Take, say, the horse—prancing with arched back, stomping with hooves, with its sprawling mane and lucid warm eye. Or, take the camel—that two-****** swan, that languid sage with a smirk of cognition on its round lips. Take, even, the homely donkey—with its patient fortitude and lively, caressive ears.
And we chose?…—this most unsightly of the Earth’s creatures, on fast rubber paws, with dead, glassy eyes and a blunt, ribbed snout, with an iron box for a ****. It will never neigh of the joy of the steppe, of the smells of the pastures, of its love for the mare or the master. Incessantly it grates its iron and spits, spits its violet fetid fume.
Well, as we are—such also is our means of locomotion.
"Means of Locomotion" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn