Animal Welfare and the “Great Republic of the Future”
THIS HISTORY IS THE backdrop to our modern debates about the care and treatment of the other creatures with whom we share the earth. Critics of today’s animal-protection movement often argue that animal welfare is ultimately a trivial matter—the product of effete modern sensibilities. But the truth is that our relationship with animals has always been profoundly important. How we treat the world’s animals—whether coldly or compassionately, selfishly or justly—is a measure of who we are. It defines our character, our moral progress, and our ability to look beyond self-interest. There’s a reason why the decent treatment of animals commands ownership of the word humane.
Far from a trivial concern, the care of animals and the fight against cruelty can bring out the best in the human heart—all the more so because it inspires pure altruism, with no angle or payoff. For the earliest reformers in the humane movement, religious conviction was no hindrance to an active concern for the treatment of animals. It was their greatest inspiration, and it gave them the courage to call cruelty by its name. Theirs was the spirit of Britain’s William Wilberforce, the great nineteenth-century Christian champion against both human slavery and cruelty to animals. Then as now, such reformist zeal was often dismissed as extreme and subversive, but Wilberforce had his answer: “If to be feeling alive to the suffering of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”
The campaigners of Wilberforce’s time brought new passion to the cause, and added the first major animal-welfare reforms to Western law, but in fact they were carrying on a debate and a mission that had begun much earlier. For millennia, the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions have called followers to be compassionate toward animals, and Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism are even more solidly grounded on the principles of kindness toward all creatures. During the Middle Ages, numerous stories of saints and their solicitude to animals provided a rich lore of tradition that continues today in the timeless example of St. Francis of Assisi—a man honored by Pope John Paul II for “his solicitous care, not only towards men, but also towards animals.” Even St. Thomas Aquinas, sometimes cited to support the view that we have no direct duty to animals, recognized animal cruelty as a moral issue, because he feared it fostered human wickedness.
In the early modern era, questions about cruelty and kindness were given even more serious attention. Even in 1641, while the French philosopher René Descartes was arguing that animals were automata with no souls, mind, or conscious experience of pain, New England Puritans were approving the first legal code to protect animals—the Body of Liberties, which prohibited “tyranny or cruelty towards any brute creatures which are usually kept for the use of man.”
Only a few years later, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke advised parents to chastise thoughtless cruelty by their children, and within a few decades the kindness-to-animals ethic became a common theme in children’s literature. By the late eighteenth century, a few influential thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and John Lawrence, were arguing that the law should extend its protection to animals. Bentham famously argued that “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?,” while Lawrence plaintively asked his readers, “Can there be one kind of justice for men and another for brutes? Or is feeling in them a different thing to what it is in ourselves?” In 1751, the English satirist William Hogarth painted a series of engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty, showing how cruelty to animals preceded violence against people. The authors and poets of the Romantic movement weighed in with admonitions against cruelty and a call to respect nature—Percy Bysshe Shelley looked forward to the day when “All things are void of terror,” and “man has lost his terrible prerogative.”
By the early nineteenth century, these moral convictions were widely shared. Although the German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed with Aquinas and Locke that humans had no direct duty to animals, he agreed that cruelty was wrong because it debased humans and hardened their hearts. Several decades later, Kant’s countryman Arthur Schopenhauer directed his own serious challenge to human presumption in treating animals as nothing. “The assumption that animals are without rights,” wrote Schopenhauer, “and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” Before the end of the century, in 1892, the reformer Henry Salt laid the groundwork for the modern approach to animal rights with a powerful work that makes remarkable reading even today, Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress. Salt encouraged people to “recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood,” asserting with conviction that the “great republic of the future will not confine its beneficence to man.”
America’s first anticruelty laws actually predate any animal-protection organization. Maine passed the first such law in 1821, and more than a dozen states followed suit by 1860. The states also began to prohibit staged animal fighting—more than half of them doing so before 1900. Bull baiting, ratting, gander pulling, dog-fighting, cockfighting, and other such spectacles were often viewed as attracting gambling and other vices. There was a commonsense understanding that cruelty to animals went against the better instincts of humanity and was an affront to any notion of Christian stewardship.
Organized concern for animals first emerged in the nineteenth century. Just two years after Britain enacted the world’s first national anticruelty law in 1822, several dozen men met in a London coffeehouse to form the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—the first of its kind in the world. Queen Victoria lent her authority to the group some years later, and in 1840 it took on the noble name it carries to this day, the Royal SPCA. It is still one of the best-known charities in the United Kingdom, with an annual budget exceeding 110 million pounds.
In 1866, New York socialite Henry Bergh founded this nation’s first animal-welfare charity, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), just three days after the New York legislature passed an ambitious anticruelty law. Inspired by Bergh, and concerned for the plight of Philadelphia’s animals, Caroline Earle White and her husband formed the Pennsylvania SPCA and a women’s branch of the organization about a year later. And after learning of a grueling forty-mile race involving two horses each carrying two riders over rough roads, an ordeal that killed both animals, George Angell, also a man of wealth and stature, founded the Massachusetts SPCA in Boston in 1868. Historian Bernard Unti calls Bergh, White, and Angell “the founding triumvirate” of the nineteenth-century American animal-protection movement. Inspired by these leaders in the Northeast, humanitarians throughout the United States formed SPCAs and humane societies, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon.
In Pets in America, historian Katherine Grier notes, “As families abandoned keeping livestock, another change that took place gradually into the 1900s, pet keeping became the only way many could directly express kindness to animals.” For the emerging urban class, pets may have fulfilled a basic impulse to be close to other creatures—what some have since described as “nature-deficit disorder.”
The new middle-class interest in pet keeping inevitably produced a new expression of the human-animal bond, but also stray cats and dogs, especially in cities. The newly formed humane organizations responded by taking on the tasks of animal control, sheltering, and often the grim business of euthanasia. Bergh and Angell, in particular, focused on all cruelties, from inhumane transportation and slaughter of livestock, to pigeon shoots, animal fighting, and vivisection. Congress’s first animal-protection law, enacted in 1873, actually protected farm animals: the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law required the off-loading, feeding, and watering of livestock from railcars on the long journey from the West to the East. In the United Kingdom, Parliament regulated vivisection in 1876, but despite para
llel efforts by American advocates, the U.S. Congress did not follow, and animal experimentation went largely unregulated until Congress enacted the federal Animal Welfare Act nearly a century later. The result of these long-ago failures by Congress was to leave a free-for-all in animal experimentation and agriculture—a long period of unrestrained abuse that we are just now beginning to correct in law. So many of the animal-welfare controversies of our day could have been avoided had there only been some basic moral framework for the conduct of these industries, put in place before new and ever more severe cruelties were allowed to become the norm.
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and it’s tempting to think that his argument about the continuity of life kick-started the formation of the first animal-welfare charities in America just a few years later. But, as Bernard Unti notes, humane reformers “never cited such influences, preferring to ground their arguments in religious conviction, concern for suffering, and animal individuality.” Indeed, it’s closer to the truth that Darwin’s arguments made a handy case against animal protection. Critics of the humane movement invoked Darwin (in ways he would not always approve) to rationalize interspecies competition and violence, excusing human brutality as “survival of the fittest.” If life is a ruthless struggle for advantage over other creatures, then why on earth should anyone bother to care for a weaker, more vulnerable species? It was not until the 1890s that some animal advocates, Henry Salt among them, began to find support in Darwin’s writings. At the heart of Darwin’s work, after all, was a recognition of commonality among the “higher” mammals, and a shared experience of suffering in a world filled with struggle.
Self-Evident Truths
THE BIRTH OF THE organized humane movement, however, required more than philosophers, preachers, and sympathetic scientists. Like most social movements, animal protection was born from both necessity and crisis—as a reaction to the intensifying, seemingly limitless exploitation of animals in the industrial era. In the nineteenth century, market hunters stalked the vast forests and plains of America and slaughtered wildlife with abandon to supply meat, furs, and feathers to the boomtowns of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. In the old agrarian economy, food had often been produced right on the farm, connecting people intimately to its production. But in the new urban-rural economy, many city dwellers were completely disconnected from the wasteful killing of wildlife and the clear-cutting of forests. It dawned on some people—the would-be leaders of the conservation movement—that all wildlife would be lost if boundaries and standards were not established.
Around the same time, city dwellers became all too familiar with cruelty, since it occurred right before their eyes—and not just the gruesome abattoirs exposed by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. More than twelve million horses lived in America, most of them in cities, and they were the primary means of transport for people and goods. Carriage drivers often overworked and mercilessly whipped the animals. They denied them adequate shelter, or forced them to work in punishing heat or cold. Henry Bergh and others decided to confront this abuse, and the years afterward would see a sudden rise in prosecutions for the abuse of horses—in fact they accounted for 70 percent of the 8,256 prosecutions for animal cruelty between 1868 and 1880. With those actions in New York to protect horses began the animal-protection movement we know today.
Katherine Grier argues that a variety of other social factors prepared the way for the humane movement, including the emerging ethic of gentility in domestic households. The new urban middle class adopted fresh social rules, among them an ethic of kindness and of pet keeping. In the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in the 1820s and 1830s, there was a rapid growth in liberal evangelical Protestantism, and with it a belief in salvation through benevolence. Even before then, other religious-minded reformers, led by Quakers and Methodists, advocated a Christian ethic of compassion to animals. In churches and meetinghouses across the country, before there was any formal humane movement to speak of, Americans could hear stirring sermons on the theme. The great John Wesley himself, the founder of Methodism, offered a sermon entitled “The General Deliverance,” which would inspire a lot of soul-searching if it were heard in any Christian church today. Why, Wesley asked, should we consider the plight of mistreated animals? “It may enlarge our hearts toward these poor creatures to reflect that, vile as they may appear in our eyes, not a one of them is forgotten in the sight of our Father which is in heaven.”
Such direct appeals to conscience had a power of their own, but in an earlier age would have had no possibility of ever gaining the force of law. By the eighteenth century, of course, humanity was ready to question a good many old assumptions and to upend entrenched institutions. This was the time of a great shift in political thought, which changed forever our understanding of the rights of the individual, and over time would establish the moral rationale for extending legal protections to animals against the particular tyranny directed at them.
Political philosophers of the Enlightenment asserted the claims of the individual against the capricious power of monarchies and other undemocratic institutions. Suddenly the world had a new and unstoppable idea—that rights were inherent and that principles of justice were universal. With the ideals that inspired the French and American revolutions, Western societies had a new creed that held laws and governments alike to “self-evident truths” and to the consent of the governed. Laws that perpetuated any wrongs or abuses of power were unjust laws and stood in need of democratic reform to meet the demands of impartial justice.
With these new principles ringingly affirmed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and above all in the American Declaration of Independence, there could be no going back, and old and obvious evils could no longer be excused or explained away as the natural order. Of course, the most glaring of wrong in that era was human slavery, which would take generations of agitation and conflict, and in America all the carnage of a civil war, before it was finally abolished. For good reason, the cause of abolition would command the devotion and energy of reformers for generations, and the first successes of the organized animal-protection movement would have to wait until slavery was overcome. But once that fundamental advance had been made, the humane movement suddenly found its footing, and it’s not by coincidence that its ranks included many of the same men and women who had labored against slavery.
In the United States, the very first humane organization—the ASPCA—was founded in the year after the Civil War. And the same woman who had helped awaken the conscience of America about slavery was also a stirring voice in defense of animals. “The care of the defenseless animal creation,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, “is to be an evidence of the complete triumph of Christianity.”
A half century earlier, a similar sequence had played out in England, with the conviction and fervor of abolitionists quickly turning to the abolition of cruelty to animals. The United Kingdom banned the slave trade in 1807, and little more than a decade later enacted national laws against cruelty that were the first of their kind anywhere. William Wilberforce is rightly remembered as a determined opponent of both slavery and animal cruelty, and often for the same reasons. This was a man who moved comfortably between the antislavery cause and the SPCA and saw both efforts as part of the same humane enterprise—defending different victims from the same kind of arrogant and merciless abuse of power. The spirit was expressed by a young compatriot of his in both causes, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. “I was convinced,” Shaftesbury wrote, “that God had called me to devote whatever advantages He might have bestowed upon me to the cause of the weak, the helpless, both man and beast, and those who had none to help them.”
Across the years, new generations of animal advocates have made the case in their own way, but the words of Shaftbury express the fundamental moral impulse that has guided us from the very beginning. In every time, there have always been people who abuse power and are blind to the misery they cause. No matter
who the victims are or how ruthless the practice in question, they always find some pretext, excuse, or high-sounding justification for the harm they inflict. And in every time there have also been people who see the wrong and try to right it—who confront injustice no matter how acceptable, routine, or customary it may seem to others. They are the ones who rid the civilized world of slavery, at a time when settled opinion still held that slaves were the rightful property of a few and an economic necessity for society. They are the ones who dared to challenge powerful industries and to assert the right of children not to be exploited for cheap labor. They’re the ones who refused to live in a country that treated women as second-class citizens and secured reforms that protected women from domestic violence, opened doors of opportunity, and finally granted them the right to vote. And for a hundred and fifty years, they are the kind of people who have seen cruelty and couldn’t abide it, and often at risk to themselves have come to the aid of afflicted animals.
Look around today and you’ll find thousands of groups carrying on this work, often against abuses of a kind and scale that men like Shaftsbury could not have imagined. Though critics try to cast the animal-protection movement as something foreign, eccentric, and subversive, this cause has long been a worthy and natural expression of the great Western moral tradition.
And the cause runs even deeper than that. It calls us back to a bond of kinship and respect for animals that humans have felt since before we had words to describe it. It calls us to be faithful shepherds of Creation, alert to our duties and alive to the suffering of our fellow creatures. It is a cause that speaks to moral aspiration, asking us to live up to our own highest ideals of justice and mercy. It writes common moral standards into law, so that liberty does not give way to license, and cruel people are not left as judges of their own conduct. Like all the best moral causes, in the end animal protection reminds us of what we know already—that to mistreat an animal is low, dishonorable, and an abuse of power that diminishes man and animal alike.
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