ABSTRACT
What is ‘wildlife’? In most dictionaries and reference texts it is taken to imply ‘animals and plants that are not domesticated, tame or cultivated’, but denitions vary. In the Little Oxford Dictionary (1986), for example, the denition given was ‘wild animals collectively’. Insofar as this book is concerned, the word ‘wildlife’ is taken to comprise those species of animals or plants that are normally to be found occurring naturally in the wild, as opposed to ‘domesticated’ or ‘cultivated’ species that have, over many years, been brought into captivity and within which selection for certain characteristics has been carried out.
