Pigs confined in gestation crates, part of the animal–industrial complex. According to Noske, animals "have become reduced to mere appendages of computers and machines."
The term animal–industrial complex (AIC) refers to the systematic and institutionalized exploitation of animals. Proponents of the term claim that activities described by the term differ from individual acts of animal cruelty in that they constitute institutionalized animal exploitation.
Definitions
The term animal–industrial complex was coined by the Dutch cultural anthropologist and philosopher Barbara Noske in her 1989 book Humans and Other Animals, saying that animals "have become reduced to mere appendages of computers and machines." The term relates the practices, organizations, and overall industry that turns animals into food and other commodities to the military–industrial complex.
Richard Twine later refined the concept, regarding it as the
"partly opaque and multiple set of networks and relationships between
the corporate (agricultural) sector, governments, and public and private
science. With economic, cultural, social and affective dimensions it
encompasses an extensive range of practices, technologies, images,
identities and markets." Twine also discusses the overlap between the AIC and other similar complexes, such as the prison–industrial complex, entertainment–industrial complex, and pharmaceutical–industrial complex. Sociologist David Nibert
defines the animal–industrial complex as "a massive network that
includes grain producers, ranching operations, slaughterhouse and
packaging firms, fast food and chain restaurants, and the state," which
he claims "has deep roots in world history."
The AIC essentially refers to the triple helix of influential,
powerful systems that control knowledge systems about meat production,
namely, the government, the corporate sphere, and the academy.
Although the origin of the animal–industrial complex can be traced back to the time when domestication of animals began, it was only since 1945 that the complex began to grow significantly under contemporary capitalism.Kim Stallwood claims that the animal–industrial complex is "an integral part of the neoliberal, transnational order of increasing privatization and decreasing government intervention, favouring transnational corporations and global capital."
According to Stallwood, two milestones mark the shift in human
attitudes toward animals that empowered the animal–industrial complex,
namely, Chicago and its stockyards and slaughterhouses from 1865 and the post–World War II developments such as intensive factory farms, industrial fishing, and xenotransplantation.
In the words of Nibert, the Chicago slaughterhouses were significant
economic powers of the early 20th century and were "famous for the
cruel, rapid-paced killing and disassembly of enormous numbers of
animals." To elucidate animal–industrial complex, Stallwood cites Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, which explicitly describes the mistreatment of animals during their lives until they end up at the slaughterhouse. He also quotes Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka, which compares treatment of animals with the Holocaust and explains how the disassembly of animals in the slaughterhouses inspired Henry Ford's assembling of cars in factories and how it further influenced Nazi Germany in building concentration camps and gas chambers.
According to Stallwood, the animal–industrial complex breeds
animals in the billions in order to make products and services for human
consumption, and all these animals are considered legal property of the
animal–industrial complex. The animal–industrial complex is said to
have transformed the already confused relationship between human and
non-human animals, significantly increasing the consumption and
threatening human survival, and the pervasive nature of the
animal–industrial complex is such that it evades attention.
Nibert argues that while it has its origins in the use of animals
during the establishment of agricultural societies, the
animal–industrial complex is ultimately "a predictable, insidious
outgrowth of the capitalist system with its penchant for continuous
expansion". According to Nibert, this complex is so destructive in its
pursuit of resources such as land and water to rear all of these animals
as a source of profit that it warrants comparisons to Attila the Hun. As the human populationgrows to a projected 9 billion by the middle of the century, meat production is expected to increase by 40%. Nibert further states,
The profound cultural devaluation
of other animals that permits the violence that underlies the animal
industrial complex is produced by far-reaching speciesist
socialization. For instance, the system of primary and secondary
education under the capitalist system largely indoctrinates young people
into the dominant societal beliefs and values, including a great deal
of procapitalist and speciesist ideology. The devalued status of other
animals is deeply ingrained; animals appear in schools merely as caged
“pets,” as dissection and vivisection subjects, and as lunch. On
television and in movies, the unworthiness of other animals is evidenced
by their virtual invisibility; when they do appear, they generally are
marginalized, vilified, or objectified. Not surprisingly, these and
numerous other sources of speciesism are so ideologically profound that
those who raise compelling moral objections to animal oppression largely
are dismissed, if not ridiculed.
Contributors to the 2013 book Animals and War, which linked critical animal studies and critical peace studies,
explored the connections between the animal–industrial complex and the
military–industrial complex, proposing and analysing the idea of a military-animal industrial complex.
The exploitation of animals, argues Colin Salter, is not necessary to
military–industrial complexes, but it is a foundational and central
element of the military–industrial complex as it actually exists. One of the aims of the book as a whole was to argue for the abolition of the military-animal industrial complex and all wars.
Referring to the animal–industrial complex intersectionally, both
Noske and Twine acknowledge the complex's negative impact on human
minorities and the environment. According to Kathleen Stachowski, the AIC "naturalizes the human as a consumer of other animals."
The enormity of the AIC, according to Stachowski, includes "its long
reach into our lives, and how well it has done its job normalizing
brutality toward the animals whose very existence is forgotten." She states that the corporate dairy industry,
the government, and schools forms the animal–industrial complex troika
of immense influence, which hides from the public's view the animal rights violations and cruelties happening within the dairy industry.
Scholars note that while critical animal theory acknowledges the
universities' position as centers of knowledge production, it also
states that the academy plays a problematic role of being a crucial
mechanism within the AIC.
Male chicks prepared to be killed
Borrowing from Dwight D. Eisenhower's
military–industrial complex warning, Stachowski states that the vast
and powerful AIC determines what children eat because people have failed
to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence" and that
Eisenhower's parallels are strikingly similar to the AIC in that the
complex involves "the very structure of our society" and completely
influences the society's economic, political, and even spiritual
spheres. Stachowski also states that the troika "hijacks" schoolchildren by promoting milk in the K-12 nutrition education curriculum and making them "eat the products of industrial animal production."
A part of the AIC, animal agriculture is the primary driver of climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss,
and of the crossing of almost every other planetary boundary, in
addition to killing more than 60 billion non-human land animals
annually, ultimately leading to the Holocene extinction, the only anthropogenic of all the mass extinctions in the planet's history.
This number excludes aquatic animals killed for food and non-food uses,
which amounts to about 103.6 billion annually, and also male chicks killed in the egg industry and marine animals killed as bycatch.
All told, around 166 to over 200 billion land and aquatic animals are
killed every year to provide humans with animal products for
consumption, which some vegans and animal rights activists, among them philosopher Steven Best and journalist Chris Hedges, have described as an "animal holocaust".
Animal research and vivisection,
another component of the AIC, is responsible to the immense suffering
of hundreds of millions of nonhuman animals annually, and the deaths of
at least 115 million. While the public is increasingly aware of this, chiefly due to animal advocacy, testaments of scientists, and growing direct evidence, the AIC lobbies against animal welfare regulation and animal rights activism.
One of the primary impacts of the animal–industrial complex is the commodification of nonhuman animals. In the book Education for Total Liberation,
Meneka Repka cites Barbara Noski as saying that the commodification of
nonhuman animals in food systems is directly linked to capitalist
systems that prioritize "monopolistically inclined financial interests"
over the well-being of humans, nonhumans, and the environment.
Richard Twine furthers this stating that "corporate influences have had
a direct interest through marketing, advertising, and flavour
manipulation in constructing the consumption of animal products as a
sensual material pleasure."
Parshwanatha, the 23rd Tirthankara, revived Jainism and ahimsa in the 9th century BCE, which led to a radical animal-rights movement in South Asia.
The c. 5th-century CE Tamil scholar Valluvar, in his Tirukkural, taught ahimsa and moral vegetarianism as personal virtues. The placard in this statue of Valluvar at an animal sanctuary in South India describes the Kural's teachings on ahimsa and non-killing, summing them up with the definition of veganism.
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which some, or all, animals are entitled to the possession of their own existence and that their most basic interests—such as the need to avoid suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. That is, all species of animals have the right to be treated as individuals, with their own desires and needs, rather than as unfeeling property.
Advocates for animal rights oppose the assignment of moral value
and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone—an
idea known as speciesism since 1970, when Richard D. Ryder adopted the term—arguing that it is a prejudice as irrational as any other.
They maintain that animals should no longer be viewed as property or
used as food, clothing, research subjects, entertainment, or beasts of
burden. Multiple cultural traditions around the world such as Jainism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Animism also espouse some forms of animal rights.
In parallel to the debate about moral rights, law schools in North America now often teach animal law, and several legal scholars, such as Steven M. Wise and Gary L. Francione, support the extension of basic legal rights and personhood to non-human animals. The animals most often considered in arguments for personhood are hominids.
Some animal-rights academics support this because it would break
through the species barrier, but others oppose it because it predicates
moral value on mental complexity, rather than on sentience alone. As of November 2019, 29 countries had enacted bans on hominoid experimentation; Argentina has granted a captive orangutan basic human rights since 2014.
Outside the order of primates, animal-rights discussions most often address the status of mammals (compare charismatic megafauna). Other animals (considered less sentient) have gained less attention; insects relatively little
(outside Jainism), and animal-like bacteria (despite their overwhelming numbers) hardly any.
Critics of animal rights argue that nonhuman animals are unable to enter into a social contract, and thus cannot be possessors of rights, a view summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton (1944-2020), who writes that only humans have duties, and therefore only humans have rights. Another argument, associated with the utilitarian tradition, maintains that animals may be used as resources so long as there is no unnecessary suffering;
animals may have some moral standing, but they are inferior in status
to human beings, and any interests they have may be overridden, though
what counts as "necessary" suffering or a legitimate sacrifice of
interests can vary considerably. Certain forms of animal-rights activism, such as the destruction of fur farms and of animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front, have attracted criticism, including from within the animal-rights movement itself, and have prompted reaction from the U.S. Congress with the enactment of laws, including the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, allowing the prosecution of this sort of activity as terrorism.
Aristotle argued that animals lacked reason (logos), and placed humans at the top of the natural world.
Aristotle stated that animals lacked reason (logos), and placed
humans at the top of the natural world, yet the respect for animals in
ancient Greece was very high. Some animals were considered divine, e.g.
dolphins.
In the Book of Genesis 1:26 (5th or 6th century BCE), Adam
is given "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Dominion need not entail
property rights, but it has been interpreted, by some, over the
centuries to imply "ownership".
The philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 BCE) urged respect for animals, believing that human and nonhuman souls were reincarnated from human to animal, and vice versa. Against this, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) said that nonhuman animals had no interests of their own, ranking them far below humans in the Great Chain of Being.
He was the first to create a taxonomy of animals; he perceived some
similarities between humans and other species, but stated for the most
part that animals lacked reason (logos), reasoning (logismos), thought (dianoia, nous), and belief (doxa).
Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE), one of Aristotle's pupils, argued that animals also had reasoning (logismos) and opposed eating meat on the grounds that it robbed them of life and was therefore unjust. Theophrastus did not prevail; Richard Sorabji
writes that current attitudes to animals can be traced to the heirs of
the Western Christian tradition selecting the hierarchy that Aristotle
sought to preserve.
Plutarch (1st century CE), in his Life of Cato the Elder,
comments that while law and justice are applicable strictly to men
only, beneficence and charity towards beasts is characteristic of a
gentle heart. This is intended as a correction and advance over the
merely utilitarian treatment of animals and slaves by Cato himself. The Moralia, traditionally ascribed to Plutarch, advances arguments for cognition in animals in the essays On the Cleverness of Animals and Beasts are Rational, and advocates moral vegetarianism in On the Eating of Flesh.
Tom Beauchamp
(2011) writes that the most extensive account in antiquity of how
animals should be treated was written by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry (234–c. 305 CE), in his On Abstinence from Animal Food, and On Abstinence from Killing Animals.
17th century: Animals as automata
Early animal protection laws in Europe
According to Richard D. Ryder,
the first known animal protection legislation in Europe was passed in
Ireland in 1635. It prohibited pulling wool off sheep, and the attaching
of ploughs to horses' tails, referring to "the cruelty used to beasts." In 1641, the first legal code to protect domestic animals in North America was passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's constitution was based on The Body of Liberties by the Reverend Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652), an English lawyer, Puritan
clergyman, and University of Cambridge graduate. Ward's list of "rites"
included rite 92: "No man shall exercise any Tirrany or Crueltie toward
any brute Creature which are usually kept for man's use." Historian Roderick Nash
(1989) writes that, at the height of René Descartes' influence in
Europe—and his view that animals were simply automata—it is significant
that the New Englanders created a law that implied animals were not
unfeeling machines.
The Puritans passed animal protection legislation in England too.
Kathleen Kete writes that animal welfare laws were passed in 1654 as
part of the ordinances of the Protectorate—the government under Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), which lasted from 1653 to 1659, following the English Civil War. Cromwell disliked blood sports, which included cockfighting, cock throwing, dog fighting, bull baiting
and bull running, said to tenderize the meat. These could be seen in
villages and fairgrounds, and became associated with idleness,
drunkenness, and gambling. Kete writes that the Puritans interpreted the
biblical dominion of man over animals to mean responsible stewardship,
rather than ownership. The opposition to blood sports became part of
what was seen as Puritan interference in people's lives, and the animal
protection laws were overturned during the Restoration, when Charles II was returned to the throne in 1660.
René Descartes
The great influence of the 17th century was the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), whose Meditations (1641) informed attitudes about animals well into the 20th century. Writing during the scientific revolution, Descartes proposed a mechanistic theory of the universe, the aim of which was to show that the world could be mapped out without allusion to subjective experience. His mechanistic approach was extended to the issue of animal consciousness. Mind, for Descartes, was a thing apart from the physical universe, a separate substance, linking human beings to the mind of God. The nonhuman, on the other hand, were for Descartes nothing but complex automata, with no souls, minds, or reason.
Treatment of animals as man's duty towards himself
John Locke, Immanuel Kant
Against Descartes, the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) commented, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693), that animals did have feelings, and that unnecessary cruelty
toward them was morally wrong, but that the right not to be harmed
adhered either to the animal's owner, or to the human being who was
being damaged by being cruel. Discussing the importance of preventing
children from tormenting animals, he wrote: "For the custom of
tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds
even towards men."
Locke's position echoed that of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Paul Waldau writes that the argument can be found at 1 Corinthians (9:9–10), when Paul
asks: "Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not speak entirely
for our sake? It was written for our sake." Christian philosophers
interpreted this to mean that humans had no direct duty to nonhuman
animals, but had a duty only to protect them from the effects of
engaging in cruelty.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804), following Aquinas, opposed the idea that humans have
direct duties toward nonhumans. For Kant, cruelty to animals was wrong
only because it was bad for humankind. He argued in 1785 that "cruelty
to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it
deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a
natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued in Discourse on Inequality (1754) for the inclusion of animals in natural law on the grounds of sentience:
"By this method also we put an end to the time-honored disputes
concerning the participation of animals in natural law: for it is clear
that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognize
that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in
consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought
to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of
obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am
bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they
are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality,
being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the latter at
least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by the former."
In his treatise on education, Emile, or On Education
(1762), he encouraged parents to raise their children on a vegetarian
diet. He believed that the food of the culture a child was raised
eating, played an important role in the character and disposition they
would develop as adults. "For however one tries to explain the practice,
it is certain that great meat-eaters are usually more cruel and
ferocious than other men. This has been recognized at all times and in
all places. The English are noted for their cruelty while the Gaures are
the gentlest of men. All savages are cruel, and it is not their customs
that tend in this direction; their cruelty is the result of their
food."
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham: "The time will come, when humanity will extend its mantle over every thing which breathes."
Four years later, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although opposed to the concept of natural rights,
argued that it was the ability to suffer that should be the benchmark
of how we treat other beings. Bentham states that the capacity for
suffering gives the right to equal consideration; equal consideration is
that the interests of any being affected by an action are to be
considered and have the equal interest of any other being. If
rationality were the criterion, he argued, many humans, including
infants and the disabled, would also have to be treated as though they
were things.
He did not conclude that humans and nonhumans had equal moral
significance, but argued that the latter's interests should be taken
into account. He wrote in 1789, just as African slaves were being freed by the French:
The French have already discovered
that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be
abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day
come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum
are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to
the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?
Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a
full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well
as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a
month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail?
the question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Badger baiting, one of the rural sports campaigners sought to ban from 1800 onwards.
The 19th century saw an explosion of interest in animal protection,
particularly in England. Debbie Legge and Simon Brooman write that the
educated classes became concerned about attitudes toward the old, the
needy, children, and the insane, and that this concern was extended to
nonhumans. Before the 19th century, there had been prosecutions for poor
treatment of animals, but only because of the damage to the animal as
property. In 1793, for example, John Cornish was found not guilty of
maiming a horse after pulling the animal's tongue out; the judge ruled
that Cornish could be found guilty only if there was evidence of malice
toward the owner.
From 1800 onwards, there were several attempts in England to
introduce animal protection legislation. The first was a bill against bull baiting, introduced in April 1800 by a Scottish MP, Sir William Pulteney (1729–1805). It was opposed inter alia
on the grounds that it was anti-working class, and was defeated by two
votes. Another attempt was made in 1802, this time opposed by the
Secretary at War, William Windham
(1750–1810), who said the Bill was supported by Methodists and Jacobins
who wished to "destroy the Old English character, by the abolition of
all rural sports."
In 1809, Lord Erskine
(1750-1823) introduced a bill to protect cattle and horses from
malicious wounding, wanton cruelty, and beating. He told the House of
Lords that animals had protection only as property: "The animals themselves are without protection--the law regards them not substantively--they have no rights!"
Erskine in his parliamentary speech combined the vocabulary of animal
rights and trusteeship with a theological appeal included in the Bill's
preamble to opposing cruelty.
The Bill was passed by the Lords, but was opposed in the Commons by
Windham, who said it would be used against the "lower orders" when the
real culprits would be their employers.
In 1821, the Treatment of Horses bill was introduced by Colonel Richard Martin
(1754–1834), MP for Galway in Ireland, but it was lost among laughter
in the House of Commons that the next thing would be rights for asses,
dogs, and cats.
Nicknamed "Humanity Dick" by George IV, Martin finally succeeded in
1822 with his "Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill"—or "Martin's
Act", as it became known—which was the world's first major piece of
animal protection legislation. It was given royal assent on June 22 that year as An Act to prevent the cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle,
and made it an offence, punishable by fines up to five pounds or two
months imprisonment, to "beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare,
gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle."
Legge and Brooman argue that the success of the Bill lay in the
personality of "Humanity Dick", who was able to shrug off the ridicule
from the House of Commons, and whose sense of humour managed to capture
the House's attention. It was Martin himself who brought the first prosecution under the Act, when he had Bill Burns, a costermonger—a
street seller of fruit—arrested for beating a donkey, and paraded the
animal's injuries before a reportedly astonished court. Burns was fined,
and newspapers and music halls were full of jokes about how Martin had
relied on the testimony of a donkey.
Other countries followed suit in passing legislation or making
decisions that favoured animals. In 1822, the courts in New York ruled
that wanton cruelty to animals was a misdemeanor at common law. In France in 1850, Jacques Philippe Delmas de Grammont succeeded in having the Loi Grammont
passed, outlawing cruelty against domestic animals, and leading to
years of arguments about whether bulls could be classed as domestic in
order to ban bullfighting. The state of Washington followed in 1859, New York in 1866, California in 1868, and Florida in 1889. In England, a series of amendments extended the reach of the 1822 Act, which became the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, outlawing cockfighting, baiting, and dog fighting, followed by another amendment in 1849, and again in 1876.
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
At
a meeting of the Society instituted for the purpose of preventing
cruelty to animals, on the 16th day of June 1824, at Old Slaughter's
Coffee House, St Martin's Lane: T F Buxton Esqr, MP, in the Chair,
It was resolved:
That a committee be appointed to superintend the Publication of
Tracts, Sermons, and similar modes of influencing public opinion, to
consist of the following Gentlemen:
That a Committee be appointed to adopt measures for Inspecting
the Markets and Streets of the Metropolis, the Slaughter Houses, the
conduct of Coachmen, etc.- etc, consisting of the following Gentlemen:
T F Buxton Esqr. MP, Richard Martin Esqr., MP, Sir James Graham,
L B Allen Esqr., C C Wilson Esqr., Jno. Brogden Esqr., Alderman
Brydges, A E Kendal Esqr., E Lodge Esqr., J Martin Esqr. T G Meymott
Esqr.
A. Broome,
Honorary Secretary
Richard Martin soon realized that magistrates did not take the Martin
Act seriously, and that it was not being reliably enforced. Martin's
Act was supported by various social reformers who were not
parliamentarians and an informal network had gathered around the efforts
of Reverend Arthur Broome
(1779-1837) to create a voluntary organisation that would promote
kindness toward animals. Broome canvassed opinions in letters that were
published or summarised in various periodicals in 1821.
After the passage of Richard Martin's anti-cruelty to cattle bill in
1822, Broome attempted to form a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals that would bring together the patronage of persons who were
of social rank and committed to social reforms. Broome organised and
chaired a meeting of sympathisers in November 1822, where it was agreed
that a Society should be created and at which Broome was named its
Secretary, but the attempt was short-lived. In 1824, Broome arranged a new meeting in Old Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane,
a London café frequented by artists and actors. The group met on June
16, 1824, and included a number of MPs: Richard Martin, Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), Sir Thomas Buxton (1786–1845), William Wilberforce (1759–1833), and Sir James Graham (1792–1861), who had been an MP, and who became one again in 1826.
They decided to form a "Society instituted for the purpose of preventing cruelty to animals"; the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as it became known. It determined to send men to inspect slaughterhouses, Smithfield Market, where livestock had been sold since the 10th century, and to look into the treatment of horses by coachmen.
The Society became the Royal Society in 1840, when it was granted a
royal charter by Queen Victoria, herself strongly opposed to vivisection.
From 1824 onwards, several books were published, analyzing animal rights issues, rather than protection alone. Lewis Gompertz (1783/4–1865), one of the men who attended the first meeting of the SPCA, published Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes
(1824), arguing that every living creature, human and nonhuman, has
more right to the use of its own body than anyone else has to use it,
and that our duty to promote happiness applies equally to all beings. Edward Nicholson (1849–1912), head of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, argued in Rights of an Animal
(1879) that animals have the same natural right to life and liberty
that human beings do, disregarding Descartes' mechanistic view—or what
he called the "Neo-Cartesian snake"—that they lack consciousness. Other writers of the time who explored whether animals might have natural (or moral) rights were Edward Payson Evans (1831–1917), John Muir (1838–1914), and J. Howard Moore (1862–1916), an American zoologist and author of The Universal Kinship (1906) and The New Ethics (1907).
Schopenhauer argued in 1839 that the view of cruelty as wrong only because it hardens humans was "revolting and abominable".
The development in England of the concept of animal rights was strongly supported by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788–1860). He wrote that Europeans were "awakening more and more to a
sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is
being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into
existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man."
He stopped short of advocating vegetarianism, arguing that, so
long as an animal's death was quick, men would suffer more by not eating
meat than animals would suffer by being eaten. Schopenhauer also theorized that the reason people succumbed to the "unnatural diet"
of meat-eating was because of the unnatural, cold climate they
emigrated to and the necessity of meat for survival in such a climate,
for fruits and vegetables could not be dependably cultivated at those
times.
He applauded the animal protection movement in England—"To the honor,
then, of the English, be it said that they are the first people who
have, in downright earnest, extended the protecting arm of the law to
animals." He also argued against the dominant Kantian idea that animal cruelty is wrong only insofar as it brutalizes humans:
Thus, because Christian morality
leaves animals out of account ... they are at once outlawed in
philosophical morals; they are mere "things," mere means to any
ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting,
coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as
they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality
that is worthy of pariahs, chandalas, and mlechchhas, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing ...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The English poet and dramatist Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) wrote two essays advocating a vegetarian diet, for ethical and health reasons: A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) and On the Vegetable System of Diet (1829, posth.).
Isabella Beeton
Isabella Beeton (1836-1865) the English reporter, editor and author of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
was an early advocate against force-fed poultry and caged hens. About
the former, she wrote that force-feeding, was a process that "may
produce a handsome-looking bird, and it may weigh enough to satisfy the
whim or avarice of its stuffer; but, when before the fire, it will
reveal the cruel treatment to which it has been subjected, and will weep
a drippingpan-ful of fat tears. You will never find heart enough to
place such a grief-worn guest at the head of your table".
About the necessity for free-range rather than caged hens, she wrote:
"We are no advocates for converting
the domestic fowl into a cage-bird. We have known amateur
fowl-keepers...coop up a male bird and three or four hens in an ordinary
egg-chest placed on its side, and with the front closely barred with
iron hooping! This system will not do. Every animal, from man himself to
the guinea-pig, must have what is vulgarly, but truly, known as
“elbow-room;” and it must be self-evident how emphatically this rule
applies to winged animals. It may be urged, in the case of domestic
fowls, that from constant disuse, and from clipping and plucking, and
other sorts of maltreatment, their wings can hardly be regarded as
instruments of flight; we maintain, however, that you may pluck a fowl's
wing-joints as bare as a pumpkin, but you will not erase from his
memory that he is a fowl, and that his proper sphere is the open air. If
he likewise reflects that he is an ill-used fowl — a prison-bird — he
will then come to the conclusion, that there is not the least use, under
such circumstances, for his existence; and you must admit that the
decision is only logical and natural."
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the English philosopher, also argued that utilitarianism must take animals into account, writing in 1864:
"Nothing is more natural to human beings, nor, up to a certain point in
cultivation, more universal, than to estimate the pleasures and pains
of others as deserving of regard exactly in proportion to their likeness
to ourselves. ... Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals
than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And
if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the
slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let
the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned."
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin wrote in 1837: "Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind?"
James Rachels writes that Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) On the Origin of Species (1859)—which presented the theory of evolution by natural selection—revolutionized
the way humans viewed their relationship with other species. Not only
did human beings have a direct kinship with other animals, but the
latter had social, mental and moral lives too, Darwin argued. He wrote in his Notebooks
(1837): "Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to
consider our equals. – Do not slave holders wish to make the black man
other kind?" Later, in The Descent of Man
(1871), he argued that "There is no fundamental difference between man
and the higher mammals in their mental faculties", attributing to
animals the power of reason, decision making, memory, sympathy, and
imagination.
Rachels writes that Darwin noted the moral implications of the
cognitive similarities, arguing that "humanity to the lower animals" was
one of the "noblest virtues with which man is endowed." He was strongly
opposed to any kind of cruelty to animals, including setting traps. He
wrote in a letter that he supported vivisection
for "real investigations on physiology; but not for mere damnable and
detestable curiosity. It is a subject which makes me sick with
horror ..." In 1875, he testified before a Royal Commission on
Vivisection, lobbying for a bill to protect both the animals used in
vivisection, and the study of physiology. Rachels writes that the animal
rights advocates of the day, such as Frances Power Cobbe, did not see
Darwin as an ally.
American SPCA, Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford
Anna Kingsford, one of the first English women to graduate in medicine, published The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), advocating vegetarianism.
An early proposal for legal rights for animals came from a group of citizens in Ashtabula County, Ohio. Around 1844, the group proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution stating that if slaves from slave states
were receiving representation as 3/5 of a person on the basis that they
were animal property, all the animal property of the free states should
receive representation also.
The first animal protection group in the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), was founded by Henry Bergh
in April 1866. Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to
a diplomatic post in Russia, and had been disturbed by the mistreatment
of animals he witnessed there. He consulted with the president of the
RSPCA in London, and returned to the United States to speak out against
bullfights, cockfights, and the beating of horses. He created a
"Declaration of the Rights of Animals", and in 1866 persuaded the New
York state legislature to pass anti-cruelty legislation and to grant the
ASPCA the authority to enforce it.
In 1875, the Irish social reformer Frances Power Cobbe
(1822–1904) founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to
Vivisection, the world's first organization opposed to animal research,
which became the National Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1880, the English feminist Anna Kingsford
(1846–1888) became one of the first English women to graduate in
medicine, after studying for her degree in Paris, and the only student
at the time to do so without having experimented on animals. She
published The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), advocating
vegetarianism, and in the same year founded the Food Reform Society. She
was also vocal in her opposition to experimentation on animals. In 1898, Cobbe set up the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection,
with which she campaigned against the use of dogs in research, coming
close to success with the 1919 Dogs (Protection) Bill, which almost
became law.
Ryder writes that, as the interest in animal protection grew in
the late 1890s, attitudes toward animals among scientists began to
harden. They embraced the idea that what they saw as anthropomorphism—the
attribution of human qualities to nonhumans—was unscientific. Animals
had to be approached as physiological entities only, as Ivan Pavlov
wrote in 1927, "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as
to the existence of any possible subjective states." It was a position
that hearkened back to Descartes in the 17th century, that nonhumans
were purely mechanical, with no rationality and perhaps even no
consciousness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Avoiding utilitarianism, Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) found other reasons to defend animals. He wrote that "The
sight of blind suffering is the spring of the deepest emotion."
He once wrote: "For man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies,
bull-fights, and crucifixions hath he hitherto been happiest on earth;
and when he invented his hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth." Throughout his writings, he speaks of the human being as an animal.
Henry Salt
In 1894, Henry Salt (1851–1939), a former master at Eton, who had set up the Humanitarian League to lobby for a ban on hunting the year before, published Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress. He wrote that the object of the essay was to "set the principle of animals' rights on a consistent and intelligible footing." Concessions to the demands for jus animalium had been made grudgingly to date, he wrote, with an eye on the interests of animals qua property, rather than as rights bearers:
Even the leading advocates of
animal rights seem to have shrunk from basing their claim on the only
argument which can ultimately be held to be a really sufficient one—the
assertion that animals, as well as men, though, of course, to a far less
extent than men, are possessed of a distinctive individuality, and,
therefore, are in justice entitled to live their lives with a due
measure of that "restricted freedom" to which Herbert Spencer alludes.
He argued that there was no point in claiming rights for animals if
those rights were subordinated to human desire, and took issue with the
idea that the life of a human might have more moral worth. "[The] notion
of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class
of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian
thought of the present day—it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at
variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and
absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full
realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to
the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a 'great
gulf' fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond
of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal
brotherhood."
In 1902, Lizzy Lind af Hageby
(1878–1963), a Swedish feminist, and a friend, Lisa Shartau, traveled
to England to study medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women,
intending to learn enough to become authoritative anti-vivisection
campaigners. In the course of their studies, they witnessed several
animal experiments, and published the details as The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology
(1903). Their allegations included that they had seen a brown terrier
dog dissected while conscious, which prompted angry denials from the
researcher, William Bayliss, and his colleagues. After Stephen Coleridge of the National Anti-Vivisection Society accused Bayliss of having violated the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, Bayliss sued and won, convincing a court that the animal had been anesthetized as required by the Act.
In response, anti-vivisection campaigners commissioned a statue
of the dog to be erected in Battersea Park in 1906, with the plaque:
"Men and Women of England, how long shall these Things be?" The statue
caused uproar among medical students, leading to frequent vandalism of
the statue and the need for a 24-hour police guard. The affair
culminated in riots in 1907 when 1,000 medical students clashed with
police, suffragettes and trade unionists in Trafalgar Square. Battersea
Council removed the statue from the park under cover of darkness two
years later.
Coral Lansbury (1985) and Hilda Kean
(1998) write that the significance of the affair lay in the
relationships that formed in support of the "Brown Dog Done to Death",
which became a symbol of the oppression the women's suffrage movement
felt at the hands of the male political and medical establishment. Kean
argues that both sides saw themselves as heirs to the future. The
students saw the women and trade unionists as representatives of
anti-science sentimentality, and the women saw themselves as
progressive, with the students and their teachers belonging to a
previous age.
Members of the English Vegetarian Society who avoided the use of eggs
and animal milk in the 19th and early 20th century were known as strict
vegetarians. The International Vegetarian Union cites an article
informing readers of alternatives to shoe leather in the Vegetarian
Society's magazine in 1851 as evidence of the existence of a group that
sought to avoid animal products
entirely. There was increasing unease within the Society from the start
of the 20th century onwards with regards to egg and milk consumption,
and in 1923 its magazine wrote that the "ideal position for vegetarians
is [complete] abstinence from animal products."
Mahatma Gandhi
(1869–1948) argued in 1931 before a meeting of the Society in London
that vegetarianism should be pursued in the interests of animals, and
not only as a human health issue. He met both Henry Salt and Anna
Kingsford, and read Salt's A Plea for Vegetarianism (1880). Salt wrote in the pamphlet that "a Vegetarian is still regarded, in ordinary society, as little better than a madman." In 1944, several members, led by Donald Watson
(1910–2005), decided to break from the Vegetarian Society over the
issue of egg and milk use. Watson coined the term "vegan" for those
whose diet included no animal products, and they formed the British Vegan Society on November 1 that year.
On coming to power in January 1933, the Nazi Party passed a comprehensive set of animal protection laws. Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax
wrote that the Nazis tried to abolish the distinction between humans
and animals, to the point where many people were regarded as less
valuable than animals. In April 1933 the Nazis passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals; one of their targets was kosher slaughter. In November the Tierschutzgesetz, or animal protection law, was introduced, with Adolf Hitler announcing an end to animal cruelty: "Im neuen Reich darf es keine Tierquälerei mehr geben." ("In the new Reich, no more animal cruelty will be allowed.") It was followed in July 1934 by the Reichsjagdgesetz, prohibiting hunting; in July 1935 by the Naturschutzgesetz,
environmental legislation; in November 1937 by a law regulating animal
transport in cars; and in September 1938 by a similar law dealing with
animals on trains. Hitler was a vegetarian in the later years of his life; several members of his inner circle, including Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, adopted some form of vegetarianism. By most accounts their vegetarianism was not as strict as Hitler's.
Increase in animal use
Despite
the proliferation of animal protection legislation, animals still had
no legal rights. Debbie Legge writes that existing legislation was very
much tied to the idea of human interests, whether protecting human
sensibilities by outlawing cruelty, or protecting property rights by
making sure animals were not harmed. The over-exploitation of fishing
stocks, for example, is viewed as harming the environment for people;
the hunting of animals to extinction means that humans in the future
will derive no enjoyment from them; poaching results in financial loss
to the owner, and so on.
Notwithstanding the interest in animal welfare of the previous
century, the situation for animals deteriorated in the 20th century,
particularly after the Second World War. This was in part because of the
increase in the numbers used in animal research—300 in the UK in 1875,
19,084 in 1903, and 2.8 million in 2005 (50–100 million worldwide), and a
modern annual estimated range of 10 million to upwards of 100 million
in the US—but
mostly because of the industrialization of farming, which saw billions
of animals raised and killed for food on a scale considered impossible
before the war.
In the early 1960s in England, support for animal rights began to coalesce around the issue of blood sports, particularly hunting deer, foxes,
and otters using dogs, an aristocratic and middle-class English
practice, stoutly defended in the name of protecting rural traditions.
The psychologist Richard D. Ryder – who became involved with the animal rights movement in the late 1960s – writes that the new chair of the League Against Cruel Sports tried in 1963 to steer it away from confronting members of the hunt, which triggered the formation that year of a direct action
breakaway group, the Hunt Saboteurs Association. This was set up by a
journalist, John Prestige, who had witnessed a pregnant deer being
chased into a village and killed by the Devon and Somerset Staghounds.
The practice of sabotaging hunts (for example, by misleading the dogs
with scents or horns) spread throughout south-east England, particularly
around university towns, leading to violent confrontations when the
huntsmen attacked the "sabs".
The controversy spread to the RSPCA, which had grown away from
its radical roots to become a conservative group with charity status and
royal patronage. It had failed to speak out against hunting, and indeed
counted huntsmen among its members. As with the League Against Cruel
Sports, this position gave rise to a splinter group, the RSPCA Reform
Group, which sought to radicalize the organization, leading to chaotic
meetings of the group's ruling Council, and successful (though
short-lived) efforts to change it from within by electing to the Council
members who would argue from an animal rights perspective, and force
the RSPCA to address issues such as hunting, factory farming, and animal
experimentation. Ryder himself was elected to the Council in 1971, and
served as its chair from 1977 to 1979.
The same period saw writers and academics begin to speak out again in favor of animal rights. Ruth Harrison published Animal Machines (1964), an influential critique of factory farming, and on October 10, 1965, the novelist Brigid Brophy had an article, "The Rights of Animals", published in The Sunday Times. She wrote:
The relationship of homo sapiens
to the other animals is one of unremitting exploitation. We employ
their work; we eat and wear them. We exploit them to serve our
superstitions: whereas we used to sacrifice them to our gods and tear
out their entrails in order to foresee the future, we now sacrifice them
to science, and experiment on their entrails in the hope—or on the mere
off chance—that we might thereby see a little more clearly into the
present ... To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should
have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the
immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally
incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of
animals.
Robert Garner
writes that Harrison's book and Brophy's article led to an explosion of
interest in the relationship between humans and nonhumans.
In particular, Brophy's article was discovered in or around 1969 by a
group of postgraduate philosophy students at the University of Oxford,
Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch (husband and wife from Canada), John
Harris, and David Wood, now known as the Oxford Group. They decided to put together a symposium to discuss the theory of animal rights.
Around the same time, Richard Ryder wrote several letters to The Daily Telegraph
criticizing animal experimentation, based on incidents he had witnessed
in laboratories. The letters, published in April and May 1969, were
seen by Brigid Brophy, who put Ryder in touch with the Godlovitches and
Harris. Ryder also started distributing pamphlets in Oxford protesting
against experiments on animals; it was in one of these pamphlets in 1970
that he coined the term "speciesism" to describe the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the protections offered to humans.
He subsequently became a contributor to the Godlovitches' symposium, as
did Harrison and Brophy, and it was published in 1971 as Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans.
In 1970, over lunch in Oxford with fellow student Richard Keshen, a vegetarian, Australian philosopher Peter Singer
came to believe that, by eating animals, he was engaging in the
oppression of other species. Keshen introduced Singer to the
Godlovitches, and in 1973 Singer reviewed their book for The New York Review of Books. In the review, he used the term "animal liberation", writing:
We are familiar with Black
Liberation, Gay Liberation, and a variety of other movements. With
Women's Liberation some thought we had come to the end of the road.
Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last form
of discrimination that is universally accepted and practiced without
pretense ... But one should always be wary of talking of "the last
remaining form of discrimination." ... Animals, Men and Morals is a manifesto for an Animal Liberation movement.
Singer pointed out that claiming animal rights in particular has
nothing to do with "animal affection." Just as claiming race or gender
equality does not mean that they are "black lovers" or "female lovers,"
they say, "there is no reason to assume that those who strive to improve
animal conditions should love animals." You can do it or don't have to
do it because it's your taste. However, the issue of rights is not the
realm of likes and dislikes, but the realm of parity. This argument
spread throughout American society the discussion of animal rights,
which was then only among "animal lovers."
On the strength of his review, The New York Review of Books took the unusual step of commissioning a book from Singer on the subject, published in 1975 as Animal Liberation,
now one of the animal rights movement's canonical texts. Singer based
his arguments on the principle of utilitarianism – the view, in its
simplest form, that an act is right if it leads to the "greatest
happiness of the greatest number", a phrase first used in 1776 by Jeremy
Bentham. He argued in favor of the equal consideration of interests,
the position that there are no grounds to suppose that a violation of
the basic interests of a human—for example, an interest in not
suffering—is different in any morally significant way from a violation
of the basic interests of a nonhuman. Singer used the term "speciesism" in the book, citing Ryder, and it stuck, becoming an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989.
The book's publication triggered a groundswell of scholarly interest in animal rights. Richard Ryder's Victims of Science: The Use of Animals in Research (1975) appeared, followed by Andrew Linzey's Animal Rights: A Christian Perspective (1976), and Stephen R. L. Clark's The Moral Status of Animals
(1977). A Conference on Animal Rights was organized by Ryder and Linzey
at Trinity College, Cambridge, in August 1977. This was followed by Mary Midgley's Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978), then Animal Rights–A Symposium (1979), which included the papers delivered to the Cambridge conference.
From 1982 onwards, a series of articles by Tom Regan led to his The Case for Animal Rights
(1984), in which he argues that nonhuman animals are
"subjects-of-a-life", and therefore possessors of moral rights, a work
regarded as a key text in animal rights theory.
Regan wrote in 2001 that philosophers had written more about animal
rights in the previous 20 years than in the 2,000 years before that. Garner writes that Charles Magel's bibliography, Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights (1989), contains 10 pages of philosophical material on animals up to 1970, but 13 pages between 1970 and 1989 alone.
In 1971, a law student, Ronnie Lee,
formed a branch of the Hunt Saboteurs Association in Luton, later
calling it the Band of Mercy after a 19th-century RSPCA youth group. The
Band attacked hunters' vehicles by slashing tires and breaking windows,
calling it "active compassion". In November 1973, they engaged in their
first act of arson when they set fire to a Hoechst Pharmaceuticals
research laboratory, claiming responsibility as a "nonviolent guerilla
organization dedicated to the liberation of animals from all forms of
cruelty and persecution at the hands of mankind."
Lee and another activist were sentenced to three years in prison
in 1974, paroled after 12 months. In 1976, Lee brought together the
remaining Band of Mercy activists along with some fresh faces to start a
leaderless resistance movement, calling it the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). ALF activists see themselves as a modern Underground Railroad, passing animals removed from farms and laboratories to sympathetic veterinarians, safe houses and sanctuaries.
Some activists also engage in threats, intimidation, and arson, acts
that have lost the movement sympathy in mainstream public opinion.
The decentralized model of activism is frustrating for law
enforcement organizations, who find the networks difficult to
infiltrate, because they tend to be organized around friends.
In 2005, the US Department of Homeland Security indicated how seriously
it takes the ALF when it included them in a list of domestic terrorist
threats.
The tactics of some of the more determined ALF activists are anathema
to many animal rights advocates, such as Singer, who regard the movement
as something that should occupy the moral high ground. ALF activists
respond to the criticism with the argument that, as Ingrid Newkirk puts it, "Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out."
From the 1980s through to the early 2000s there was an increased
level of violence by animal rights extremist groups directed at
individuals and institutions associated with animal research. Activist groups involved included the Justice Department, the Animal Rights Militia and SHAC.
In the 1980s, animal rights became associated with punksubculture and ideologies, particularly straight edgehardcore punk in the United States and anarcho-punk in the United Kingdom. This association continues on into the 21st century, as evidenced by the prominence of vegan punk events such as Fluff Fest in Europe.
Henry Spira
(1927–1998), a former seaman and civil rights activist, became the most
notable of the new animal advocates in the United States. A proponent
of gradual change, he formed Animal Rights International in 1974, and
introduced the idea of "reintegrative shaming", whereby a relationship
is formed between a group of animal rights advocates and a corporation
they see as misusing animals, with a view to obtaining concessions or
halting a practice. It is a strategy that has been widely adopted,
including the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Spira's first campaign was in opposition to the American Museum of Natural History
in 1976, where cats were being experimented on, research that he
persuaded them to stop. In 1980 he convinced the cosmetics company Revlon to stop using the Draize test,
which involves toxicity tests on the skin or in the eyes of animals. He
took out a full-page ad in several newspapers, featuring a rabbit with
sticking plaster over the eyes, and the caption, "How many rabbits does
Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" Revlon stopped using animals for
cosmetics testing, donated money to help set up the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, and was followed by other leading cosmetics companies.
21st century: developments
In 1999, New Zealand passed a new Animal Welfare Act that had the effect of banning experiments on "non-human hominids".
Also in 1999, Public Law 106-152 (Title 18, Section 48) was put
into action in the United States. This law makes it a felony to create,
sell, or possess videos showing animal cruelty with the intention of
profiting financially from them.
However, there have been strong arguments that this law is
unconstitutional in light of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence
concerning privacy and sex.
as well as the fact that the U.S. government may not criminalize mere
possession of obscene materials in the privacy of one's own home.
In 2005, the Austrian Parliament banned experiments on apes, unless they are performed in the interests of the individual ape.
Also in Austria, the Supreme Court ruled in January 2008 that a
chimpanzee (called Matthew Hiasl Pan by those advocating for his personhood)
was not a person, after the Association Against Animal Factories sought
personhood status for him because his custodians had gone bankrupt. The
chimpanzee had been captured as a baby in Sierra Leone
in 1982, then smuggled to Austria to be used in pharmaceutical
experiments, but was discovered by customs officials when he arrived in
the country, and was taken to a shelter instead. He was kept there for
25 years, until the group that ran the shelter went bankrupt in 2007.
Donors offered to help him, but under Austrian law only a person can
receive personal gifts, so any money sent to support him would be lost
to the shelter's bankruptcy. The Association appealed the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights.
The lawyer proposing the chimpanzee's personhood asked the court to
appoint a legal guardian for him and to grant him four rights: the right
to life, limited freedom of movement, personal safety, and the right to
claim property.
In June 2008, a committee of Spain's national legislature became
the first to vote for a resolution to extend limited rights to nonhumanprimates. The parliamentary Environment Committee recommended giving chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans the right not to be used in medical experiments or in circuses, and recommended making it illegal to kill apes, except in self-defense, based upon the rights recommended by the Great Ape Project. The committee's proposal has not yet been enacted into law.
From 2009 onwards, several countries outlawed the use of some or all animals in circuses, starting with Bolivia, and followed by several countries in Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, and Singapore.
In 2010, the regional government in Catalonia passed a motion to outlaw bull fighting, the first such ban in Spain. In 2011, PETA sued SeaWorld over the captivity of five orcas in San Diego and Orlando, arguing that the whales were being treated as slaves. It was the first time the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, was cited in court to protect nonhuman rights. A federal judge dismissed the case in February 2012.
Petitions for habeas corpus
In 2015, the Nonhuman Rights Project
(NhPR) filed three lawsuits in New York State on behalf of four captive
chimpanzees, demanding that the courts grant them the right to bodily
liberty via the writ of habeas corpus and immediately send them to a sanctuary affiliated with the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance. All of the petitions were denied. In the case
involving the chimpanzees Hercules and Leo, Justice Barbara Jaffe did
not immediately dismiss the filing and instead ordered a hearing
requiring the chimpanzee owner to show why the chimpanzees should not be
released and transferred to the sanctuary. Following the hearing, Justice Jaffe issued an order denying Hercules and Leo's petition.
Even though the petition was denied, the NhRP interpreted Justice
Jaffe's decision as a victory. In its press release it emphasized the
fact that Justice Jaffe agreed with NhRP, writing that "'persons' are
not restricted to human beings, and that who is a 'person' is not a
question of biology, but of public policy and principle" and also
stating that "efforts to extend legal rights to chimpanzees are thus
understandable; some day they may even succeed."
The temple town of Palitana, India is the world's first vegetarian-only city.
The belief in and promotion of animal rights has had a long history in East and South Asia. It has its roots in traditional Eastern religious and philosophical beliefs and concepts such as ahimsa, the doctrine of non-violence. The earliest reference to the idea of non-violence to animals (pashu-ahimsa), apparently in a moral sense, is in the Kapisthala Katha Samhita of the Yajurveda (KapS 31.11), written about the 8th century BCE.
Ancient era
Numerous
works of the classical Indian literature that speaks against animal
cruelties exist in many Indian languages. For example, the Tirukkural, likely a Hindu or Jain work written between 450 and 500 CE, dedicates verses 251–260 and 321–330 of its first volume to the virtue of Ahimsa, emphasizing on moral vegetarianism and non-killing (kollamai). According to George Uglow Pope, verses 121 to 123 of the Naladiyar, another ancient Tamil work, speak against cruelty to animals, including feeding on them and imprisioning them in cages.
Several kings in India built hospitals for animals, and the emperor Ashoka (304–232 BCE) issued orders against hunting and animal slaughter, in line with ahimsa, the doctrine of non-violence.
In Japan in 675, the Emperor Tenmu
prohibited the killing and the eating of meat during the busy farming
period between April and September but excluded the eating of wild birds
and animals. This ban and several others that followed over the
centuries were overturned in the nineteenth century during the Meiji restoration.
In 2000, the High Court in Kerala, India
used the language of "rights" in relation to circus animals, ruling
that they are "beings entitled to dignified existence" under Article 21
of the Indian Constitution.
The ruling said that if human beings are entitled to these rights,
animals should be too. The court went beyond the requirements of the
Constitution that all living beings should be shown compassion, and
said: "It is not only our fundamental duty to show compassion to our
animal friends, but also to recognize and protect their rights." Waldau wrote that other courts in India and one court in Sri Lanka have used similar language.
In 2012, the Indian government issued a ban on the use of live animals in education and much research.
In 2014, the Jain pilgrimage destination of Palitana City in India became the first city in the world to be legally vegetarian.
It has outlawed, or made illegal, the buying and selling of meat, fish
and eggs, and also related jobs or work, such as fishing and penning
'food animals'.
For some the basis of animal rights is in religion or animal worship (or in general nature worship), with some religions banning killing of any animal, and in other religions animals can be considered unclean.
Hindu and Buddhist societies abandoned animal sacrifice and embraced vegetarianism from the 3rd century BCE. One of the most important sanctions of the Jain, Hindu and Buddhist faiths is the concept of ahimsa,
or refraining from the destruction of life. According to Buddhist
belief, humans do not deserve preferential treatment over other living
beings. The Dharmic interpretation of this doctrine prohibits the killing of any living being.
In Islam, animal rights were recognized early by the Sharia. This recognition is based on both the Qur'an and the Hadith.
In the Qur'an, there are many references to animals, detailing that
they have souls, form communities, communicate with God and worship Him
in their own way. Muhammad forbade his followers to harm any animal and asked them to respect the rights of animals.
The two main philosophical approaches to animal ethics are
utilitarian and rights-based. The former is exemplified by Peter Singer,
and the latter by Tom Regan and Gary Francione.
Their differences reflect a distinction philosophers draw between
ethical theories that judge the rightness of an act by its consequences
(consequentialism/teleological ethics, or utilitarianism), and those
that focus on the principle behind the act, almost regardless of
consequences (deontological ethics). Deontologists argue that there are
acts we should never perform, even if failing to do so entails a worse
outcome.
There are a number of positions that can be defended from a consequentalist or deontologist perspective, including the capabilities approach, represented by Martha Nussbaum, and the egalitarian approach, which has been examined by Ingmar Persson and Peter Vallentyne.
The capabilities approach focuses on what individuals require to
fulfill their capabilities: Nussbaum (2006) argues that animals need a
right to life, some control over their environment, company, play, and
physical health.
Stephen R. L. Clark, Mary Midgley, and Bernard Rollin also discuss animal rights in terms of animals being permitted to lead a life appropriate for their kind.
Egalitarianism favors an equal distribution of happiness among all
individuals, which makes the interests of the worse off more important
than those of the better off. Another approach, virtue ethics,
holds that in considering how to act we should consider the character
of the actor, and what kind of moral agents we should be. Rosalind Hursthouse has suggested an approach to animal rights based on virtue ethics. Mark Rowlands has proposed a contractarian approach.
Nussbaum (2004) writes that utilitarianism, starting with Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill, has contributed more to the recognition of
the moral status of animals than any other ethical theory.
The utilitarian philosopher most associated with animal rights is Peter
Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Singer is not a
rights theorist, but uses the language of rights to discuss how we
ought to treat individuals. He is a preference utilitarian,
meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by the extent to which
it satisfies the preferences (interests) of those affected.
His position is that there is no reason not to give equal
consideration to the interests of human and nonhumans, though his
principle of equality does not require identical treatment. A mouse and a
man both have an interest in not being kicked, and there are no moral
or logical grounds for failing to accord those interests equal weight.
Interests are predicated on the ability to suffer, nothing more, and
once it is established that a being has interests, those interests must
be given equal consideration. Singer quotes the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick
(1838–1900): "The good of any one individual is of no more importance,
from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other."
Peter Singer: interests are predicated on the ability to suffer.
Singer argues that equality of consideration is a prescription, not
an assertion of fact: if the equality of the sexes were based only on
the idea that men and women were equally intelligent, we would have to
abandon the practice of equal consideration if this were later found to
be false. But the moral idea of equality does not depend on matters of
fact such as intelligence, physical strength, or moral capacity.
Equality therefore cannot be grounded on the outcome of scientific
investigations into the intelligence of nonhumans. All that matters is
whether they can suffer.
Commentators on all sides of the debate now accept that animals suffer and feel pain, although it was not always so. Bernard Rollin,
professor of philosophy, animal sciences, and biomedical sciences at
Colorado State University, writes that Descartes' influence continued to
be felt until the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the US before 1989
were taught to ignore pain, he writes, and at least one major veterinary
hospital in the 1960s did not stock narcotic analgesics for animal pain
control. In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to
"prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically
acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.
Scientific publications have made it clear since the 1980s that
the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain,
though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by
an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as humans, or
to remember the suffering as vividly. The problem of animal suffering, and animal consciousness in general, arose primarily because it was argued that animals have no language.
Singer writes that, if language were needed to communicate pain, it
would often be impossible to know when humans are in pain, though we can
observe pain behavior and make a calculated guess based on it. He
argues that there is no reason to suppose that the pain behavior of
nonhumans would have a different meaning from the pain behavior of
humans.
Tom Regan, professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, argues in The Case for Animal Rights (1983) that nonhuman animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life", and as such are bearers of rights. He writes that, because the moral rights of humans are based on their possession of certain cognitive
abilities, and because these abilities are also possessed by at least
some nonhuman animals, such animals must have the same moral rights as
humans. Although only humans act as moral agents, both marginal-case
humans, such as infants, and at least some nonhumans must have the
status of "moral patients".
Moral patients are unable to formulate moral principles, and as
such are unable to do right or wrong, even though what they do may be
beneficial or harmful. Only moral agents are able to engage in moral
action. Animals for Regan have "intrinsic value"
as subjects-of-a-life, and cannot be regarded as a means to an end, a
view that places him firmly in the abolitionist camp. His theory does
not extend to all animals, but only to those that can be regarded as
subjects-of-a-life. He argues that all normal mammals of at least one year of age would qualify:
... individuals are
subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory,
and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional
life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and
welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their
desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an
individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well
or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and
logically independently of their being the object of anyone else's
interests.
Whereas Singer is primarily concerned with improving the treatment of
animals and accepts that, in some hypothetical scenarios, individual
animals might be used legitimately to further human or nonhuman ends,
Regan believes we ought to treat nonhuman animals as we would humans. He
applies the strict Kantian
ideal (which Kant himself applied only to humans) that they ought never
to be sacrificed as a means to an end, and must be treated as ends in
themselves.
Gary Francione: animals need only the right not to be regarded as property.
Gary Francione, professor of law and philosophy at Rutgers Law School
in Newark, is a leading abolitionist writer, arguing that animals need
only one right, the right not to be owned. Everything else would follow
from that paradigm shift.
He writes that, although most people would condemn the mistreatment of
animals, and in many countries there are laws that seem to reflect those
concerns, "in practice the legal system allows any use of animals,
however abhorrent." The law only requires that any suffering not be
"unnecessary". In deciding what counts as "unnecessary", an animal's
interests are weighed against the interests of human beings, and the
latter almost always prevail.
Francione's Animals, Property, and the Law (1995) was the
first extensive jurisprudential treatment of animal rights. In it,
Francione compares the situation of animals to the treatment of slaves in the United States,
where legislation existed that appeared to protect them while the
courts ignored that the institution of slavery itself rendered the
protection unenforceable. He offers as an example the United States Animal Welfare Act,
which he describes as an example of symbolic legislation, intended to
assuage public concern about the treatment of animals, but difficult to
implement.
He argues that a focus on animal welfare, rather than animal
rights, may worsen the position of animals by making the public feel
comfortable about using them and entrenching the view of them as
property. He calls animal rights groups who pursue animal welfare
issues, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the "new welfarists",
arguing that they have more in common with 19th-century animal
protectionists than with the animal rights movement; indeed, the terms
"animal protection" and "protectionism" are increasingly favored. His
position in 1996 was that there is no animal rights movement in the
United States.
Mark Rowlands, professor of philosophy at the University of Florida, has proposed a contractarian approach, based on the original position and the veil of ignorance—a "state of nature" thought experiment that tests intuitions about justice and fairness—in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice
(1971). In the original position, individuals choose principles of
justice (what kind of society to form, and how primary social goods will
be distributed), unaware of their individual characteristics—their
race, sex, class, or intelligence, whether they are able-bodied or
disabled, rich or poor—and therefore unaware of which role they will
assume in the society they are about to form.
The idea is that, operating behind the veil of ignorance, they
will choose a social contract in which there is basic fairness and
justice for them no matter the position they occupy. Rawls did not
include species membership as one of the attributes hidden from the
decision makers in the original position. Rowlands proposes extending
the veil of ignorance to include rationality, which he argues is an
undeserved property similar to characteristics including race, sex and
intelligence.
American philosopher Timothy Garry has proposed an approach that deems nonhuman animals worthy of prima facie rights. In a philosophical context, a prima facie
(Latin for "on the face of it" or "at first glance") right is one that
appears to be applicable at first glance, but upon closer examination
may be outweighed by other considerations. In his book Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, Lawrence Hinman
characterizes such rights as "the right is real but leaves open the
question of whether it is applicable and overriding in a particular
situation". The idea that nonhuman animals are worthy of prima facie
rights is to say that, in a sense, animals have rights that can be
overridden by many other considerations, especially those conflicting a
human's right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
Garry supports his view arguing:
... if a nonhuman animal were to
kill a human being in the U.S., it would have broken the laws of the
land and would probably get rougher sanctions than if it were a human.
My point is that like laws govern all who interact within a society,
rights are to be applied to all beings who interact within that society.
This is not to say these rights endowed by humans are equivalent to
those held by nonhuman animals, but rather that if humans possess rights
then so must all those who interact with humans.
In sum, Garry suggests that humans have obligations to nonhuman
animals; animals do not, and ought not to, have uninfringible rights
against humans.
The American ecofeministCarol Adams has written extensively about the link between feminism and animal rights, starting with The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).
Women have played a central role in animal advocacy since the 19th century.
The anti-vivisection movement in the 19th and early 20th century in
England and the United States was largely run by women, including Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford, Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Caroline Earle White (1833–1916).
Garner writes that 70 per cent of the membership of the Victoria Street
Society (one of the anti-vivisection groups founded by Cobbe) were
women, as were 70 per cent of the membership of the British RSPCA in
1900.
The modern animal advocacy movement has a similar representation
of women. They are not invariably in leadership positions: during the
March for Animals in Washington, D.C., in 1990—the largest animal rights
demonstration held until then in the United States—most of the
participants were women, but most of the platform speakers were men. Nevertheless, several influential animal advocacy groups have been founded by women, including the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection by Cobbe in London in 1898; the Animal Welfare Board of India by Rukmini Devi Arundale in 1962; and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, co-founded by Ingrid Newkirk in 1980. In the Netherlands, Marianne Thieme and Esther Ouwehand were elected to parliament in 2006 representing the Parliamentary group for Animals.
The preponderance of women in the movement has led to a body of
academic literature exploring feminism and animal rights; feminism and
vegetarianism or veganism, the oppression of women and animals, and the
male association of women and animals with nature and emotion, rather
than reason—an association that several feminist writers have embraced. Lori Gruen
writes that women and animals serve the same symbolic function in a
patriarchal society: both are "the used"; the dominated, submissive "Other". When the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), a Cambridge philosopher, responded with an anonymous parody, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
(1792), saying that Wollstonecraft's arguments for women's rights could
be applied equally to animals, a position he intended as reductio ad absurdum.
Transhumanism
Some transhumanists argue for animal rights, liberation, and "uplift" of animal consciousness into machines.
Transhumanism also understands animal rights on a gradation or spectrum
with other types of sentient rights, including human rights and the
rights of conscious artificial intelligences (posthuman rights).
Critics
R. G. Frey
R. G. Frey, professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, is a preference utilitarian, as is Singer. But, in his early work, Interests and Rights
(1980), Frey disagreed with Singer – who in his Animal Liberation
(1975) wrote that the interests of nonhuman animals must be included
when judging the consequences of an act – on the grounds that animals
have no interests. Frey argues that interests are dependent on desire,
and that no desire can exist without a corresponding belief. Animals
have no beliefs, because a belief state requires the ability to hold a
second-order belief—a belief about the belief—which he argues requires
language: "If someone were to say, e.g. 'The cat believes that the door
is locked,' then that person is holding, as I see it, that the cat holds
the declarative sentence 'The door is locked' to be true; and I can see
no reason whatever for crediting the cat or any other creature which
lacks language, including human infants, with entertaining declarative
sentences."
Carl Cohen
Carl Cohen,
professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that
rights holders must be able to distinguish between their own interests
and what is right. "The holders of rights must have the capacity to
comprehend rules of duty governing all, including themselves. In
applying such rules, [they] ... must recognize possible conflicts
between what is in their own interest and what is just. Only in a
community of beings capable of self-restricting moral judgments can the
concept of a right be correctly invoked." Cohen rejects Singer's
argument that, since a brain-damaged human could not make moral
judgments, moral judgments cannot be used as the distinguishing
characteristic for determining who is awarded rights. Cohen writes that
the test for moral judgment "is not a test to be administered to humans
one by one", but should be applied to the capacity of members of the
species in general.
Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit debated the issue of animal rights in 2001 with Peter Singer. Posner posits that his moral intuition
tells him "that human beings prefer their own. If a dog threatens a
human infant, even if it requires causing more pain to the dog to stop
it, than the dog would have caused to the infant, then we favour the
child. It would be monstrous to spare the dog."
Singer challenges this by arguing that formerly unequal rights
for gays, women, and certain races were justified using the same set of
intuitions. Posner replies that equality in civil rights did not occur
because of ethical arguments, but because facts mounted that there were
no morally significant differences between humans based on race, sex, or
sexual orientation that would support inequality. If and when similar
facts emerge about humans and animals, the differences in rights will
erode too. But facts will drive equality, not ethical arguments that run
contrary to instinct, he argues. Posner calls his approach "soft
utilitarianism", in contrast to Singer's "hard utilitarianism". He
argues:
The "soft" utilitarian position on
animal rights is a moral intuition of many, probably most, Americans. We
realize that animals feel pain, and we think that to inflict pain
without a reason is bad. Nothing of practical value is added by dressing
up this intuition in the language of philosophy; much is lost when the
intuition is made a stage in a logical argument. When kindness toward
animals is levered into a duty of weighting the pains of animals and of
people equally, bizarre vistas of social engineering are opened up.
Roger Scruton,
the British philosopher, argues that rights imply obligations. Every
legal privilege, he writes, imposes a burden on the one who does not
possess that privilege: that is, "your right may be my duty." Scruton
therefore regards the emergence of the animal rights movement as "the
strangest cultural shift within the liberal worldview", because the idea
of rights and responsibilities is, he argues, distinctive to the human
condition, and it makes no sense to spread them beyond our own species.
He accuses animal rights advocates of "pre-scientific" anthropomorphism, attributing traits to animals that are, he says, Beatrix Potter-like,
where "only man is vile." It is within this fiction that the appeal of
animal rights lies, he argues. The world of animals is non-judgmental,
filled with dogs who return our affection almost no matter what we do to
them, and cats who pretend to be affectionate when, in fact, they care
only about themselves. It is, he argues, a fantasy, a world of escape.
Scruton singled out Peter Singer, a prominent Australian philosopher and animal-rights activist, for criticism. He wrote that Singer's works, including Animal Liberation,
"contain little or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical
moral conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain
and pleasure of all living things as equally significant and that
ignores just about everything that has been said in our philosophical
tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals."
Tom Regan countered this view of rights by distinguishing moral agents and moral patients.
Evolutionary studies have provided explanations of altruistic behaviours in humans and nonhuman animals, and suggest similarities between humans and some nonhumans. Scientists such as Jane Goodall and Richard Dawkins believe in the capacity of nonhuman great apes, humans' closest relatives, to possess rationality and self-awareness.
In 2010, research was presented to a conference in San Diego, suggesting that dolphins are second in intelligence only to human beings, and concluded that they should be regarded as nonhuman persons. MRI
scans were used to compare the dolphin and primate brain; the scans
indicated there was "psychological continuity" between dolphins and
humans. The research suggested that dolphins are able to solve complex
problems, use tools, and pass the mirror test, using a mirror to inspect parts of their bodies.
Studies have established links between interpersonal violence and animal cruelty.
In Christian theology, the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, was a Christian vegetarian
and maintained "that animals had immortal souls and that there were
considerable similarities between human and non-human animals."
Public attitudes
According
to a paper published in 2000 by Harold Herzog and Lorna Dorr, previous
academic surveys of attitudes towards animal rights have tended to
suffer from small sample sizes and non-representative groups.
However, a number of factors appear to correlate with the attitude of
individuals regarding the treatment of animals and animal rights. These
include gender, age, occupation, religion, and level of education. There
has also been evidence to suggest that prior experience with pets may be a factor in people's attitudes.
Women are more likely to empathize with the cause of animal rights than men. A 1996 study suggested that factors that may partially explain this discrepancy include attitudes towards feminism and science, scientific literacy, and the presence of a greater emphasis on "nurturance or compassion" among women.
A common misconception on the concept of animal rights is that
its proponents want to grant non-human animals the exact same legal
rights as humans, such as the right to vote.
This is not the case, as the concept is that animals should have rights
with equal consideration to their interests (for example, cats do not
have any interest in voting, so they should not have the right to vote).
A 2016 study found that support for animal testing may not be based on cogent philosophical rationales, and more open debate is warranted.
A 2007 survey to examine whether or not people who believed in evolution were more likely to support animal rights than creationists and believers in intelligent design found that this was largely the case – according to the researchers, the respondents who were strong Christian fundamentalists and believers in creationism
were less likely to advocate for animal rights than those who were less
fundamentalist in their beliefs. The findings extended previous
research, such as a 1992 study which found that 48% of animal rights
activists were atheists or agnostic. A 2019 study in The Washington Post
found that those who have positive attitudes toward animal rights also
tend to have a positive view of universal healthcare, favor reducing
discrimination against African Americans, the LGBT community and
undocumented immigrants, and expanding welfare to aid the poor.
Two surveys found that attitudes towards animal rights tactics, such as direct action,
are very diverse within the animal rights communities. Near half (50%
and 39% in two surveys) of activists do not support direct action. One
survey concluded "it would be a mistake to portray animal rights
activists as homogeneous."
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