Read Ebook: Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress by Salt Henry S

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The domination of property has left its trail indelibly on the records of this question. Until the passing of "Martin's Act" in 1822, the most atrocious cruelty, even to domestic animals, could only be punished where there was proved to be an infringement of the rights of ownership. Some measure of legal protection was, as I have said, accorded to wild animals in the Wild Animals in Captivity Act of 1900, which was repealed, re-enacted, and extended in the Protection of Animals Act, 1911; which Act was itself strengthened by an Amendment passed in 1921, prohibiting the coursing or hunting of a wild animal in an enclosed space from which it has no reasonable chance of escape. With this exception, it is permissible for anyone to kill or torture them with impunity, except where the sacred privileges of "property" are thereby offended. "Everywhere," it has been well said, "it is absolutely a capital crime to be an unowned creature."

In the same way, while admitting that man is justified, by the exigencies of his own destiny, in asserting his supremacy over the wild animals, we must deny him any right to turn his protectorate into a tyranny, or to inflict one atom more of subjection and pain than is absolutely unavoidable. To take advantage of the sufferings of animals, whether wild or tame, for the gratification of sport, or gluttony, or fashion, is quite incompatible with any possible assertion of animals' rights. We may kill, if necessary, but never torture or degrade.

"The laws of self-defence," says an old writer, "undoubtedly justify us in destroying those animals who would destroy us, who injure our properties or annoy our persons; but not even these, whenever their situation incapacitates them from hurting us. I know of no right which we have to shoot a bear on an inaccessible island of ice, or an eagle on the mountain's top, whose lives cannot injure us, nor deaths procure us any benefit. We are unable to give life, and therefore ought not to take it away from the meanest insect without sufficient reason."

I reserve, for fuller consideration in subsequent chapters, certain problems which are suggested by the wholesale slaughter of wild animals by the huntsman or the trapper, for purposes which are loosely supposed to be inevitable. Meantime a word must be said about the condition of those tamed or caged animals which, though wild by nature, and not bred in captivity, are yet to a certain extent "domesticated"--a class which stands midway between the true domestic and the wild. Is the imprisonment of such animals a violation of the principle we have laid down? In most cases I fear this question can only be answered in the affirmative.

And so in like manner it is sometimes contended that a menagerie is a sort of paradise for wild beasts, whose loss of liberty is more than compensated by the absence of the constant apprehension and insecurity which, it is conveniently assumed, weigh so heavily on their spirits. But all this notion of their "gaining by it" is in truth nothing more than a mere arbitrary supposition; for, in the first place, a speedy death may, for all we know, be very preferable to a protracted death-in-life; while, secondly, the pretence that wild animals enjoy captivity is even more absurd than the episcopal contention that the life of a domestic animal is "one of very great comfort, according to the animal's own standard."

But of course these remarks do not apply, with anything like the same force, to the taming of such wild animals as are readily domesticated in captivity, or trained by man to some intelligible and practical purpose. For example, though we may look forward to the time when it will not be deemed necessary to convert wild elephants into beasts of burden, it must be acknowledged that the exaction of such service, however questionable in itself, is very different from condemning an animal to a long term of useless and deadening imbecility. There can be no absolute standard of morals in these matters, whether it be human liberty or animal liberty that is at stake; I merely contend that it is as incumbent on us to show good reason for curtailing the one as the other. This would be at once recognized, but for the prevalent habit of regarding the lower animals as devoid of purpose and individuality.

The caging of wild song-birds is another practice which deserves the strongest reprobation. It is often pleaded that the amusement given by these unfortunate prisoners to the still more unfortunate human prisoners of the sick-room, or the smoky city, is a justification of their sacrifice; but surely such excuses rest only on habit--habitual inability or unwillingness to look facts in the face. Few invalids, I fancy, would be greatly cheered by the captive life that hangs at their window, if they had fully considered how blighted and sterilized a life it must be. The bird-catcher's trade and the bird-catcher's shop are alike full of horrors, and they are horrors which are due entirely to a silly fashion and a habit of callous thoughtlessness, not on the part of the ruffianly bird-catcher who has to bear the burden of the odium attaching to these cruelties, but of the respectable customers who buy captured larks and linnets without the smallest scruple or consideration.

Of all uses to which animals can be put--and this applies to the domesticated as well as to the wild--the silliest, perhaps, is that of training them to "perform." The true interest of animal life lies in its naturalness; and to see a dog, or horse, or lion performing a "trick" is a sight which ought to cause disgust rather than pleasure in any rational mind, especially as the process of training in most, if not in all cases, involves the practice of cruelty. Humane persons should discountenance every sort of entertainment in which animals are introduced, from the dancing bear in the village to the more elaborate but not less idiotic performances on the stage. Many of them are cruel; all of them are stupid; most of them are both.

THE SLAUGHTER OF ANIMALS FOR FOOD.

It is impossible that any discussion of the principle of animals' rights can be at all adequate or conclusive which ignores, as many so-called humanitarians still ignore, the immense underlying importance of the food question. The origin of the habit of flesh-eating need not greatly concern us; let us assume, in accordance with the most favoured theory, that animals were first slaughtered by the uncivilized migratory tribes under the stress of want, and that the practice thus engendered, being fostered by the religious idea of blood-offering and propitiation, survived and increased after the early conditions which produced it had passed away. What is more important to note, is that the very prevalence of the habit has caused it to be regarded as a necessary feature of modern civilization, and that this view has inevitably had a marked effect, and a very detrimental effect, on the study of man's moral relation to the lower animals.

Let me give a few examples.

"We deprive animals of life," says Bentham, in a delightfully na?ve application of the utilitarian philosophy, "and this is justifiable; their pains do not equal our enjoyments."

Schopenhauer's plea is somewhat similar to the foregoing:

"Man deprived of all flesh-food, especially in the north, would suffer more than the animal suffers in a swift and unforeseen death; still we ought to mitigate it by the help of chloroform."

Then there is the argument so frequently founded on the supposed sanction of Nature.

"My scruples," wrote Lord Chesterfield, "remained unreconciled to the committing of so horrid a meal, till upon serious reflection I became convinced of its legality from the general order of Nature, which has instituted the universal preying upon the weaker as one of her first principles."

Finally, we find the redoubtable Paley discarding as valueless the whole appeal to Nature, and relying on the ordinances of Holy Writ.

"A right to the flesh of animals. Some excuse seems necessary for the pain and loss which we occasion to animals by restraining them of their liberty, mutilating their bodies, and at last putting an end to their lives for our pleasure or convenience. The reasons alleged in vindication of this practice are the following: that the several species of animals being created to prey upon one another affords a kind of analogy to prove that the human species were intended to feed upon them.... Upon which reason I would observe that the analogy contended for is extremely lame, since animals have no power to support life by any other means, and since we have, for the whole human species might subsist entirely upon fruit, pulse, herbs, and roots, as many tribes of Hindus actually do.... It seems to me that it would be difficult to defend this right by any arguments which the light and order of Nature afford, and that we are beholden for it to the permission recorded in Scripture."

It is evident from the above quotations, which might be indefinitely extended, that the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb is constantly repeating itself in the attitude of our moralists and philosophers towards the victims of the slaughter-house. Far wiser and humaner, on this particular subject, is the tone adopted by such writers as Michelet, who, while not seeing any way of escape from the practice of flesh-eating, at least refrain from attempting to support it by fallacious reasonings.

"The animals below us have also their rights before God. Animal life, sombre mystery! Immense world of thoughts and of dumb sufferings! All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.... Life--death! The daily murder which feeding upon animals implies--those hard and bitter problems sternly placed themselves before my mind. Miserable contradiction! Let us hope that there may be another globe in which the base, the cruel fatalities of this may be spared to us."

Meantime, however, the simple fact remains true, and is every year finding more and more scientific corroboration, that there is no such "cruel fatality" as that which Michelet imagined. Comparative anatomy has shown that man is not carnivorous, but frugivorous, in his natural structure; experience has shown that flesh-food is wholly unnecessary for the support of healthy life. The importance of this more general recognition of a truth which has in all ages been familiar to a few enlightened thinkers, can hardly be over-estimated in its bearing on the question of animals' rights. It clears away a difficulty which has long damped the enthusiasm, or warped the judgment of the humaner school of European moralists, and makes it possible to approach the subject of man's moral relation to the lower animals in a more candid and fearless spirit of enquiry. It is no part of my present purpose to advocate the cause of vegetarianism; but in view of the mass of evidence, readily obtainable, that the transit and slaughter of animals are necessarily attended by most atrocious cruelties, and that a large number of persons have for years been living healthily without the use of flesh-meat, it must at least be said that to omit this branch of the subject from the most earnest and strenuous consideration is playing with the question of animals' rights. Fifty or a hundred years ago, there was perhaps some excuse for supposing that vegetarianism was a mere fad; there is absolutely no such excuse at the present time.

There are two points of especial significance in this connection. First, that as civilization advances, the cruelties inseparable from the slaughtering system have been aggravated rather than diminished, owing both to the increased necessity of transporting animals long distances by sea and land, under conditions of hurry and hardship which generally preclude any sort of humane regard for their comfort, and to the clumsy and barbarous methods of slaughtering too often practised in those ill-constructed dens of torment known as "private slaughter-houses."

Secondly, that the feeling of repugnance caused among all people of sensibility and refinement by the sight, or mention, or even thought, of the business of the butcher is also largely on the increase; so that the details of the revolting process are, as far as possible, kept carefully out of sight and out of mind, being delegated to a pariah class who do the work which most educated persons would shrink from doing for themselves. In these two facts we have clear evidence, first that there is good reason why the public conscience, or at any rate the humanitarian conscience, should be uneasy concerning the slaughter of "live-stock," and secondly that this uneasiness is already to a large extent developed and manifested.

The common argument, adopted by many apologists of flesh-eating, as of fox-hunting, that the pain inflicted by the death of the animals is more than compensated by the pleasure enjoyed by them in their life-time, since otherwise they would not have been brought into existence at all, is ingenious rather than convincing, being indeed none other than the old familiar fallacy already commented on--the arbitrary trick of constituting ourselves the spokesmen and the interpreters of our victims. Mr. E. B. Nicholson, for example, is of opinion that "we may pretty safely take it that if he were able to understand and answer the question, he would choose life, with all its pains and risks, to non-existence without them." Unfortunately for the soundness of this suspiciously partial assumption, there is no recorded instance of this strange alternative having ever been submitted either to fox or philosopher; so that a precedent has yet to be established on which to found a judgment. Meantime, instead of committing the gross absurdity of talking of non-existence as a state which is good, or bad, or in any way comparable to existence, we might do well to remember that animals' rights, if we admit them at all, must begin with the birth, and can only end with the death, of the animals in question, and that we cannot evade our just responsibilities by any such quibbling references to an imaginary ante-natal choice in an imaginary ante-natal condition.

Vegetarianism, then, is the ideal towards which food-reformers must strive; and in the meantime something may be done by the improvement of methods of slaughtering. The advantages of the public over the private slaughter-house have repeatedly been demonstrated, as, for example, in the Report of the Tuberculosis Commission of 1898, and in the Report of the Commission appointed by the Admiralty "to consider the humane slaughtering of animals," issued in 1904. Anyone who will compare the blundering, haphazard methods of many English slaughter-houses with the model abattoirs of Germany, Switzerland, and other Continental States, will at once see the pressing need of such reforms on the score of humanity.

The butchers' objections to the abattoir system arise from the usual trade prejudices, and from the fear that their interests would suffer; but private interests, real or imagined, should not be allowed to stand in the way of a reform which would in the long run benefit all classes of the community--not least the unhappy victims of the shambles. One thing is certain, that if all flesh-eaters could themselves see what goes on behind the scenes in many private slaughter-houses, an end would soon be put to a system which is as barbarous as it is insanitary--a fruitful cause of cruelty to the animals and of danger to the public.

Reform of diet will doubtless be slow, and attended in many individual cases with its difficulties and drawbacks. But at least we may lay down this much as incumbent on all humanitarian thinkers--that everyone must satisfy himself of the necessity, the real necessity, of the use of flesh-food, before he comes to any conclusion on the subject of animals' rights. It is easy to see that, as the question is more and more discussed, the result will be more and more decisive. "Whatever my own practice may be," wrote Thoreau, "I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized."

SPORT, OR AMATEUR BUTCHERY.

That particular form of recreation which is euphemistically known as "sport" has a close historical connection with the practice of flesh-eating, inasmuch as the hunter was in old times what the butcher is now,--the "purveyor" on whom the family was dependent for its daily supply of victuals. Modern sport, however, as usually carried on in civilized European countries, has degenerated into what has been well described as "amateur butchery," a system under which the slaughter of certain kinds of animals is practised less as a necessity than as a means of amusement and diversion. Just as the youthful nobles, during the savage scenes and reprisals of the Huguenot wars, used to seize the opportunity of exercising their swordsmanship, and perfecting themselves in the art of dealing graceful death-blows, so the modern sportsman converts the killing of animals from a prosaic and perhaps distasteful business into an agreeable and gentlemanly pastime.

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

But the sporting instinct is due to sheer callousness and insensibility; the sportsman, by force of habit, or by force of hereditary influence, cannot understand or sympathize with the sufferings he causes, and being, in the great majority of instances, a man of slow perception, he naturally finds it much easier to follow the hounds than to follow an argument. And here, in his chief blame, lies also his chief excuse; for it may be said of him, as it cannot be said of certain other tormentors, that he really does not comprehend the import of what he is doing. Whether this ultimately makes his position better or worse, is a point for the casuist to decide.

That "it would have to be killed anyhow" is a truly deplorable reason for torturing any animal whatsoever; it is an argument which would equally have justified the worst barbarities of the Roman amphitheatre. To exterminate wolves, and other dangerous species, may indeed, at certain places and times, be necessary and justifiable enough. But the sportsman nowadays will not even perform this practical service of exterminating such animals--the fox, for example--as are noxious to the general interests of the community; on the contrary, he "preserves" them , and then, by a happy afterthought, claims the gratitude of the animals themselves for his humane and benevolent interposition. In plain words, he first undertakes to rid the country of a pest, and then, finding the process an enjoyable one to himself, he contrives that it shall never be brought to a conclusion. Prometheus had precisely as much reason to be grateful to the vulture for eternally gnawing at his liver, as have the hunted animals to thank the predaceous sportsmen who "preserve" them. Let me once more enter a protest against the canting Pharisaism which is afraid to take the just responsibility of its own selfish pleasure-seeking.

"What name should we bestow," said a humane essayist of the eighteenth century, "on a superior being who, without provocation or advantage, should continue from day to day, void of all pity and remorse, to torment mankind for diversion, and at the same time endeavour with the utmost care to preserve their lives and to promulgate their species, in order to increase the number of victims devoted to his malevolence, and be delighted in proportion to the miseries which he occasioned? I say, what name detestable enough could we find for such a being? Yet, if we impartially consider the case, and our intermediate situation, we must acknowledge that, with regard to the inferior animals, just such a being is the sportsman."

The excuses alleged in favour of English blood-sports in general, and of hunting in particular, are for the most part as irrelevant as they are unreasonable. It is often said that the manliness of our national character would be injuriously affected by the discontinuance of these sports--a strange argument, when one considers the very unequal, and therefore unmanly, conditions of the strife. But, apart from this consideration, what right can we possess to cultivate these personal qualities at the expense of unspeakable suffering to the lower races? Such actions may be pardonable in a savage, or in a schoolboy in whom the savage nature still largely predominates, but they are wholly unworthy of a civilized and rational man.

As for the nonsense sometimes talked about the beneficial effects of those field-sports which bring men into contact with the sublimities of nature, the dynamiters who used to cross the ocean to blow up an English town might on this principle have justified the object of their journey by the assertion that the sea-voyage brought them in contact with the exalting and ennobling influence of the Atlantic.

As the case stands between the sportsman and his victims, there cannot be much doubt as to whence the benefits proceed, and from which party the gratitude is due.

The sports of hunting and coursing are a brutality which could not be tolerated for a day in a state which possessed anything more than the mere name of justice, freedom, and enlightenment. Sir Thomas More says of his model citizens in "Utopia:"

"Nor can they comprehend the pleasure of seeing dogs run after a hare more than of seeing one dog run after another; for if the seeing them run is that which gives the pleasure, you have the same entertainment to the eye on both these occasions, since that is the same in both cases; but if the pleasure lies in seeing the hare killed and torn by the dogs, this ought rather to stir pity, that a weak, harmless, and fearful hare should be devoured by strong, fierce, and cruel dogs."

To be accurate, the zest of sport lies neither in the running nor the killing, as such, but in the excitement caused by the fact that a life is at stake, that the pursuer is matched in a fierce game of hazard against the pursued. The opinion has been expressed, by one well qualified to speak with authority on the subject, that "well-laid drags, tracked by experts, would test the mettle both of hounds and riders to hounds; but then a terrified, palpitating, fleeing life would not be struggling ahead, and so the idea is not pleasing to those who find pleasure in blood."

The case is even worse when the quarry is to all intents and purposes domesticated, an animal wild by nature, but by force of circumstances and surroundings tame. Such are the park deer, the victims of the sportsmen who persist in carrying on the carted stag hunt, in spite of the abolition of the Royal Buckhounds in 1901. There is urgent need that the laws which relate to the humane treatment of animals should be amended, or more wisely interpreted, on this particular point, so as to afford immediate protection to these domesticated stags, whose torture, under the name and sanction of "sport," has been long condemned by the public conscience. Bear-baiting and cock-fighting have now been abolished by legal enactment, and it is high time that the equally demoralizing sport of hunting of tame stags should be relegated to the same category.

The same must be said of some sports which are practised by the English working man--rabbit-coursing, in particular, that half-holiday diversion which is so popular in many villages of the North. An attempt is often made by the apologists of amateur butchery to play off one class against another in the discussion of this question. They protest, on the one hand, against any interference with aristocratic sport, on the plea that working men are no less addicted to such pastimes; and, on the other hand, a cry is raised against the unfairness of restricting the amusements of the poor, while noble lords and ladies are permitted to hunt the carted stag with impunity.

Nothing can be more shocking than the treatment commonly accorded to rabbits, rats, and other small animals, on the plea that they are "vermin," and therefore, it is tacitly assumed, outside the pale of humanity and justice; we have here another instance of the way in which the application of a contemptuous name may aggravate and increase the actual tendency to barbarous ill-usage. How many a demoralizing spectacle, especially where the young are concerned, is witnessed when "fun" is made out of the death and torture of "vermin"! How horrible is the practice, apparently universal throughout all country districts, of setting steel traps along the ditches and hedgerows, in which the victims are frequently left to linger, in an agony of pain and apprehension, for hours, or even days! Yet there are no means of redressing these barbarities, because the laws, such as they are, which prohibit cruelty to animals, are not designed to take any cognizance of "vermin."

All that has been said of hunting and coursing is applicable also--in a less degree, perhaps, but on exactly the same principle--to the sports of shooting and fishing. Let me quote a striking testimony to the wickedness and injustice of sport, as exhibited in one of its most refined and fashionable forms, the "cult of the pheasant."

It does not in the least matter, so far as the question of animals' rights is concerned, whether you run your victim to death with a pack of yelping hounds, or shoot him with a gun, or drag him from his native waters by a hook; the point at issue is simply whether man is justified in inflicting any form of death or suffering on the lower races for his mere amusement and caprice. There can be little doubt what answer must be given to this question.

MURDEROUS MILLINERY.

We have seen what a vast amount of quite preventable suffering is caused through the agency of the slaughterman who kills for a business, and of the sportsman who kills for a pastime, the victims in either case being regarded as mere irrational automata, with no higher destiny than to satisfy the most artificial wants or the most cruel caprices of mankind. A few words must now be said about the fur and feather traffic--the slaughter of mammals and birds for human clothing or human ornamentation--a subject connected on the one hand with that of flesh-eating, and on the other, though to a less degree, with that of sport. What I shall say will of course have no reference to wool, or any other substance which is obtainable without injury to the animal from whom it is taken.

Take the case of leather, for instance, a material which is in almost universal use, and may, under present circumstances, be fairly described as a necessary. What should we do without leather? was, in fact, a question very frequently asked of vegetarians during the early and callow years of the food-reform movement, until it was found that vegetable leather could be successfully employed in boot-making, and that the inconsistency of which vegetarians at present stand convicted is only a temporary and incidental one. Now of course so long as oxen are slaughtered for food, their skins will be utilized in this way; but it is not difficult to foresee that the gradual discontinuance of the habit of flesh-eating will lead to a similar gradual discontinuance of the use of hides, and that human ingenuity will not be at a loss in the provision of a substitute. So that it does not follow that a commodity which, in the immediate sense, is necessary now, would be absolutely or permanently necessary, under different conditions, in the future.

My sole reason for dwelling on this typical point is that I wish to guard myself, by anticipation, against a very plausible argument, by which discredit is often cast on the whole theory of animals' rights. What can be the object, it is said, of entering on the sentimental path of an impossible humanitarianism, which only leads into insurmountable difficulties and dilemmas, inasmuch as the use of these various animal substances is so interwoven with the whole system of society that it can never be discontinued until society itself comes to an end? I assert that the case is by no means so desperate--that it is easy to make a right beginning now, and to foresee the lines along which future progress will be effected. Much that is impossible in our own time may be realized, by those who come after us, as the natural and inevitable outcome of reforms which it now lies with us to inaugurate.

Whatever it may be in other respects, the fur trade, in so far as it is a supply of ornamental clothing for those who are under no necessity of wearing fur at all, is a barbarous and stupid business. It makes patchwork, one may say, not only of the hides of its victims, but of the conscience and intellect of its patrons. A fur garment or trimming, we are told, appearing to the eye as if it were one uniform piece, is generally made up of many curiously shaped fragments. It is significant that a society which is enamoured of so many shams and fictions, and which detests nothing so strongly as the need of looking facts in the face, should pre-eminently esteem those articles of apparel which are constructed on the most deceptive and illusory principle. The story of the Ass in the Lion's skin is capable, it seems, of a new and wider application.

Cruel as is all hunting of animals for their fur, there is a peculiar callousness in the seal "fishery," not only because the seal, far from being a fish, is one of the most sensitive of warm-blooded animals, but because of the atrocious methods by which the practice of "sealing" has too often been pursued. In all the history of man's dealings with the lower races, there is no bloodier record than that of his treatment of the trustful and unresisting seal.

But if the fur trade gives cause for serious reflection, what are we to say of the still more abominable trade in feathers? Murderous, indeed, is the millinery which finds its most fashionable ornament in the dead bodies of birds--birds, the loveliest and most blithesome beings in Nature! It has been said that "to enumerate all the feathers used for ornamental purposes would be practically to give a complete list of all known and obtainable birds." The figures and details published by those humane writers who have raised an unavailing protest against this latest and worst crime of Fashion are really appalling in their stern and naked record of unremitting cruelty.

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