Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb
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Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb Rod Preece Rod Preece Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb A Chronicle o f Sensibility to Animals Routledge Taylor & Francis G ro u p as*LONELONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2002 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. ISBN 978-0-415-94363-5 (pbk) Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress For she who daily walks the walk As I do daily talk the talk, my gaea you animals who are so innocent, what have you done worthy of death? —Richard de Wyche, Bishop of Chichester, c. 1235 If thy heart be right, then will every creature be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. —Thomas a Kempis, c. 1427 I pray, when a lion eats a man and a man eats an ox, why is the ox made more for the man than the man for the lion? —Thomas Hobbes, 1641 The well-taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye And feels for all that lives. —Anna Laetitia Barbauld, c. 1780 Boundless compassion for all living beings is the finest and surest guarantee of pure moral conduct… —Arthur Schopenhauer, 1841 Contents Acknowledgments/ xi Introduction/ xiv 1 Animals in Myth and Religion/ 1 2 The Classical World/ 32 3 The Dark Ages/ 60 4 The Renaissance/ 90 5 The Enlightenment/ 124 6 The Utilitarian and Romantic Age/ 181 7 The Legislative Era/ 228 8 The Darwinian Age/ 272 Postscript: The Ensuing Years/ 365 Notes/ 369 Index/ 408 Acknowledgments A book of this nature must depend heavily on what others have done before. The following books have been of especial help in various degrees and in different parts of this volume: Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, London: Penguin, 1987; Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Each of these books is indispensable to understanding the Presocratic and classical mind, especially with regard to animals. Paul A.B.Clarke and Andrew Linzey, eds., Political Theory and Animal Rights, London: Pluto Press, 1990; Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan, eds., Animals and Christianity: A Book of Readings, London: SPCK, 1989; Lewis G. Regenstein, Replenish the Earth: A History of Organized Religion’s Treatment of Animals and Nature—Including the Bible’s Message of Conservation and Kindness toward Animals, New York: Crossroad, 1991, of great help for the first chapter; Mathias Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Fleur Adcock and Jacqueline Simms, eds., The Oxford Book of Creatures, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, London: Penguin, 1984, a monumental work of impeccable scholarship; E.S. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, Fontwell: Centaur, 1992 [1964]; Roberta Kalechofsky, ed., Judaism and Animal Rights: Classical and Contemporary Responses, Marblehead, MA: Micah Publications, 1992; Richard D. Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes toward Speciesism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, a work of original research containing material not found elsewhere; Dix Harwood, Love for Animals and How It Developed in Great Britain, New York: Privately Printed, 1928, a rare but brilliant book, especially helpful for the eighteenth century; Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, London: F.Pitman, 1883, a monument to the rigour, integrity, and depth of traditional scholarship; Jon Wynne- Tyson, The Extended Circle: A Commonplace Book of Animal Rights, New York: Paragon, 1989 [1985], a work of immense dedication and labour, especially helpful for the final chapter; Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, which puts a due emphasis, one sometimes overlooked, on the American contribution; James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; John Vyvyan, In Pity and In Anger, Marblehead, MA: Micah, 1988 [London: Michael Joseph, 1969], and The Dark Face of Science, London: Michael Joseph, 1971, both invaluable for vivisection material; Joanna Cullen Brown, Let Me Enjoy the Earth: Thomas Hardy and Nature, London: Allison and Busby, 1990; Cecily Boas, ed., Birds and Beasts in English Literature, London: Thomas Nelson, 1926; Al- Hafiz B.A. Masri, Animals in Islam, Petersfield: The Athene Trust, 1989. I have sometimes followed these authors, editors, and compilers, and have often been prompted by them. At the very least, they showed me where to start looking. Sometimes their signposts were the very goal. Of course, my sources have been far more diverse than those mentioned here, but without their particular yet multifarious stimuli this book would have been beyond my capacities. I have also drawn on, and elaborated, some of the sources used in my own previous writings. My gratitude is also owed to many more, above all to those who are ever willing to discuss the development and state of animal welfare and animal rights literature with me, especially Lorna Chamberlain, Executive Director of the London Humane Society, my occasional co-author, and my treasured wife; David Fraser, NSERC Industrial Research Professor in Animal Welfare at the University of British Columbia, also my occasional co-author, and the recipient of most of my e-mail; and Mathias Guenther, Professor of Anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University, my ever-stimulating power lunch companion. Joris and Dorothy Van Daele of London, Ontario, Ian Duncan of the University of Guelph, Barbara Noske of the University of Sydney, and Chien-hui Li, Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, are also valued intellectual companions who provide a source of enjoyment as well as of self-questioning. Their views are so complex, stimulating, and mind- and heartfelt, that I cannot fail to be impressed by the variety of well-considered, albeit often conflicting, orientations which inform scholars of animal ethics. I am especially indebted to Randy Malamud of Georgia State University and Walter Hogan of Eastern Michigan University who were not only very generous in their praise of an earlier draft of this book, which helped persuade UBC Press that publication was merited, but who also made a number of valuable suggestions for improvements which I have endeavoured to follow. While they are, of course, not responsible for the contents of this book, it would certainly have been a less satisfactory volume without their critiques. Finally, my editor, Randy Schmidt, is the editor every author would want—one who is wholeheartedly on the author’s side in all those inconveniences which inevitably arise in the preparation of a book, even when the author gets a little testy. An explanation is due for the lack of a bibliography. An extensive list of cited works was prepared but since all the books are given full bibliographic reference in the notes, environmental, space, and cost considerations prevailed. A note on permissions: Extracts from “Essays” by Plutarch, translated by Robin Waterfield (Penguin Classics, 1992) © Robin Waterfield, 1992, and from Piers the Ploughman by William Langland, translated by J.F. Goodridge (Penguin Classics, 1959, revised edition 1966) © J.F. Goodridge, 1956, 1966, are reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Rod Preece, London, Ontario Christmas Day, 2001 Introduction My purpose in this book is to present some of the more compassionate and respectful attitudes toward our fellow creatures from the earliest writings to the opening decade of the twentieth century—after which, sensibilities to animals went into a period of modest decline and intellectual conceptions of animal capacities were dominated by the strictures of the Pavlovs and Piagets, before the great humanitarian revival of the 1970s. I have selected examples from the realm of myth, religion, poetry, philosophy, essays, novels, parliamentary proceedings, and other literature in a variety of forms. My criteria for selection have been threefold: (a) passages that are in and of themselves meritorious in expressing, or making the case for consideration of, animal well-being, animal interests, and/or animal rights; (b) passages that allow us to comprehend more readily the transformation from one level and form of sensibility to another; and (c) passages that have themselves stimulated further consideration of animal orientations. In a book of this genre it is inevitable that the compiler will have left out much he would have wished to include—and perhaps much of value of which he was woefully ignorant. But it is to be hoped that the reader, the researcher, the browser, and the dabbler will find examples of the most significant, and perhaps even a few of the less significant, contributions to sensibilities toward animals in these pages. It is to be hoped, too, that there is abundant material here that even the most avid reader of animal welfare and animal rights literature will not have encountered before. In all traditions, perhaps especially in the Western tradition as a consequence of its ever-increasing technological capacities, it is almost as easy to find instances of cruelty, denigration and dismissal, as it is to find those portraits that elevate the human spirit at the same time as they elevate those beings with whom we share our threatened planet. This book, then, does not purport to represent a microcosm of the whole. Instead, it represents a microcosm of humanity’s finer musings.