The gavel landed with resounding thuds against the podium. “Settle down, settle down… We’ve been going at this for three days.” His shoulders heaved a sigh of frustration. “The Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Animal Rights Group still has not been able to determine anything, but every group can have a closing statement about what their group stands for.” He looked at the first table on his left. The banner above boldly proclaimed “Show Animals Love Every Single Minute and Appreciate Nature.” Giving them a weary look, he said “Would the group from S.A.L.E.S.M.A.N. like to go first?”

A representative stood up and beamed with pride. “Animals are just so cute and cuddly. It’s our job to care for them and love them.” He stressed his point by wrapping himself in a large hug, “How could anyone even think about hurting them. Animals don’t have hate, or envy, or any of that other bad stuff. We should all just love them.” He sat down with a pleased look on his face, as if the whole world thought exactly like he did.

At the next table was a gentleman with a stretched t-shirt across his barreling chest. “L.E.A.F.Y.” was printed way out of proportion by the rippling muscles underneath. It couldn’t be seen by the speaker at the moment but he knew the name “Chuck” was printed across the back. “Does the ‘Let’s Eat Animals For Yumminess’ group have anything to say?”

Chuck stood silently, trying to glare into every eye. “Animals taste good. They ain’t worth much else, and I don’t need some Oxford-type tellin’ me otherwise. Let’s just eat ‘em.” The chair creaked under his weight as he sat back down but it didn’t dare collapse on him. It seemed to be as afraid of him as the rest of the room was.

The speaker quickly turned to the next table. A member of A.N.A.T.O.M.Y. was already standing and began speaking as if he were a salesman making an important presentation.

“We at ‘Animals Need All Things Owned by Me and You’ feel that animals are too defenseless. They can not take care of themselves and we should provide for all of their wants and needs. We as humans have all the advantages. We can fend for ourselves and respond to any situation that arises, but animals don’t have this luxury. There is no reason why everything that we have should not be given to them.” With a curt bow, he sat relinquishing control back to the speaker.

A stuffed and mounted deer positioned in front of the next table wore a blue blanket over its back with P.E.R.H.A.P.S. stenciled in tidy yellow letters on the side. The text underneath proclaimed ‘Please Eradicate Really Healthy Animal Populations Safely.’

A hunter dressed in camouflage leaned against the deer. “Animal herds have to be thinned and controlled. There is a balance that must be achieved in order to keep everything functioning correctly. Too many of a species can wipe out an entire crop or another species. Too little and the food chain can’t survive beyond the weak link. It’s up to us to keep things in check.” He paused in the middle of his speech, and it was easy to see the daydream in his eyes of being in a deer stand. “Once you get out into the leafy green forest and start to interact with it, you realize that we need to protect it the best way that we can, and sometimes that means hunting.” He sat down and went back to his day dream.

The speaker realized that he didn’t really know the two odd men at the next table. They hadn’t said a word through the whole conference. “Perhaps the representatives from O.X.F.O.R.D. have something to add?”

The two looked at each other, almost as if in silent communication, before one slowly rose to his feet, but the speaker interrupted him before he could begin to speak. “…and would you mind telling me what O.X.F.O.R.D. stands for?”

“After studying you for a while we realized that we needed to come up with some identifying acronym per your usual customs. We are ‘Only Xenobiologists Fully Obtain Real Data’ for we are the Xenobiologists of our species. We have been studying alien cultures for quite some time.” The relevance of what he was saying didn’t seem to register with most of those attending. Undaunted, he continued. “We are to you as you are to the animals that you have been studying. We have been watching you for several millennia trying to determine how we should treat you. We also had conferences discussing your value and like you, have been unable to make any determination.” Most of the group was starting to understand, although the disbelief was very prevalent. “We debated taking care of you and treating you as pets, but you didn’t seem to be… trainable. We studied your anatomy and found that you would probably make a very delectable dish, but most of you would not be very nutritious. We thought about providing you with our advanced technology and trying to make you into a productive culture, but feared you wouldn’t use it wisely. We almost settled on ‘thinning the herd’, but you do seem to have some value, although there is fear of your species spreading out too much, especially into our neighborhood of space. It was finally decided that we needed to try to treat you as peers and give you the benefit of the doubt, but after listening to you prattle on for three days about how to treat YOUR animals, we realized that this was inane. The decision has finally been made to eliminate your species.” This last line was delivered in a very straightforward manner, just as if all of humanity had to be put down due to being too old, or diseased.

Out of the crowd, one lone voice was heard. Chuck said, “Can we at least have a steak first?”

Beneath the gloomy, grey sky, a man sat alone on a bench outside the grounds of Oxford. A payphone laid next to this booth, and the man waited for it to finally ring.

When would it ring? Who knew? Would the call carry good news? Perhaps.

As a bell sounded eight times in the distance, a single streetlight flickered on, illuminating the man, the phone, and the bench in a yellow circle. As he stared into the open space in front of him, the rest of the city began to darken under the new moon. Soon, as the distant bell tolled nine o'clock, nothing could be seen but the yellow circle and its inhabitants.

Looking about him, the man saw a ragged book lying under his bench. He opened the book, and was greeted with a puff of dust. After he wiped his eyes, the man looked down to see a piece of paper with some messy anatomy notes, most likely left by a student at the school.

As he closed the book, a quiet ring began to come from the booth. He looked around him quickly, and then got up and walked into the phone booth. The man picked up the phone and listened.

The speaker on the other end began to speak. "It is hard to sell them this time of year, is it not?"

The man replied quickly with a cryptic reply. "You must be a good salesman if you can."

"Mr. Giovanni! I'm glad to see you're there. Look, this whole thing isn't working out as we planned, two of our guys are bein–"

"I don't care how badly it's working out, this has to happen."

"But Don Giovanni, we've been found out. You're not safe, you need to move."

A pause. "Where should I go?"

"Anywhere but where you are now. If you don't move soon, who knows what could happen?"

Another pause. "I'll meet you at..." Giovanni stopped talking, as he heard a rustling in the bushes. "I hear something. I'll be right back."

Giovanni hung up the receiver and stepped out of the phone booth. He looked around him. The leafy foliage produced more noise, and Giovanni was not going to be taken out like this. He grabbed the book under the bench, wielded it in two hands, and approached the bushes. As he stood only feet from the foliage, a man walked out, gun aimed at Giovanni's head. "Goodbye, Don Giovanni."

A lone gunshot rang throughout all of Oxford. Only moments later, a phone began to ring, echoing along the once again quiet streets.