Humans treated as oxen...and then told to drive the oxen.

Wednesday in class we talked a lot about the line that was constantly being crossed between considering slaves as low as animals and then treating them as humans when it was convenient (Several people have also discussed it here). I wanted to delve a little deeper in the oxen excerpt.
I found it very interesting because there is a line on page 423 that says "I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeed in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit....and behold a man transformed into a brute!" I do not think that it is a coincidence that Douglass used words such as "tamed," "breaking," or "brute." These are words typically used when describing an animal, such as an unruly horse or oxen. With this vocab Douglass succeeded in portraying the mindset of slaves having the status of cattle or horses.

It is interesting because, as many people have already pointed out, later on the scene occurs where Douglass is expected to know how to control the oxen. The very thought that slaves should know and thus succeed in controlling other animals disproves the mindset of slaves being the same as animals. I believe that the oxen references are but a small example of how messed up and contradictory the beliefs of many slave-owners and societies at the time.