by Stephen Bodio

About the author: Stephen Bodio is the author of several books on hunting, falconry, and the outdoors.

How, given the canine teeth and close-set eyes that declare the human animal to be a predator, had we come up with the notion that oat bran is more natural to eat than chicken"

—Valerie Martin, The Great Divorce

My life has been built around animals and books about them. They have been in every book I’ve written and most of my essays. I was imprinted on the Jungle Books and Peterson’s Field Guide before I was four, fated to be a raving biophiliac as long as I lived. I fed myself a constant diet of books with animals—Charles Darwin, William Beebe, Konrad Lorenz on the one hand, Rud-...