Animal rights

"Animal liberation" redirects here; for other uses, see Animal liberation (disambiguation). For the album by Moby, see Animal Rights (album).

A man holds a monkey by a rope around her neck, a scene epitomizing the idea of animal ownership.

Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings.^[1] Animal rights advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, but they agree that animals should no longer be regarded as property, or used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment, but should instead be viewed as legal persons and members of the moral community.^[2][3]

The idea of awarding rights to animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School.^[4][2] Steven Wise, also of Harvard Law School, argues that the first serious judicial challenges to what he calls the "legal thinghood" of animals may only be a few years away,^[5] while Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby believes that the idea of animal rights has reached the stage the gay rights movement was at 25 years ago.^[6] Animal law is now taught in 100 out of 180 law schools in the United States,^[7] and in eight law schools in Canada.^[6] The concept of animal rights is routinely covered in universities as part of applied ethics or philosophy courses; Robert Garner of the University of Leicester calls it the "new morality."^[8] In June 2008, Spain became the first country to introduce animal rights, when a cross-party parliamentary committee recommended that rights be extended to the great apes, in accordance with Peter Singer's Great Ape Project.^[9]

Critics argue that animals are unable to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of rights, a position summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who writes that only human beings have duties and that "[the] corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights."^[10] An argument running parallel to this is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals as resources so long as they do not suffer unnecessarily, a view known as the animal welfare position.^[11] There has also been criticism, including from within the animal rights movement, of certain forms of animal rights activism, in particular the destruction of fur farms and animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front.

Development of the idea

Moral status of animals in the ancient world

Main articles: Moral status of animals in the ancient world and Human exceptionalism

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. The Book of Genesis echoed earlier ideas about divine hierarchy, and that God and humankind share traits, such as intellect and a sense of morality, that non-humans do not possess.

The idea that the use of animals by human beings — for food, clothing, entertainment, and as research subjects — is morally acceptable springs mainly from two sources. First, there is the idea of a divine hierarchy based on the theological concept of "dominion," from Genesis (1:20-28), where 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." Although the concept of dominion need not entail property rights, it has, over the centuries, been interpreted to imply some form of ownership.^[12][10]

Second, is the idea that animals are inferior, because they lack rationality or language, and as such are worthy of less consideration than human beings, or even none.^[12][10] Springing from this is the idea that individual animals have no separate moral identity. A pig is simply an example of the class of pigs, and it is to the class, not to the individual, that human responsibility or stewardship applies. This leads to the argument that the use of individual animals is acceptable so long as, for example, the species is not threatened with extinction.

The 21st-century debate about these ideas can be traced back to the earliest philosophers and theologians.

17th century: Animals as automata

1641: Descartes

Further information: Dualism (philosophy of mind) and Scientific Revolution

Descartes' remains influential regarding how the issue of animal consciousness — or as he saw, lack thereof — should be approached.^[13]

The year 1641 was significant for the idea of animal rights. The great influence of the century was the French philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650), whose Meditations was published that year, and whose ideas about animals informed attitudes well into the 21st century.^[13]

Writing during the "scientific revolution" versus medieval and Renaissance thinking — a revolution of which he was one of the chief architects — Descartes proposed a mechanistic theory of the universe, the aim of which was to show that the world could be mapped out without having to allude to subjective experience. The senses deceive, he wrote in the First Meditation in 1641, and "it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once."^[15]

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 non-human, on the other hand, are nothing but complex automata, with no souls, minds, or reason. They can see, hear and touch, but they are not, in any sense, conscious, and are unable to suffer or even to feel pain.^[13]

In the Discourse, published in 1637, Descartes wrote that the ability to reason and use language involve being able to respond in complex ways to "all the contingencies of life," something that animals clearly cannot do. He argued from this that any sounds animals make do not constitute language, but are simply automatic responses to external stimuli.^[17]

1635, 1641, 1654: First known laws protecting animals

Richard Ryder writes that the first known legislation against animal cruelty in the English-speaking world 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," which Ryde writes is probably the earliest reference to this concept in the English language.^[18]

In 1641, the year Descartes' Meditations was published, the first legal code to protect domestic animals in North America was passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.^[19] The colony's constitution was based on The Body of Liberties, written by the Reverend Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652), a lawyer, Puritan clergyman, and Cambridge graduate, originally from Suffolk, England.^[20] Ward listed the "rites" the Colony's general court later endorsed, including rite number 92: "No man shall exercise any Tirrany or Crueltie toward any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use." Historian Roderick Nash writes that, at the height of Descartes' influence in Europe, it is significant that the early New Englanders created a law that implied animals were not unfeeling automata.^[21]

The Puritans passed animal protection legislation in England too. Katheen Kete of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut writes that animal welfare laws were passed in 1654 as part of the ordinances of the Protectorate — the government under Oliver Cromwell, which lasted 1653–1659 — during the English Civil War. Cromwell disliked blood sports, particularly cockfighting, cock throwing, dog fighting, as well as bull baiting and bull running, both said to tenderize the meat. These could frequently be seen in towns, villages, in fairgrounds, and became associated for the Puritans with idleness, drunkenness, and gambling. Kete writes that the Puritans interpreted the dominion of man over animals in the Book of Genesis 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, which became a leitmotif of resistance to them, Kete writes, and the animal protection laws were overturned during the Restoration, when Charles II was returned to the throne in 1660.^[22] Bull baiting remained lawful in England for another 162 years, until it was outlawed in 1822.

1693: Locke

John Locke argued against animal cruelty, but only because of the effect it has on human beings.

Against Descartes, the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693, that animals do have feelings, and that unnecessary cruelty toward them is morally wrong, but — echoing Thomas Aquinas — the right not to be so harmed adhered either to the animal's owner, or to the person who was being harmed by being cruel, not to the animal itself. 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."^[23]

18th century: The centrality of sentience, not reason

1754: Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in 1754 that animals are part of natural law, and have natural rights, because they are sentient.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued in Discourse on Inequality in 1754 that animals should be part of natural law, not because they are rational, but because they are sentient:

1785: Kant

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), following Augustine, Aquinas, and Locke, opposed the idea that human beings have duties toward non-humans. For Kant, cruelty to animals was wrong solely on the grounds that it was bad for humankind. He argued in 1785 that human beings have duties only toward other human beings, and 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."^[26]

1789: Bentham

Jeremy Bentham: "The time will come, when humanity will extend its mantle over every thing which breathes" (1781).^[27]

Four years later, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although deeply opposed to the concept of natural rights, argued with Rousseau that it was the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, that should be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If rationality were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things.^[28] He wrote in 1789, just as slaves were being freed by the French, but were still held captive in the British dominions:

1792: Thomas Taylor

Despite Rousseau and Bentham, the idea that animals did or ought to have rights remained ridiculous. When Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), the British feminist writer, published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Thomas Taylor (1758—1835), a Cambridge philosopher, responded with an anonymous tract called Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, intended as a reductio ad absurdum. Taylor took Wollstonecraft's arguments, and those of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1790), and showed that they applied equally to animals, leading to the conclusion that animals have "intrinsic and real dignity and worth," a conclusion absurd enough, in his view, to discredit Wollstonecraft's and Paine's positions entirely.^[30]

19th century: Emergence of jus animalium

Legislation

Further information: Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822, Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, Cruelty to Animals Act 1849, and Cruelty to Animals Act 1876

The first known prosecution for cruelty to animals was brought in 1822 against two men found beating horses in London's Smithfield Market, where livestock had been sold since the 10th century. They were fined 20 shillings each.

Badger baiting was outlawed in England by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835. Painting by Henry Thomas Alken, 1824

The 19th century saw an explosion of interest in animal protection, particularly in England. Debbie Legge and Simon Brooman of Liverpool John Moores University 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 non-humans. 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 its tongue out, the judge ruling that he could be found guilty only if there was evidence of malice toward the owner.^[32]

From 1800 onwards, there were several attempts in England to introduce animal welfare or rights legislation. The first was a bill in 1800 against bull baiting, introduced by Sir William Pulteney, and opposed by the Secretary of War, William Windham, on the grounds that it was anti-working class. Another attempt was made in 1802 by William Wilberforce, again opposed by Windham, who said that bulls enjoyed being baited. In 1811, Lord Erskine introduced a bill to protect cattle and horses from malicious wounding, wanton cruelty, and beating, this one opposed by Windham because it would prejudice property rights. Judge Edward Abbott Parry writes that the House of Lords found the proposal so sentimental that they drowned Erskine out with cat calls and cock crowing.^[33]

1822: Martin's Act

Further information: Badger baiting, Bull baiting, and Cockfighting

In 1821, the Treatment of Horses bill was introduced by Colonel Richard Martin, 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.^[35]

Martin — nicknamed "Humanity Dick" by George IV — finally succeeded in 1822 with his Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill, or "Martin's Act", as it became known, 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."^[36] Any citizen was entitled to bring charges under the Act.^[37]

A painting of the Trial of Bill Burns, showing Richard Martin with the donkey in an astonished courtroom, leading to the world's first known conviction for animal cruelty, a story that delighted London's newspapers and music halls.

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 own sense of humour managed to capture its 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. Seeing in court that the magistrates seemed bored and didn't much care about the donkey, he sent for it, parading its injuries before a reportedly astonished court. Burns was fined, becoming the first person in the world known to have been convicted of animal cruelty. Newspapers and music halls were full of jokes about the "Trial of Bill Burns," as it became known, and how Martin had relied on the testimony of a donkey, giving Martin's Act some welcome publicity.^[34][37] The trial became the subject of a painting (right), which hangs in the headquarters of the RSPCA in London.^[38]

Other countries followed suit in passing legislation or making decisions that favoured animals. In 1882, the courts in New York ruled that wanton cruelty to animals was a misdemeanor at common law.^[19] 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.^[39] The state of Washington followed in 1859, New York in 1866, California in 1868, Florida in 1889.^[40] 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.

1824: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

Further information: Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

It soon became clear to Richard Martin that magistrates were not taking the Martin Act seriously, and that it was not being reliably enforced. A number of MPs decided to form a society with a view to bringing prosecutions under the Act. A meeting was arranged in Old Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane — a London café frequented by artists and actors — by the Reverend Arthur Broome, a Balliol man originally from Devonshire, who had recently become the vicar of Bromley-by-Bow.^[34]

The men met on June 16, 1824, and included a number of MPs: Richard Martin, Sir James Mackintosh, Sir Thomas Buxton, William Wilberforce, and Sir James Graham, 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," or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as it became known. It determined to send men to inspect the Smithfield Market in the City, where livestock had been sold since the 10th century, as well as slaughterhouses, and the practices of coachmen toward their horses.^[34]

The Society became the Royal Society in 1840, when it was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria, herself strongly opposed to vivisection.^[41][42]

An early example of direct action

Noel Molland writes that, in 1824, Catherine Smithies, an anti-slavery activist, set up an SPCA youth wing called the Bands of Mercy. It was a children's club modeled on the Temperance Society's Bands of Hope, which were intended to encourage children to campaign against drinking and gambling. The Bands of Mercy were similarly meant to encourage a love of animals.^[43]

Molland writes that some of its members responded with more enthusiasm than Smithies intended, and became known for engaging in direct action against hunters by sabotaging their rifles, although Kim Stallwood of the Animal Rights Network writes he has often heard these stories but has never been able to find solid evidence to support them.^[44]

Whether the story is true or apocryphal, the idea of the youth group was revived by Ronnie Lee in 1972, when he and Cliff Goodman set up the Band of Mercy as a militant, anti-hunting guerrilla group, which slashed hunters' vehicles' tires and smashed their windows. In 1976, some of the same activists, sensing that the Band of Mercy name sounded too accommodating, founded the Animal Liberation Front.^[43]

1866: American SPCA

Frances Power Cobbe founded two of the world's first anti-vivisection societies.

The first animal protection group in the United States was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 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 treatment of animals there. He consulted with the president of the RSPCA in London, the Earl of Harrowby, and returned to the U.S. 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.^[45]

Other groups

The remainder of the century saw the creation of many animal protection groups. In 1875, the British feminist Frances Power Cobbe 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 1898, she 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.

1824: Development of the concept of animal rights

The period saw the first extended interest in the idea that non-humans might have natural rights, or ought to have legal ones. In 1824, Lewis Gompertz, one of the men who attended the first meeting of the SPCA in June that year, published Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, in which he argued that every living creature, human and non-human, 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.^[46]

In 1879, Edward Nicholson argued in Rights of an Animal that animals have the same natural right to life and liberty that human beings do, arguing strongly against Descartes' mechanistic view, or what he called the "Neo-Cartesian snake," that they lack consciousness.^[47][46] Other writers of the time who explored whether animals might have natural rights were John Lewis, Edward Evans, and J. Howard Moore.^[48]

In 1894, Henry Salt, a former master at Eton who had set up the Humanitarian League to lobby for a ban on hunting the year before, created what Keith Tester of the University of Portsmouth has called an "epistemological break," in Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.^[49]

Salt wrote that the object of his essay was to "set the principle of animals' rights on a consistent and intelligible footing, [and] to show that this principle underlies the various efforts of humanitarian reformers ...," using the definition of "right" proposed by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, namely: "Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal liberty of any other man ... Whoever admits that each man must have a certain restricted freedom, asserts that it is right he should have this restricted freedom.... And hence the several particular freedoms deducible may fitly be called, as they commonly are called, his rights."^[50]

Concessions to the demands for jus animalium have been made grudgingly to date, he writes, with an eye on the interests of animals qua property, rather than as rights bearers:

He argued that there is no point in claiming rights for animals if we subordinate those rights to human desire, and took issue with the idea that the life of a human being might have more moral worth or purpose. "[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."^[50]

1839: Schopenhauer

For Schopenhauer, the view that cruelty is wrong only because it hardens human beings was "revolting and abominable."^[51]

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."^[52] 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."^[52] — and argued against the dominant Kantian idea that animal cruelty is wrong only insofar as it brutalizes human beings:

Schopenhauer's views on animal rights 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. He wrote in The Basis of Morality: "It is asserted that beasts have no rights ... that 'there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals.' Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism." A few passages later, he called the idea that animals exist for human benefit a "Jewish stence."^[53]

Late 1890s: Opposition to anthropomorphism

Further information: Behaviorism and B. F. Skinner

Richard Ryder writes that, in his view, attitudes toward animals began to harden in the late 1890s, when scientists embraced the idea that what they saw as anthropomorphism — the attribution of human qualities to non-humans — 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."^[54][55] This stance harkened back to the position of Descartes in the 17th century that non-humans were purely mechanical, like clocks, with no rationality and perhaps even with no consciousness.

Early 20th century: Tierschutzgesetz; industrialization of animal use

Further information: Animal Welfare Act and Brown Dog Affair

1933: Tierschutzgesetz

Further information: Animal protection in Nazi Germany, Animal rights and the Holocaust, Ecofascism, Nazi human experimentation, The Holocaust#Medical experiments, and Vegetarianism of Adolf Hitler

On coming to power in January 1933, the Nazis passed the most comprehensive set of animal protection laws in Europe.^[56] Kathleen Kete of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut writes that it was the first known attempt by a government to break the species barrier, the traditional binary of humans and animals.

On November 24, 1933, 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 on July 3, 1934 by the Reichsjagdsgesetz, prohibiting hunting; on July 1, 1935, by the Naturschutzgesetz, a comprehensive piece of environmental legislation; on November 13, 1937, by a law regulating animal transport by car; and on September 8, 1938, by a similar one dealing with animals on trains.^[57] The least painful way to shoe a horse was prescribed, as was the correct way to cook a lobster to prevent them from being boiled alive.^[58] Several senior Nazis, including Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, adopted some form of vegetarianism, though by most accounts not strictly, with Hitler allowing himself the occasional dish of meat. Himmler also mandated vegetarianism for senior SS officers.^[59]

Shortly before the Tierschutzgesetz was introduced, vivisection was first banned, then restricted. Animal research was viewed as part of "Jewish science," and "internationalist" medicine, indicating a mechanistic mind that saw nature as something to be dominated, rather than respected. Hermann Göring first announced a ban on August 16, 1933, following Hitler's wishes, but Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Morrel, reportedly persuaded him that this was not in the interests of German research,^[60] and in particular defence research. The ban was therefore revised three weeks later, on September 5, 1933, when eight conditions were announced under which animal tests could be conducted, with a view to reducing pain and unnecessary experiments.^[61] Primates, horses, dogs, and cats were given special protection, and licences to conduct vivisection were to be given to institutions, not to individuals.^[62] The removal of the ban was justified with the announcement: "It is a law of every community that, when necessary, single individuals are sacrificed in the interests of the entire body."^[63]

Medical experiments were later conducted on Jews and Romani children in camps, particularly in Auschwitz by Dr. Josef Mengele, and on others regarded as inferior, including prisoners-of-war. Because the human subjects were often in such poor health, researchers feared that the results of the experiments were unreliable, and so human experiments would be repeated on animals. Dr Hans Nachtheim, for example, induced epilepsy on human adults and children without their consent by injecting them with cardiazol, then repeated the experiments on rabbits to check the results.^[64]

Significance of the German position

The Nazis' position was the first attempt by a government to reject the concept of speciesism, at that point still unnamed, but it produced the worst of all possible outcomes. Rather than elevating the status of non-humans, the Nazis traduced the status of human beings they regarded as enemies.

Kathleen Kete writes that animal liberation seeks a different outcome, and that it is a mark of Peter Singer's importance that, in exploring the moral line drawn between humans and non-humans, he has raised what Kete calls the most central philosophical issue of our time.^[65]

Post 1945: Increase in animal use

Despite the profileration of animal protection legislation, animals 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 damaged. The over-exploitation of fishing stocks, for example, is viewed as harming the environment for people; the hunting of animals to extinction means that human beings in future will derive no enjoyment from them; poaching results in financial loss to the owner, and so on.^[40]

Notwithstanding the interest in animal welfare of the previous century, the situation for animals arguably 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)^[66] and an modern annual estimated range of 10 million to upwards of 100 million in the U.S. ^[67] — but mostly because of the industrialization of farming, which saw billions of animals raised and killed for food each year on a scale not possible before the war.^[68]

Late 20th century: Emergence of an animal rights movement

Further information: Animal liberation movement, Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, Animal Welfare Act, and List of animal rights groups

1960s: Formation of the Oxford group and the first wave of writers

A small group of intellectuals, particularly at Oxford University — now known as the Oxford Group — began to view the increasing use of animals as unacceptable exploitation.^[69] In 1964, Ruth Harrison published Animal Machines, a critique of factory farming, which proved influential. Psychologist Richard D. Ryder, who became a member of the Oxford Group, cites a 1965 Sunday Times article by novelist Brigid Brophy, called "The Rights of Animals," as having encouraged his own interest. He writes that it was the first time a major newspaper had devoted so much space to the issue.^[54] Robert Garner of the University of Leicester writes that Harrison's and Brophy's articles led to an explosion of interest in the relationship between humans and non-humans, or what Garner calls the "new morality."^[70]

Brophy wrote:

Ryder had been disturbed by incidents he had witnessed as a researcher in animal laboratories in the UK and U.S., and in what he calls a "spontaneous eruption of thought and indignation," he wrote letters to the editor of The Daily Telegraph about the issue, which were published on April 7, May 3, and May 20, 1969.

Brophy read them, and put Ryder in touch with Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris, who were working on a book of moral philosophy about the treatment of animals.^[54] Ryder subsequently became a contributor to their highly influential Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971), as did Harrison and Brophy.^[72] Rosalind Godlovitch's essay "Animal and Morals" was published in the same year.

1970: Coining the term "speciesism"

In 1970, Ryder coined the phrase "speciesism" in a privately printed pamphlet — having first thought of it in the bath — to describe the assignment of value to the interests of beings on the basis of their membership of a particular species.^[73] Peter Singer used the term in Animal Liberation in 1975, and it stuck within the animal rights movement, becoming an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989.^[74]

1975: Publication of Animal Liberation

Further information: Animal Liberation (book)

Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, published in 1973, became pivotal.

It was in a review of Animals, Men and Morals for the The New York Review of Books on April 5, 1973, that the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, first put forward his arguments in favour of animal liberation, which have become pivotal within the movement.^[75] He based his arguments on the principle of utilitarianism, the view, broadly speaking, that an act is right insofar as it leads to the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," a phrase first used in 1776 by Jeremy Bentham in A Fragment on Government. He drew an explicit comparison between the liberation of women and the liberation of animals.

In 1970, over lunch in Oxford with fellow student Richard Keshen, who was a vegetarian, Singer first came to believe that, by eating animals, he was engaging in the oppression of other species by his own. Keshen introduced Singer to the Godlovitches, and Singer and Roslind Godlovitch spent hours together refining their views. Singer's review of the Godlovitches' book evolved into Animal Liberation, published in 1975, now widely regarded as the "bible" of the modern animal rights movement.^[76]

Although he regards himself as an animal rights advocate, Singer uses the term "right" as "shorthand for the kind of protection that we give to all members of our species."^[77] There is no rights theory in his work. He rejects the idea that humans or non-humans have natural or moral rights, and proposes instead the equal consideration of interests, arguing that there are no logical, moral, or biological grounds to suppose that a violation of the basic interests of a human being — for example, the interest in not suffering — is different in any morally significant way from a violation of the basic interests of a non-human. Singer's position is that of the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), who wrote: "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."^[78]

The publication of Animal Liberation — in 1975 in the U.S. and 1976 in the UK — triggered a groundswell of scholarly interest in animal rights. Tom 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.^[79] Robert Garner writes that Charles Magel's extensive bibliography of the literature, 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.^[80]

1976: Founding of the Animal Liberation Front

Main article: Animal Liberation Front

In parallel with the development of the Oxford Group, grassroots activists set up the Animal Liberation Front in 1976.

In parallel with the Oxford Group, grassroots activists were also developing ideas about animal rights. A British law student, Ronnie Lee, formed an anti-hunting activist group in Luton in 1971, 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 their brand of activism "active compassion." In November 1973, they engaged in their first act of arson when they set fire to a Hoechst Pharamaceuticals research laboratory near Milton Keynes. The Band claimed responsibility, identifying itself to the press as a "nonviolent guerilla organization dedicated to the liberation of animals from all forms of cruelty and persecution at the hands of mankind."^[81]

In August 1974, Lee and another activist were sentenced to three years in prison. They were paroled after 12 months, with Lee emerging more militant than ever. In 1976, he brought together the remaining Band of Mercy activists, with some fresh faces, 30 activists in all, in order to start a new movement. He called it the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a name he hoped would come to "haunt" those who used animals.^[83][81]

The ALF is now active in 38 countries, operating as a leaderless resistance, with covert cells acting on a need to know basis, often learning of each other's existence only when acts of "liberation" are claimed. Activists see themselves as a modern Underground Railroad, the network that helped slaves escape from the U.S. to Canada, passing animals from ALF cells, who have removed them from farms and laboratories, to sympathetic veterinarians to safe houses and finally to sanctuaries. Controversially, some activists also engage in sabotage and arson, as well as threats and intimidation, acts that have lost the movement a great deal of sympathy in mainstream public opinion.

The decentralized model of activism is intensely frustrating for law enforcement organizations, who find the cells and networks difficult to infiltrate, because they tend to be organized around known friends.^[85] In 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security indicated how seriously it takes the ALF when it included them in a list of domestic terrorist threats.^[86]

The tactics of some of the more determined ALF activists are anathema to many animal rights advocates, such as Singer, who regard the animal rights movement as something that should occupy the moral high ground, an impossible claim to sustain when others are bombing buildings and risking lives in the name of the same idea.

ALF activists respond to the criticism with the argument that, as Ingrid Newkirk of PETA puts it, "Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out."^[87]

Main philosophical approaches

Overview

Further information: Consequentialism, Deontological ethics, and Teleological ethics

There are two main philosophical approaches to the issue of animal rights: a utilitarian approach and a rights-based one. The former is exemplifed by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, and the latter by Tom Regan, professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton 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 are, he argues, distinctive to the human condition, and it makes no sense to spread them beyond our own species.^[10]

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 in this fiction that the appeal of animal rights lies. 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.^[10]

Great apes

See also: Great Ape Project

Due to the close genetic relationship between humans and great apes, some animal rights groups have been advocating for conferring upon the great apes some basic human rights. In response, the Spanish parliament recently agreed to grant limited rights to great apes. The proposed laws make it illegal to kill apes, except for self defense. In addition, torture, including torturous medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.^[88][89]

See also

• Animal chaplains
• Animal intelligence
• Animal welfare in Nazi Germany
• Anti-hunting
• Brown dog affair
• Deep ecology
• Ethics of eating meat
• Saint Francis of Assisi Patron Saint of Animals
• Veganism
• Vegetarianism
• Vivisection

Notes

Further reading

Animal rights Activists Nicolas Atwood · Greg Avery · David Barbarash · Mel Broughton · Rod Coronado · John Feldmann · Bruce Friedrich · Barry Horne · Shannon Keith · Ronnie Lee · Keith Mann · Ingrid Newkirk · Alex Pacheco · Jill Phipps · Craig Rosebraugh · Henry Spira · Marianne Thieme · Darren Thurston · Andrew Tyler · Jerry Vlasak · Paul Watson · Robin Webb Groups Animal Aid · Animal Legal Defense Fund · Animal Liberation Brigade · Animal Liberation Front · Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group · Animal Liberation Press Office · Animal Rights Militia · BUAV · CAFT · Great Ape Project · Justice Department · PETA · Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine · Primate Freedom Project · Sea Shepherd · SARC · SPEAK · Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty · WARN Issues Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act · Animal rights · Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act · Animal testing · Attitudes to animals in the ancient world · Bile bear · Bull fighting · Covance · Cruelty to animals · Factory farming · Fur farming · Great ape research ban · Greyhound racing · Green Scare · Horse racing · Horse slaughter · Hunting · Huntingdon Life Sciences · International trade in primates · Meat industry · Nafovanny · Non-human primate experiments · Open rescue · Operation Backfire · Pet shops · Puppy farming · Rodeo · Silk farming · Speciesism · Veal · Veganism · Vegetarianism Highlighted cases Brown Dog affair · Britches · Cambridge University primates · Pit of despair · Silver Spring monkeys · Unnecessary Fuss Writers Steven Best · Stephen R.L. Clark · Gary Francione · Gill Langley · Tom Regan · Richard D. Ryder · Peter Singer · Steven M. Wise Books, magazines, films Animal Liberation (1977) · Behind the Mask (2006) · Earthlings (2005) Arkangel · Bite Back · No Compromise Categories Animal testing · Animal Liberation Front · Animal rights movement · Animal rights · Famous animals