So the question as to the present-day legal status of bêtes was beyond me. For all I knew, their legal equivalence with humanity had been withdrawn. Revoked. Overturned. The slaves returned to bondage, the cows marched back to the slaughterhouse. But a moment’s thought ought to have made me realize – of course not. A state of war existed between His Majesty’s government and certain canny animals in the northlands, and one does not legally revoke one’s enemy’s humanity. This is not a matter of fairness, or even of legal or parliamentary principle. This is a simply matter of strategy. You want battlefield superiority because you want to win your war; but you don’t want to blow Bambi up with a cruise missile. If you style your enemy as too far beneath contempt them people will start to feel sorry for them, because pity is the geological layer directly underneath contempt. And the bêtes were a threat. Admitting that one’s enemies had a certain legal status hadn’t prevented us killing one another for hundreds of thousands of years of almost continual warfare, after all.
