“We tread them to death, and a troop of them dies
Without our regard or concern,”
cheerfully remarked Dr. Watts concerning ants; but he might have said the same of our “unconcern” in the case of the cruel destruction of thousands of harmless birds and beasts and the starvation of their young, and of the all but universal recklessness of men in dealing with creatures not representing value in money.
It is not, however, to be reckoned as surprising that our forefathers did not dream of such a thing as duty to animals. They learned very slowly that they owed duties to men of other races than their own. Only on the generation which recognized thoroughly for the first time (thanks in great measure to Wilberforce and Clarkson) that the negro was “a man and a brother” did it dawn that, beyond the negro, there were other still humbler claimants for benevolence and justice. Within a few years passed both the emancipation of the West Indian slaves and that first act for prevention of cruelty to animals of which Lord Erskine so truly prophesied that it would prove, “not only an honor to the Parliament of England, but an era in the civilization of the world.”
But the noble law of England—which thus forestalled the moralists and set an example which every civilized nation, with one solitary exception, has followed—remains even to this day, after sixty years, still in advance of the systematic teachers of human duty. Even while every year sermons specially inculcating humanity to animals are preached all over the kingdom, nobody (so far as the present writer is aware) has attempted formally to include Duty to the Lower Animals in any complete system of ethics as an organic part of the Whole Duty of Man.[22]
Without pretending for a moment to fill up this gap in ethics, I would fain offer to those who are interested in the subject a suggestion which may possibly serve as a scaffolding till the solid edifice be built by stronger hands. We must perchance yet wait to determine what are the right actions of man to brute; but I do not think we need lose much time in deciding what must be the right sentiment, the general feeling wherewith it is fit we should regard the lower animals. If we can but clearly define that sentiment, it will indicate roughly the actions which will be consonant therewith.
In the first place, it seems to me that a sense of serious responsibility toward the brutes ought to replace our “lady-and-the-nosegay” condition of insouciance. The “ages before morality” are at an end at last, even in this remote province of human freedom. Of all the grotesque ideas which have imposed on us in the solemn phraseology of divines and moralists, none is more absurd than the doctrine that our moral obligations stop short where the object of them does not happen to know them, and assures us that, because the brutes cannot call us to account for our transgressions, nothing that we can do will constitute a transgression. To absolve us from paying for a pair of boots because our bootmaker’s ledger had unluckily been burned would be altogether a parallel lesson in morality. It is plain enough, indeed, that the creature who is (as we assume) without a conscience or moral arbitrament must always be exonerated from guilt, no matter what it may do of hurt or evil; and the judicial proceedings against, and executions of, oxen and pigs in the Middle Ages for manslaughter were unspeakably absurd. But not less absurd, on the other side, is it to exonerate men, who have consciences and free will, when they are guilty of cruelty to brutes, on the plea not that they, but the brutes are immoral and irresponsible.[23]
A moral being is not moral on one side of him only, but moral all round, and toward all who are above, beside, and beneath him: just as a gentleman is a gentleman not only to the king, but to the peasant; and as a truthful man speaks truth to friend and stranger. Just in the same way, the “merciful man is merciful to his beast,” as he is merciful to the beggar at his gate. I may add that every noble quality is specially tested by its exhibition in those humbler directions wherein there is nothing to be gained by showing it and nothing to be lost by contrary behavior.
There is a passage from Jeremy Bentham, quoted in Mrs. Jamieson’s Commonplace Book and elsewhere, which will recur to many readers at this point: “The day may come,” he says, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor.... The question is not, Can they reason? or Can they speak? but, Can they suffer?”
Long before Bentham, a greater mind, travelling along a nobler road of philosophy, laid down the canon which resolves the whole question. Bishop Butler affirmed that it was on the simple fact of a creature being SENTIENT—i.e., capable of pain and pleasure—that rests our responsibility to save it pain and give it pleasure. There is no evading this obligation, then, as regards the lower animals, by the plea that they are not moral beings. It is our morality, not theirs, which is in question. There are special considerations which in different cases may modify our obligation, but it is on such special reasons, not on the universal non-moral nature of the brutes (as the old divines taught), that our exoneration must be founded; and the onus lies on us to show cause for each of them.
The distinction between our duties to animals and our duties to our human fellow-creatures lies here. As regards them both, we are indeed forbidden to inflict avoidable pain, because both alike are sentient. But, as regards the brutes, our duties stop there: whereas, as regards men, they being moral as well as sentient beings, our primary obligations toward them must concern their higher natures, and include the preservation of the lives which those higher natures invest with a sanctity exclusively their own. Thus, we reach the important conclusion that the infliction of avoidable pain is the supreme offence as regards the lower animals, but not the supreme offence as regards man. Sir Henry Taylor’s noble lines go to the very root of the question:—