4 ideas
He names her Jasmine, grows attached, and secretly conceives a child with her. When she gives birth, he hands the baby to Cecilia as their own, then knocks Jasmine unconscious to send her to slaughter, showing that his apparent tenderness toward her was ownership all along.
The society forbids words like 'cannibalism' and 'human' and substitutes 'special meat', 'product', and 'head'. By removing the vocabulary that would register the victims as people, it turns killing them into an administrative and commercial routine. Language comes first: once the name changes, the practice becomes speakable, then regulated, then normal.
Farmed humans have their vocal cords removed, are branded instead of named, and are raised without being taught language. The category of 'livestock' is produced by removing the traits used to recognise personhood, not discovered by finding their absence. Seen this way, the line between person and animal looks like a boundary society maintains through deliberate practice rather than a natural fact.
The novel raises the possibility, through Marcos's own suspicion, that the animal virus was exaggerated or engineered to justify reducing an overpopulated, impoverished underclass. The poor, migrants, and the marginal become the supply of meat, while the wealthy buy and consume them. On this reading, an emergency frame lets a society turn class and economic hierarchy directly into who may be eaten.