“We are not animals”

“We are not animals” is both a declaration of human dignity and a disputed proposition in the women’s debate about how to answer violence in Molotschna Colony. Agata Friesen gives the phrase its first decisive use when Greta Loewen compares the women’s choices to the instinctive escape of startled horses. From there, the animal comparison keeps returning—not as a settled description of the women, but as a way to expose their treatment, test possible responses, and challenge a social order that denies them authority over their own lives.

Origin in the Debate over Flight and Resistance

Greta argues that horses do not hold meetings when danger approaches: they run, and running may save them. Agata laughs, agrees with part of the comparison, and then draws a boundary: the women are not animals. Greta answers that they have been preyed upon like animals and suggests that they might respond in kind. Ona Friesen asks whether this means running away; Salome Friesen asks whether it means killing their attackers. The phrase thus enters a debate about immediate choices, not an abstract discussion of human nature. It resists reducing the women to prey even as Greta uses that image to press for decisive action.

Agata’s account of animals that can fight or flee complicates the dispute. Its point, as she explains it, is that the women need not settle whether they are animals, or whether they have been treated as such, before deciding what to do. The men will soon return, so the practical question cannot be postponed until the group reaches consensus on the analogy. The phrase matters partly because it cannot itself resolve the women’s choices: rejecting the label does not tell them whether to stay, leave, or fight.

Dignity, Forgiveness, and the Cost of Disagreement

Mariche Loewen redirects the discussion from animal identity to whether the women should avenge the harm done to them or forgive the men. She describes forgiveness not as a free choice but as a condition tied to their place in the colony and their hope of entering heaven: refusal to forgive, or to accept apologies, could mean expulsion and the loss of that religious standing. Her question reveals that the women are making decisions under institutional pressure. They are not simply choosing how to react to danger; they are also being told what their spiritual and communal future will depend on.

Ona brings that pressure into sharper focus by asking what the women are supposed to forgive if the elders and bishop have decided they do not need counseling because they were unconscious during the attacks. Her reasoning exposes the contradiction between denying women recognition of what happened and requiring them to perform forgiveness. In that context, the claim that they are not animals also insists on their capacity to understand, judge, and speak about their own experience—capacities the authorities’ decision effectively discounts.

The phrase does not produce immediate agreement. Later, when Ona raises practical concerns about securing animals for a possible departure, Mariche points out that the women have not made a final decision to leave. As she observes, even the conclusion that they are not animals was reached without solid consensus. The repetition makes the slogan’s limits visible: it can name a shared injury, but it cannot erase differences over risk, retaliation, forgiveness, and what the women should do next.

From Comparison to an Indictment of Power

Greta continues to use the comparison to describe the women’s position, arguing that they have been treated worse than animals and that animals in the colony are safer and better cared for. Agata reminds her that the group had agreed to leave the animal question aside. Greta’s return to it shows why the image remains difficult to discard. For her, it registers the scale of the women’s exposure; for Agata, it threatens to consume time needed for decisions. The women can reject animal status without pretending that the comparison has no force.

Salome turns the argument from metaphor toward social structure. She says that women are not members of the colony but commodities, and describes a system in which men give orders, determine women’s fates, vote on excommunications, interpret the Bible, lead worship, and punish. Her account connects the denial of membership to the denial of voice: women are expected to remain silent even at the burials of their babies. The phrase’s insistence on personhood therefore challenges more than the use of an animal analogy. It contests the terms by which male authority assigns women a place while withholding the standing and participation that membership should imply.

Salome also objects to the male interpretation of the Bible being handed down to women. Ona identifies their inability to read or write as a serious disadvantage in any negotiation over scriptural meaning. The debate over who counts as fully human is consequently inseparable from who is allowed to interpret, record, and contest the rules governing the colony. The women’s speech in the meetings pushes against that exclusion, though their restricted access to literacy limits the means available to them.

The Phrase in the Wider Choice to Leave

The stakes of the language are sharpened by the women’s unequal circumstances. Ona is pregnant after the attacks, and the elders judge her through Narfa while planning for her unborn child to be raised by another colony family. The women’s claim to dignity takes place within a system that can determine her status and the child’s future without giving her control over either. Their condition is not merely an insulting comparison; it has consequences for how their bodies, families, and choices are governed.

Nor does rejecting the animal label require treating every boy or man as an irredeemable threat. August Epp argues that thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys can cause harm but are still children capable of being taught through direction, love, and patience. That position offers a contrast to the impulse to answer violence with violence: recognizing danger does not require abandoning the possibility of change. The expression therefore remains connected to a difficult ethical question about protection—how to take the women’s vulnerability seriously without making retaliation the only imaginable response.

Across the meetings, “We are not animals” is neither a unanimous verdict nor a complete plan. It begins as Agata’s refusal of Greta’s analogy, returns as a disputed conclusion, and opens onto Salome’s indictment of women’s exclusion from membership and authority. Its force comes from holding those meanings together: the women reject being defined as prey or property, while insisting that the conditions imposed on them must be named before they can decide whether to stay, resist, or leave.