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It's not so long ago that a servant would bring up a family and tell their children that if they did really well they might get to be servants in a good house. That was what they had to aspire to. Life as a servant was difficult and generally shorter than their self-professed superiors. By and large, these servants did not rebel.
Even today it is recognised that lower socio-economic group have a shorter life expectancy than higher. And the rich are often called snobs because they prefer the company of their economic equals, and reverse snobbery is not rare, so we continue to form natural segregations into poor suburbs and rich ones. (The right and wrong side of the tracks.) And even on the poorer end of the scale we have people crossing the street rather than pass too close to homeless and destitute drunks. But aside from a few thieves, in general is no rebellion by the poor in search of their share of life expectancy.
I can anticipate that such comparisons will meet with resistance because there has been no deliberate killing of the poor/servant classes for body parts to aid the rich. But the examples, I think, demonstrate that we humans are very good at accepting things, even very ugly and unfair things, and in that light the story presented does not seem quite so unbelievable.
It is obvious that the cloning is not simple copying: these clones are unable to breed, so some genetic manipulation has taken place. How much? Is, or was, it enough that early versions of these clones seemed genuinely subhuman? Might that have been the start of believing they truly were animals being bred for their flesh. bfisher mentioned the Nazi's and their Final Solution, so given the timing and alternate history of this story we might see there are grounds for thinking the situation is not so incredible. Just because it has not been explained doesn't mean an explanation does not exist, and what we are left with is the context for this story: an exploration of people living out their lives as best they can. However unfair it seems from the outside, for them it is all they have ever known.
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