ought about it.

"That led him to wantin' to know all about the Man-Animal War. I told
him the best I could, how one of a man's basic drives is to exterminate,
ever' since prehistoric times when he did in the wooly mammoth and
rhinoceros. The dodo, quagga, passenger pigeon, great auk, aurochs, Key
deer, bison, African elephant, gorilla, tiger--there's an awful list.
Why, five hundred species of mammals, alone, have become extinct since 1
A.D., 'bout four hundred of them since 1850. A man'll even kill off
other men, like the Neanderthals and the Tasmanians!" Stonecypher rested
the paddle and grinned, faintly, at Catriona reclining in the bow. "I
guess you've heard this before."

"Go rahght ahead, Stony," Catriona sighed. "Ah like to heah yoah speech.
It's the only time you really get angry, and you look so fine and
noble."

"Yeah. Well. I told Moe how a man exterminates useful or harmless
species, and then he lets dangerous ones, like rats, eat him out of
house and home. Course, I explained this was just kinship. Folks used to
argue man come from a monkey, or from spontaneous combustion, or
something. Now we got fossil proof he's not like anything anybody ever
saw. He's a case of straight line development all the way back to the
first mammal, a sort of rat."

The canoe glided past Highland Pier. Every type of small watercraft,
from a punt, through an electric motorboat, to a sloop, had docked. More
boats lined the shore on either side of the pier. The flying field
contained so many butterfliers and copters that there seemed no
possibility of any of them taking off. Human voices welled in a mob roar
from the great open cylinder of the bullring. A huge banner draped on
the curving white wall proclaimed, in ten-foot letters:

DEPENDENCE DAY
BULLFIGHT
HONOR THE GREAT
GOVERNMENT ON WHICH
WE DEPEND
SIX BULLS--THREE KILLERS

Stonecypher ran the canoe aground in a patch of dead weeds, exposed by a
slight lowering of the lake level, and helped Catriona over the rocks
that lined the bank. He said, "I told Moe other things men do to
animals. All the laboratory butchery, done because it would be cruel to
treat a man like that, but it's all right with a animal, like takin' out
a dog's brains and lettin' 'im live. I told him about huntin', how the
kudu become extinct 'cause a bunch of fools wanted to see who could kill
the one with the biggest horns.

"I told him the things don