Wildlife

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the usage of wild, meaning “of an animal; living in a state of nature; not tame, not domesticated,” can be traced back to 725 c.e. By 1440 c.e., the word wildness, meaning “the state or character of being wild” or “undomesticated,” referred to a particular way of being—a category of behaviors and attributes, but not Kingdom or Phylum-specific ones. The word wildlife (or wild life), meaning “native flora and fauna of a particular region,” dates back only to 1879 c.e., and popular usage of its attributive form (e.g., wildlife conservation) and combinative form (e.g., wildlife park, wildlife sanctuary), began in the mid-1930s and 1960s, respectively (OED). Wildlife, then, originated as a category inclusive of animals and plants. As such, wildlife together comprise biodiversity.

Although wildlife was meant to refer to the native flora and fauna of a particular region, for nearly half a century, television, film, and a number of prominent organizations have privileged fauna. Wildlife as animals dominates National Geographic documentaries, Marlin Perkins's Wild Kingdom, more recent shows on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. The U.S. Department of Agriculture describes wildlife as “any living creature, wild by nature, endowed with sensation and power of voluntary motion and including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, which spend a majority of their life cycle on land.” The Natural Resources Defense Council describes wildlife as “animals living in the wilderness without human intervention,” while the standard forestry glossary describes wildlife as “a broad term that includes nondomesticated vertebrates, especially mammals, birds, and fish.”

Humans are not counted among wildlife, although anthropogenic processes certainly impact the life forms that are. Prior to the Neolithic Revolution, all human beings relied on undomesticated plants and animals for survival. Thus, for most of human history, all plants and animals would have been considered “wild” by today's standards. With the advent of agriculture, many species of “wild” plants and animals were domesticated. Over time and through human selection, plants and animals of today's farmlands and pet shops have become quite different from their ancestors. This contrast between domesticated species and their increasingly distant relatives contributed to the creation of the word wildlife.

More recently, interest in wildlife and wildlife conservation has increased because many species of wildlife have been driven to extinction or near-extinction due to rapid human growth rates and their concomitant ecological pressures. Non-human species have suffered habitat loss and other threats due to agricultural and urban expansion, deforestation, desertification, pollution, and the introduction of exotic species, also called biopollution.