>God, they treated animals as if they were humans.
>
>Having said this, however, it surely is true that the capitalist
>treatment of animals used for fur, shoes, and food is unusually cruel
>(and mirrors the capitalist treatment of workers or human resources as
>the economists say) as is a lot of the research done with animals.
Saint More has Raphael say in _Utopia_:
***** "'The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men, and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men the abbots, not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places in solitudes, for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners as well as tenants are turned out of their possessions, by tricks, or by main force, or being wearied out with ill-usage, they are forced to sell them. By which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell almost for nothing their household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay for a buyer. When that little money is at an end, for it will be soon spent, what is left for them to do, but either to steal and so to be hanged (God knows how justly), or to go about and beg? And if they do this, they are put in prison as idle vagabonds; while they would willingly work, but can find none that will hire them; for there is no more occasion for country labor, to which they have been bred, when there is no arable ground left. One shepherd can look after a flock which will stock an extent of ground that would require many hands if it were to be ploughed and reaped. This likewise in many places raises the price of corn.
"'The price of wool is also so risen that the poor people who were wont to make cloth are no more able to buy it; and this likewise makes many of them idle. For since the increase of pasture, God has punished the avarice of the owners by a rot among the sheep, which has destroyed vast numbers of them; to us it might have seemed more just had it fell on the owners themselves...". *****
The origin of capitalism lies in the enclosure of the commons, which created sheep that devour men; in other words, human beings lost the land to sheep, since sheep were more valuable to the rising bourgeoisie than humans were. Sheep, in turn, suffered a consequence of the commercialization of agriculture (e.g., the eventual emergence of factory farms).
***** "The law doth punish man or woman That steals the goose from off the common, But let the greater felon loose, That steals the common from the goose."
(Anonymous, Traditional Rhyme, England) *****
The rhyme neatly sums up the effects of the enclosure on human beings and other natural entities.
Yoshie