Significance of Animals

From the story's earliest phases to its ending, animals - and human beings that are treated like animals - represent the helplessness and vulnerability of those who fall prey to scientific ambition. Even in cases where their disposability is less a result of scientific ambition than of simple human need (i.e. hunger), animals - and more specifically their deaths (physical in the case of actual animals, spiritual and psychological in the case of humans treated like animals) - are powerfully evocative of sacrifice, to what those who consume them (literally or metaphorically) believe to be the greater good.