Let the creditor seize all that he has. Let strangers plunder the fruit of his labor.

Let the extortioner catch all that he hath and let the strangers spoil his labour.

The moneylender was the most hated figure in medieval Europe.

Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets to Elisha, saying, Your servant my husband is dead. You know that your servant feared Yahweh. Now the creditor has come to take for himself my two children to be slaves.

Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets unto Elisha, saying, Thy servant my husband is dead and thou knowest that thy servant did fear the LORD and the creditor is come to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.

The animals burn up most of that food s energy just to breathe and keep their bodies warm, so we end up with a small fraction usually no more than one third and sometimes as little as one tenth of the food value that we feed them.

But consider the way in which the term debt (the original sin against God, with Satan as the great loan shark) has become leverage, a metaphor from engineering that has turned the classical injunction against getting into debt into a virtual duty to be highly leveraged.

The problem, as Jim Mason and I describe in our recent book, The Way We Eat, is that industrial agriculture denies animals even a minimally decent life.