Reply #54: I dunno.

[shockra]

Feminists, like Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade, have pointed out that women were only kept and thought of as chattel after the domestication of animals and keeping of livestock. There's an outgrowth. The way animals are treated leads to an acceptance of people being treated the same. Would slavery ever have happened if we hadn't already thought of animals as mere tools for our service?

The word slavery was coined to refer to human conditions, but the comparison to animals returns to its roots.