First Chance to Eat

Everyone can picture the restored animal in a reserve. Who pictures the first person to hunt it, the restaurant serving it, the antlers on the wall or the customer who paid years in advance for that distinction?

The business runs in five moves: bring an animal back, find someone who will pay, sell the first encounter before the animal is born, separate who owns the technology from who owns the commercial rights, then discover that the protest is another market.

In this world, First Chance to Eat partners with the de-extinction company Gigantic. Gigantic supplies the technology. First Chance owns the hospitality, hunting estates, customer relationships and commercial rights.

Its New Zealand branch opens with the Irish elk: up to 700 kilos of deer, carrying antlers almost the length of a small car.

Woolly, the first mammoth, is hunted at ten years old. Forest Cartwright, the billionaire’s son whose father bought the hunt when he was an infant, eats at the sold-out charity dinner. The protest becomes publicity.

That reaction creates a second market. Some customers do not merely tolerate disapproval. They enjoy provoking it. The business develops another brand: Last Chance to Eat.

This is not only a story about bringing an animal back. It is about the different businesses people can build around rarity, firstness and the desire to own an experience nobody else has had.

“It was delicious.” — Forest Cartwright, at the dinner after Woolly’s hunt. A voice from the scenario.