It's 2067, and five years is all the time it has taken for Dr. Kibry's invention to change the world forever. No one who wants to live as a human has to, and no endangered or recently extinct animal is without former humans helping to rebuild its population, whether by force or by choice. At first, the transformations were voluntary, and consent was touted as a necessary requirement for species reassignment. By late 2064, though, even that had radically changed.
Overpopulation of humans and rapid extinction of other species had meant, among other things, that prisons were overcrowded to a horrifying degree, and food was getting harder to come by even for law-abiding citizens of previously wealthy countries. People started to wonder why their tax dollars and food rations were being used to support people who had attacked or even murdered innocent people! However, in many jurisdictions, execution was still considered a barbaric practice that should never be reinstated. A political compromise was reached: the worst criminal offenders would be coerced into forfeiting their humanity rather than their lives. They would undergo involuntary reassignment and would be used to repopulate the animal kingdom and bring new life to the world. It was still considered a very extreme punishment, so at first, only murderers and rapists were forcibly transformed. However, by 2065, new tough-on-crime policy initiatives, along with repeated official assurances that species reassignment was humane and safe, had broadened the scope of this penalty significantly. People were being reassigned for fraud, theft, and minor drug offenses the world over. The very few regions left which still had the death penalty abolished it, because reassignment was such an objectively preferable alternative.
Unfortunately, the food shortages continued, but very few people were being transformed into edible livestock, which was considered an obvious waste of potential for the technology. Reassigned humans normally wanted to live out their lives as things like tigers or elephants, having sex as often as they wanted before dying either naturally of old age (in captivity) or through the normal workings of the food chain (in the wild). Most people didn't want to contemplate being slaughtered (even humanely) and having their flesh dined on by wealthy patrons who could afford to buy meat. Even for hardened criminals, it was at first considered too cruel and too close to bringing back death row. Nevertheless, now that involuntary species reassignment was on the books in every jurisdiction, it was a fairly small step to take. Worldwide social problems, fueled by the famines and the global crime crackdown, had caused violence to explode to historically unprecedented levels. People were getting hungrier and less sympathetic to wrongdoers, so by 2066, it was normal and expected than even petty thieves would be transformed into meat animals, bred to produce new meat animals as offspring, and then slaughtered humanely after they became too old for such use.
Now, it's 2067, and the story is yours. After you lost your job at a species reassignment center in what used to be Australia, you started getting desperate. One day, you saw an old woman walking home with a loaf of bread at night under the street lights. Hungry, jealous, and having nothing to your name but a steak knife, you freely surrendered the first impulse you had when you saw her: you threatened to harm her if she didn't hand over what she had in exchange for her safety. She looked pretty rich to you, but even so, you knew there was a chance she might starve because of what you did. It didn't stop you from running off with the bread and right into the path of a patrolling police droid! It didn't take many days for you to end up at a reassignment center just like the one you used to work at, knowing exactly what was likely to become of you.