Fish and game

This category covers the wild animal taken as a commodity. What defines it is not the species but the mode of acquisition: the animal was caught rather than bred. A wild boar is game and a pig is a domesticated animal; a river sturgeon is game and a pond carp raised to be eaten is not. That single distinction does all the work here, and it is the reason the category runs from the Paleolithic to the industrial trawler without changing character.

It takes in fish, shellfish, and crustaceans from capture fisheries; mammals, birds, and reptiles taken by hunting, trapping, or netting; marine mammals; and the flesh of all of them, whether eaten where it was caught or salted, smoked, dried, or frozen and carried to market. Where wild animals are traded alive rather than dead — for menageries, for breeding stock, for the exotic-pet trade — the live animal belongs here too.

The by-products are the part most easily mistagged, and the rule is that each is tagged for what it is rather than for how it was obtained. Ivory has its own category, and so do hides, skins, furs, feathers, and down. Oils rendered from wild animals belong with oils, gums, resins, and waxes where they are used as oils, and with fuels, lubricants, and sealants where they are burned or used to lubricate — which is where most of the nineteenth-century whale-oil trade sits. Animals bred rather than caught are domesticated animals, and what a bred animal yields while alive is a livestock product. What remains in this category is the catch itself, together with those wild-animal products that have no category of their own: horn and antler, bone, baleen, musk, and raw tortoiseshell, which becomes a manufactured good once worked.

One property sets this category apart from everything else on the list. Its supply is governed by the reproduction rate of a wild population, and nothing a producer does can raise it. Mines deplete, but a mine can be opened elsewhere and ore can be substituted; a fishery that has been fished out yields nothing at any price, and the stock either recovers on its own schedule or does not. Depletion is therefore this commodity's characteristic mechanism, where for others it is price, monopoly, or substitution — the Newfoundland cod, the North Atlantic right whale, the plains bison, and the Caspian sturgeon all ended the same way, and in each case the collapse arrived while the trade was still profitable.

The category carries two first-significance dates because it covers two different systems of acquisition. Hunting is attested with Homo erectus from roughly 1.5 million years ago. Systematic exploitation of the sea comes very much later, at Pinnacle Point on the South African coast from about 164,000 years ago, where shellfish were being harvested in quantity rather than opportunistically. The gap between them is not a gap in the evidence: taking animals from the land and taking them from the water are different technical problems, and the second was solved more than a million years after the first.