This is an excerpt from Call of the Wild: "In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of their animals." What conclusion can you draw from this excerpt? Use textual evidence to support your answer.

The trio was more worried about their own comfort, goals, and individual needs to care for the team. The team was secondary. Thus, rather than take care of the needs of the team, they neglected and abused them.

Hal's theory, which he practised on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and
brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the starved horses of the cattlemen six months back. In its frozen state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and indigestible.