Wind rushings

Two days ago the passenger window in my car stopped working. Yesterday, as I drove with both front windows open to the repair shop, a cattle truck passed me on the interstate, and perhaps the aroma of the livestock caused me to fall to musing. I reflected that none of us does a lot of windows-down driving anymore—at least not in the South during the summer or on an interstate highway.
    The livestock were presumably on their way to a slaughterhouse. I wish it weren't so. We humans are related to those animals.

People and chimpanzees are certainly linked via a continuous chain of intermediaries and a shared ancestor, but the intermediaries are extinct: what remains is a discontinuous distribution. The same is true of people and monkeys, and of people and kangaroos [and of people and cattle], except that the extinct intermediaries lived longer ago. Because the intermediaries are nearly always extinct, we can usually get away with assuming that there is a sharp discontinuity between every species and every other. But in this book [The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution] we are concerned with evolutionary history, with the dead as well as the living. When we are talking about all the animals who ever lived, not just those that are living now, evolution tells us there are lines of gradual continuity linking literally every species to every other. When we are talking history, even apparently discontinuous modern species like sheep and dogs are linked, via their common ancestor, in unbroken lines of smooth continuity. [pp. 307-8, Richard Dawkins, 2004]

Talking history, we might reflect that in Nazi Germany, people must have marveled on occasion to see a truck or boxcar full of Jews, or gypsies, or homosexuals, or mental defectives pass and wondered where they were being herded off to. The Nazis apparently actually passed some laws that made what was happening "legal" (or at least administratively approved).
    It occurred to me yesterday that of course we have laws that make the slaughter of cattle and other animals legal (so that we might eat their flesh). The Nazis' laws (or administrative directives) were overturned following Hitler's defeat. I mused that it is morally and theoretically possible here, in America, that we could overturn the laws approving the slaughter of our relatives in the "animal kingdom"....