Achilles in Vietnam has a thesis that ancient warriors had a lot of respect for their enemy, but modern armies tend to position enemies as weak and low-status. Those give death and losing a very different valence. Obviously you prefer winning, but if you lose, well at least some of you got to die gloriously. This is pretty much lost today, and makes losing or watching your friends die in battle feel much worse.
This attitude[1] seems really easy to transfer to hunting, which takes a lot of skill and some risk. I imagine that as you move from true hunting of dangerous animals, to pastoralism, to domesticated sheep, to factory farming you lose more and more respect for the animals, and this enables them to treat them worse.
So it seems plausible that ancient shepherd did have more respect for animals while killing them, and this showed up in material ways, although probably that representation is also romanticized.
Re: ancient shepherds.
Achilles in Vietnam has a thesis that ancient warriors had a lot of respect for their enemy, but modern armies tend to position enemies as weak and low-status. Those give death and losing a very different valence. Obviously you prefer winning, but if you lose, well at least some of you got to die gloriously. This is pretty much lost today, and makes losing or watching your friends die in battle feel much worse.
This attitude[1] seems really easy to transfer to hunting, which takes a lot of skill and some risk. I imagine that as you move from true hunting of dangerous animals, to pastoralism, to domesticated sheep, to factory farming you lose more and more respect for the animals, and this enables them to treat them worse.
So it seems plausible that ancient shepherd did have more respect for animals while killing them, and this showed up in material ways, although probably that representation is also romanticized.
I don’t know if the book’s claims are true
Ancient warriors enslaved their captives.
And that was also viewed fairly differently than chattel slavery.