[131] Statutes of Great Britain and Ireland, lxii. 403 sqq.
[132] Stephen, New Commentaries on the Laws of England, iv. 213 sqq.
[133] von Hippel, op. cit. p. 1.
[134] Ibid. p. 90 sq.
Whatever be the professed motives of legislators for preventing cruelty to animals, there can be no doubt that the laws against it are chiefly due to a keener and more generally felt sympathy with their sufferings. The actual feelings of men have commonly been somewhat more tender than the theories of law, philosophy, and religion. The anthropocentric exclusiveness of Christianity was from ancient times to some extent counterbalanced by popular sentiments and beliefs. In the folk-tales of Europe man is not placed in an isolated and unique position in the universe. He lives in intimate and friendly intercourse with the animals round him, attributes to them human qualities, and regards them with mercy.[135] Tender feelings towards the brute creation are also displayed in many legends of saints.[136] St. Francis of Assisi talked with the birds and called them “brother birds” or “little sister swallows,” and was seen employed in removing worms from the road that they might not be trampled by travellers.[137] John Moschus speaks of a certain abbot who early in the morning not only used to give food to all the dogs in the monastery, but would bring corn to the ants and to the birds on the roof.[138] In the ‘Revelations of St. Bridget’ we read, “Let a man fear, above all, me, his God, and so much the gentler will he become towards my creatures and animals, on whom, on account of me, their Creator, he ought to have compassion.”[139] Many kind words about animals have come from poets and thinkers. Montaigne says that he has never been able to see without affliction an innocent beast, which is without defence and from which we receive no offence, pursued and killed.[140] Shakespeare points out that “the poor beetle that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance finds a pang as great as when a giant dies.”[141] Mandeville thinks that if it was not for that tyranny which custom usurps over us, no men of any tolerable good-nature could ever be reconciled to the killing of so many animals for their daily food, as long as the bountiful earth so plentifully provides them with varieties of vegetable dainties.[142] Towards the end of the eighteenth century Bentham wrote:—“Men must be permitted to kill animals; but they should be forbidden to torment them. Artificial death may be rendered less painful than natural death by simple processes, well worth the trouble of being studied, and of becoming an object of police. Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? A time will come when humanity will spread its mantle over everything that breathes. The lot of slaves has begun to excite pity; we shall end by softening the lot of the animals which labour for us and supply our wants.”[143] Some years later Thomas Young pronounced hunting, shooting, and fishing for sport to be “unlawful, cruel, and sinful.”[144] And in the course of the nineteenth century humanity to animals, from being conspicuous in a few individuals only, became the keynote of a movement gradually increasing in strength. Humanitarians, says Mr. Salt, “insist that the difference between human and non-human is one of degree only and not of kind, and that we owe duties, the same in kind though not in degree, to all our sentient fellow-beings.”[145] Some people maintain that it is wrong to kill animals for food or in sport; but the most vigorous attacks concerning the treatment of the brute creation are at present directed against the practice of vivisection. The claim is made that this practice should be, not merely restricted, but entirely prohibited by law. And while the antivivisectionists generally endeavour to deny or minimise the scientific importance of experiments on living animals, their cry for the abolition of such experiments is mainly based on the argument that humanity at large has no right to purchase relief from its own suffering by torturing helpless brutes.
[135] Supra, [i. 259]. Schwarz, Prähistorisch-anthropologische Studien, p. 203.
[136] Lecky, History of European Morals, ii. 168 sqq. Joyce, Social History of Ancient Ireland, ii. 517 sq.
[137] Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. 176 sq. Digby, Mores Catholici, ii. 291.
[138] Moschus, Pratum spirituale, 184 (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, Ser. Græca, lxxxvii. 3056).
[139] St. Bridget, quoted by Helps, op. cit. p. 124.