Mental Hospital Vs Animals Analysis

How are the blind in the mental hospital compared animals? Why is this comparison made?
In the quarantine the blind slowly transform into savages. “There are many ways of becoming an animal, he thought, this is just the first of them” (93), this first sign being how dirty they all are; the hallways filled with feces, their beings covered in filth, the corpses lying in the yard. As much as the internees try to not recognize their savagery, it slowly becomes inevitable and “if we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals”(116). Ultimately, they aren't being treated as human beings by the government and the guards so they begin to act as such. They were seen as a threat
Early one morning “she had forgotten to wind up the wretched watch, or wretched her, wretched me, for not even this simple task had she remembered to carry out after only three days of isolation” (95). She feels as though when she loses her sense of time, she feels as though she will lose part of her sanity or humanity as well. On page 117, soon after the old man with the black eyepatch arrives to the mental hospital, bringing with him a working radio and watch, the doctor’s wife is quick to wind her watch after hearing the radio announce the time. She compares to see if the time is correct against the old man with the black eye patch’s wristwatch. Time controls everyone’s life in the normal world, work from this time to this time, eat at this time and this time, sleep at this time, but inside the mental hospital it can all be a blur under the fluorescent lights with no outside contact. This contributes to the wife’s need to know the time, as to keep structure in her life as everything else she no longer can control inside the quarantine. “Give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our live” (318). By time, Saramago is saying that we ultimately have no control over life and we are dealt the cards of life we were meant to be given and only time will reveal what those cards