Old Dog's Right About Rights

When I said "rights", that's what I meant, legally protected rights. Without legal protection, the only rights you have are the ones you can physically defend with force. In a manner of speaking, those aren't really rights, they are just something you get away with unless somebody tries to stop you, and then it becomes a case of "might makes right". I suppose the only difference is that, with legal rights, you can call on the police power of the state to protect your rights, so it's still "might makes right", in a manner of speaking. It's the same only different. Ken brought up a good point about equal rights. Earlier civilizations may have guaranteed rights to certain individuals or classes of people, but the concept of equal rights is relatively new. Indeed, it's so new that we haven't worked all the bugs out of it yet.

Peasants were farmers who didn't own property, they were tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Slaves, on the other hand, were property. I don't know if you can classify migrant farm workers as peasants because they are working for wages and are not tied to any particular farm. Peasants were usually in debt to their landowners because, in a bad crop year, the landowner would forego the rent payments and put them on a tab. After several years of that, the peasants would be so far in debt that they would never dig themselves out, and the debt would pass on to their descendants. Peasants usually could leave the land, but they didn't because they had no place to go. Escaped slaves would likely be pursued, but runaway peasants usually were not, unless they had committed some crime before they left, which might be why they left.

One thing that kept the peasants on the land was that the landlord was supposed to protect them from robbers, vandals, and other landlords. The peasants in turn were supposed to warn their landlords when some other landlord made an incursion and was marching towards the castle. In his book "The Prince", Niccolo Machiavelli advised that landlords should take good care of their peasants because, if they became dissatisfied, all they had to do to get even was to fail to warn the landlord of an approaching invasion force. Conversely, Machiavelli said that, if you are a landlord looking to expand your holdings, target a place where the peasants have been abused by their landlord.

I don't think that animals understand rights the way we do. Their social orders, far from being egalitarian, are based on dominance and submission. The farther back you go in human history, the more human social orders resembled the ones that animals maintain even unto this day.