If the dogs no longer guarded the sheep, he observes, they would be taken by the wolves (again, at once the closest ancestors and the fiercest enemies of the dogs). “In denying us the bones,” the dogs protest, “you will lose them along with the meat.” We, in other words, eat the beasts of the field together, and it is this arrangement that keeps us alive, and that gives shape and meaning to the pronoun in the first-person plural.