Salt Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-98594-458-3
Verlag: FilRougeViceversa
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten

The immediate question that claims our attention is thisif men have rights, have animals their rights also?From the earliest times there have been thinkers who, directly or indirectly, answered this question with an affirmative. The Buddhist and Pythagorean canons, dominated perhaps by the creed of reincarnation, included the maxim not to kill or injure any innocent animal. The humanitarian philosophers of the Roman empire, among whom Seneca, Plutarch, and Porphyry were the most conspicuous, took still higher ground in preaching humanity on the broadest principle of universal benevolence. Since justice is due to rational beings, wrote Porphyry, how is it possible to evade the admission that we are bound also to act justly towards the races below us?

Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. It was Salt who first introduced Mohandas Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi's study of vegetarianism. Salt is considered, by some, to be the 'father of animal rights,' having been one of the first writers to argue explicitly in favour of animal rights, rather than just improvements to animal welfare, in his Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Salt, Henry S.

Leseproben

CHAPTER II. THE CASE OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS.

The main principle of animals’ rights, if admitted to be fundamentally sound, will not be essentially affected by the wildness or the domesticity, as the case may be, of the animals in question; both classes have their rights, though these rights may differ largely in extent and importance. It is convenient, however, to consider the subject of the domestic animals apart from that of the wild ones, inasmuch as their whole relation to mankind is so much altered and emphasized by the fact of their subjection. Here, at any rate, it is impossible, even for the most callous reasoners, to deny the responsibility of man, in his dealings with vast races of beings, the very conditions of whose existence have been modified by human civilization.

An incalculable mass of drudgery, at the cost of incalculable suffering, is daily, hourly performed for the benefit of man by these honest, patient labourers in every town and country of the world. Are these countless services to be permanently ignored in a community which makes any pretension to a humane civilization? Will the free citizens of the enlightened republics of the future be content to reap the immense advantages of animals’ labour, without recognizing

that they owe them some consideration in return? The question is one that carries with it its own answer.

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But the human mind is subtle to evade the full significance of its duties, and nowhere is this more conspicuously seen than in our treatment of the lower races. Given a position in which man profits largely (or thinks he profits largely, for it is not always a matter of certainty) by the toil or suffering of the animals, and our respectable moralists are pretty sure to be explaining to us that this providential arrangement is “better for the animals themselves.” The wish is father to the thought in these questions, and there is an accommodating elasticity in our social ethics that permits of the justification of almost any system which it would be inconvenient to us to discontinue. Thus we find it stated, and on the authority of a bishop, that man may “lay down the terms of the social contract between animals and himself,” because, forsooth, “the general life of a domestic animal is one of very great comfort—according to the animal’s own standard ( sic ) probably one of almost perfect happiness.”

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Now this prating about “the animal’s own standard” is nothing better than hypocritical cant. If man is obliged to lay down the terms of the contract, let him at least do so without having recourse to such a suspiciously opportune afterthought. We have taken the

animals from a free, natural state, into an artificial thraldom, in order that we , and not they , may be the gainers thereby; it cannot possibly be maintained that they owe us gratitude on this account, or that this alleged debt may be used as a means of evading the just recognition of their rights. It is the more necessary to raise a strong protest against this jesuitical mode of reasoning, because, as we shall see, it is so frequently employed, in one form or another, by the apologists of human tyranny.

On the other hand, I desire to keep clear also of the extreme contrary contention, that man is not morally justified in imposing any sort of subjection on the lower animals.

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An abstract question of this sort, however interesting as a speculation, and impossible in itself to disprove, is beyond the scope of the present inquiry, which is primarily concerned with the state of things at present existing. We must face the fact that the services of domestic animals have become, whether rightly or wrongly, an integral portion of the system of modern society; we cannot immediately dispense with those services, any more than we can dispense with human labour itself. But we can provide, as at least a present step towards a more ideal relationship in the future, that the conditions under which all labour is performed, whether by men or by animals, shall be such as to enable the worker to take

some appreciable pleasure in the work, instead of experiencing a lifelong course of injustice and ill-treatment.

And here it may be convenient to say a word as to the existing line of demarcation between the animals legally recognized as “domestic,” and those feræ naturæ , of wild nature. In the Act of 1849, in which a penalty was imposed for cruelty to “any animal,” it was expressly provided that

“ The word animal shall be taken to mean any horse, mare, gelding, bull, ox, cow, heifer, steer, calf, mule, ass, sheep, lamb, hog, pig, sow, goat, dog, cat, or any other domestic animal.”

But as time went on, and public opinion was more sensitive, the interpretation of this vague reference to “any other domestic animal” became a point of considerable importance, since it closely affected the welfare of certain captive animals which, though regarded as wild, and therefore outside the pale of protection, were to all intents and purposes in a state of domestication. The Act of 1849 was accordingly amended by the Wild Animals in Captivity Act of 1900, which made it an offence to maltreat a wild animal while actually in a state of captivity. ( See also the Act of 1911, infra p. 34.)

“ Food, rest, and tender usage,” were declared by Humphry Primatt, the old author already quoted, to be the three rights of the domestic animals. Lawrence’s opinion was to much the same effect.

“ Man is indispensably bound to bestow upon animals, in return for the benefit he derives from their services, good and sufficient nourishment, comfortable shelter, and merciful

treatment; to commit no wanton outrage upon their feelings, whilst alive, and to put them to the speediest and least painful death, when it shall be necessary to deprive them of life.”

But it is important to note that something more is due to animals, and especially to domestic animals, than the mere supply of provender and the mere immunity from ill-usage. “We owe justice to men,” wrote Montaigne, “and grace and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it; there is a natural commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.” Sir Arthur Helps admirably expressed this sentiment in his well-known reference to the duty of “using courtesy to animals.”

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If these be the rights of domestic animals, it is pitiful to reflect how commonly and how grossly they are violated. The average life of our “beasts of burden,” the horse, the ass, and the mule, is from beginning to end a rude negation of their individuality and intelligence; they are habitually addressed and treated as stupid instruments of man’s will and pleasure, instead of the highly-organized and sensitive beings that they are. Well might Thoreau, the humanest and most observant of naturalists, complain of man’s “not educating the horse, not trying to develop his nature, but merely getting work out of him”; for such, it must be acknowledged, is the prevalent method of treatment, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, at the present day, even where there is no actual cruelty or ill-usage.

We are often told that there is no other western

country where tame animals are so well treated as in England, and it is only necessary to read the records of a century back to see that the inhumanities of the past were far more atrocious than any that are still practised in the present. Let us be thankful for these facts, as showing that the current of English opinion is at least moving in the right direction. But it must yet be said that the sights that everywhere meet the eye of a humane and thoughtful observer, whether in town or country, are a disgrace to our vaunted “civilization.” Watch the cab traffic in one of the crowded thoroughfares of our great cities—always the same lugubrious patient procession of underfed overloaded animals, the same brutal insolence of the drivers, the same accursed sound of the whip. And remembering that these horses are gifted with a large degree of sensibility and intelligence, must one not feel that the fate to which they are thus mercilessly subjected is a shameful violation of the principle which moralists have laid down?

Yet it is to this fate that even the well-kept...