Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain. - Spider Robinson

The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten.

If you’re under 35, and not passionately interested in health food, this one may go over your head. If so, count your blessings: Until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected beneath Greenwich village. To some extent it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on Earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed. Everyone knows that Yule Gibbons ate only nuts and fruits…

You humans are at least aware of that supreme paradox—that free will exists to an extent for the individual, but disappears in the group—although you can’t work with it.