The Absolute Difference

Woke up to a turkey family hanging out by the garden - two adults and nine chicks. The very slightest squeak from my screen door and they made a very slow but deliberate beeline for the trees.

Physiologically there is doubtless a connection between these wild creatures that welcomed American colonists in the 17th century, and those shrink-wrapped on supermarket shelves today. Heidegger thinks that animals are 'poor in world' but something like world connectedness is the big difference between these two manifestations of turkeyhood: one a dead commodity with an industrial farm origin, and the other an original inhabitant of this land - foraging, breeding, protecting, rearing, communicating and so on.



I would venture to describe this as an absolute difference.