmed poultry, not by the cow on the hill.

(Blaming the grass-fed cow for the soy fields is like blaming the sawmill for the plastic.)

The rainforest is cleared for an oil crop, and the animal that never eats it takes the blame.

They pin the soy on the cow, then sell you the oil it was actually grown for.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1975 a Seattle gut doctor publishes a book arguing that human beings are carnivores built along the lines of a dog.

He could not possibly have chosen a worse year to say it.

His name is Walter Voegtlin, a gastroenterologist by trade, and his book is called The Stone Age Diet. Its central argument is anatomical, and to the profession of the day it is rank heresy.

The human digestive tract, Voegtlin argues, is short and simple, built far more like a meat-eater's than a plant-eater's, closer in its basic design to the gut of a dog than to the long fermenting apparatus of a cow.

From this he draws his conclusion. That we are adapted, by two million years of hunting, to a diet of meat and fat, and not to the mountain of grain that settled agriculture dropped on the species a mere ten thousand years ago.

He claimed, from his own clinic, that the meat-heavy regimen cleared up exactly the complaints his patients came to him with, the irritable colon and the chronic digestive misery, by removing the fermenting plant matter he believed was causing them.

He was, in effect, laying the foundation stone of the whole edifice that a later generation would market as paleo. And he was laying it years before anyone made the idea fashionable or profitable.

And he published it, of all the years available to him, in 1975.

Straight into the teeth of the exact moment the United States government was preparing to swing the entire nation the other way, toward the low-fat, grain-forward advice that would define nutrition for the rest of the century.

His book limped out on a vanity press that made him pay for his own printing. It was barely distributed. It appeared only months before he died. And it sank without a ripple while the official machine thundered past in the opposite direction.

The anatomical argument at its heart kept resurfacing anyway, decade after decade, no matter how firmly it was pushed back under.

A doctor argued, from the plain shape of the human intestine, that we were built to eat meat.

He committed it to print in the one single year the establishment had decided, with total and lasting confidence, that we were built instead to eat wheat.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Before 1800, somewhere between thirty and sixty million bison moved across North America.

Add the elk. Add the deer and the pronghorn, tens of millions more. A whole continent carpeted in wild ruminants, every one of them belching methane into the same sky we are now told the cow is wrecking.

By the best estimates going, all those wild herds put out about as much methane as every cow, feedlot and dairy in America does today.

And here is the part the panic cannot survive. The land under them did not wear out. It became the richest farmland on earth. The deepest, blackest topsoil humans have ever dug was built up over thousands of years by exactly this: enormous herds grazing, trampling, dunging, moving on, and letting the grass come roaring back.

The herbivores did not wreck that country.

They are the reason it was worth ploughing at all.

Then we ploughed up what they built, and started blaming their replacements.