Joel Salatin Quotes

Life eats life to live.

Buzzards got to eat, same as the worms.

Those who live, live off the dead.

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

That's the food chain that cricket is sometimes. You have to be at the top of it otherwise you get swept away and eaten up.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

Take, for example, the African jungle, the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old, the sick, the wounded, the weak, the very young, but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey, you had better be strong.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

The fast fish, not the big fish, eats the small fish.

You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.

We are so arrogant, we forget that we are not the reason for evolution, we are not the point of evolution. We are part of evolution. Unfortunately, we believe that we've been created to dominate the planet, to dominate nature. Ain't true.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis.

Big fish eat little fish.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

Nature taking its course - hunter and prey, the endless circle of life and death.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.

Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh.