Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law

1. It is the condition of the human body that it needs to take in its sustenance from without and to protect itself from anything that would destroy its integrity; there are also many things which relieve and enrich our lives. We may therefore safely infer that it is clearly the will of the supreme governor of the world that man may use other creatures for his own benefit, and that he may in fact in many cases kill them. This is true not only of vegetable species and such creatures as have no sense of their own destruction, but also of harmless animals which it is not wrong for men to kill and consume, even though they die in pain.

2. But in the beginning all these things are thought to have been made available by God to all men indifferently, so that they did not belong to one more than to another. The proviso was that men should make such arrangements about them as seemed to be required by the condition of the human race and by the need to preserve peace, tranquillity and good order. Hence while there were as yet few men in the world, it was understood that whatever a man had laid hold upon with the intention of making use of it for himself should be his and no one should take it from him, but the actual bodies [corpora] which produced those things should remain available to all without relation to anyone in particular. In the course of time, however, men multiplied and began to cultivate things which produce food and clothing. To avoid conflicts and to institute good order at this stage, they took the Step of dividing the actual bodies of things amongst themselves, and each was assigned his own proper portion; a convention [conventio] was also made that what had been left available to all by this first division of things should henceforth be his who first claimed it for himself. In this way, property in things [proprietas rerum] or ownership [dominium] was introduced by the will of God, with consent [consensus] among men right from the beginning and with at least a tacit agreement [pactum].