It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. To most readers it will be easy, after reading this tale, to accept Rover's theory that Man is set up deliberately as the antithesis of everything the Dogs stand for, a sort of mythical straw-man, a sociological fable. This is underlined by the recurring evidence of Man's aimlessness, his constant running hither and yon, his grasping at a way of life which constantly eludes him, possibly because he never knows exactly what he wants.
Life is a distributed object system.
Roy T. Fielding, 1998.