I-70 is a crucial economic artery for Colorado and the West, and on an average day, almost 5,000 semi-trucks carrying medicine, food, livestock, fuel, and other critical supplies travel on this federal highway.

The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders...

The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens ? tax livestock ? labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.