Where would either the animals or plants 'run' to? One of the wonders of modern economics is that we are totally myopic about the needs of other species. If plants and animals do not have a direct economic value their lebensraum is endangered; wiped to make way for species or activities which do have an immediate exploitable human economic value.

Modern land use rarely makes use of coherent ecologies. We most often use single species or very limited sets of species. We reduce the complexity of habitats to create circumstances which we feel we can understand and control. We maximise single outputs to the exclusion of any underlying ecological context and purposes. We distort the breeding and genetics of the species we do value to maximise profits and are happy to foster variants which cannot reproduce by themselves. Many Indian farmers committed suicide after being caught with rice and cotton variants which made them dependent on multinational seed and herbicides. More than 199,132 farmers have killed themselves since 1997.

There is much we do not understand about the interrelated needs of species we depend on. Hopefully we will graduate to more sustainable and systemically viable forms of plant and animal husbandry and to manage human population numbers.

Or perhaps the virii are breeding battery humans. The grasses we tend as lawns keep us as staff. Yeasts frolick in our drinks and guts. We are substrate, noisome fodder; fast food, we deliver. We farm ourselves and stack ourselves in bulk packs. More and more species adapt to this abundant resource. Microbes and insects, stroll down the aisles of humans looking for bargains. Plants hunger for smoked femur. Bunnies use us for blood sport. And after all we can always run.