Complete Monster: The Headmistress is the ruler of the Walled City and a human supremacist who tortures and lobotomizes sapient animals while taking young girls and women to brainwash them into her ideology, even having them select newly born piglets that are butchered and served. The girls are beaten if they refused, while the Headmistress intends on using their wombs as weapons, having them artificially impregnated with the threat of what awaits those who rebel: They are placed in medically induced comas and made into living wombs, forced to bear child after child to be of use to the Headmistress's personal paradise.
One of the animals we follow during the Wake is a housecat who in their first act of speech and true cognition tells their beloved owner's abusive boyfriend that they are defending her now and they'll kill him if he hurts her again.
The first speech we see during the Wake is Sandor's, when he is just casually playing with his owner Jesse:
Sandor: Jesse? I... I... I love you, Jesse, honey. I just love you.
The idea of animals gaining human sentience and what they could do. They could be friendly and loyal to their human companions, or they could want to seek revenge on humans who abuse or hunt them. And to make matters worse, because some of the animals hunt each other as part of the food chain, meat is considered a taboo now. Which is why some animals prefer to eat death row inmates, both human and animal. And then there's the humans' side of the scenario. Some are okay living with animals with sentience. Others are so fanatical in their beliefs that Man is the only dominant species, they are willing to kill or perform brain surgery on animals to assert the human race's dominance.
When Jessie is taken to the Walled Off City, she's met with a scenario straight out of a George Orwell story. She's threatened that she's not going anywhere even if she wanted to, the animals there are mindless beasts that have their teeth and bits of their brains removed, and to make matters worse, when she's properly dressed and cleaned of sentient fleas (some of them get crushed by the cleaning staff when they try to get away), she is forced into a room with girls in various stages of pregnancy. Some of them are even underage. That's how far some humans will go to assert their dominance on the Earth.
