Edward Anthony Rayne

The ruminant family, and the one job each of them does that nothing else on earth can. The cow turns a wet hillside into beef and milk, and leaves the soil better than she found it. The sheep grows a fireproof, waterproof, compostable coat every year, out of grass and rain, and then gives it away for the price of a haircut. The goat eats the bramble, the scrub and the invasive weed that strangles everything else, and asks only for a weak point in the fence. The water buffalo makes the milk that becomes real mozzarella, standing in marsh a cow would sink in. The yak gives milk at an altitude that would kill a lowland animal in a week, and carries your bags up there as well. The reindeer feeds and clothes entire peoples above the Arctic Circle, on lichen and moss, in the dark, for months. The bison built the deepest soil on the planet by walking across it and eating. Seven animals, one gift each, and not one of them can be replaced by a crop, a machine or a sachet. Every one of them is classed, this decade, as a liability on a spreadsheet by somebody who has never been cold.