Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress

by Henry S. Salt

“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.”[27]

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.”[28]

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 [the fox] were able to understand and answer the question, he would choose life, with all its pains and risks, to non-existence without them.”[29] 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.

The most mischievous effect of the practice of flesh-eating, in its influence on the study of animals’ rights at the present time, is that it so stultifies and debases the very raison d’être of countless myriads of beings—it brings them into life for no better purpose than to deny their right to live. It is idle to appeal to the internecine warfare that we see in some aspects of wild nature, where the weaker animal is often the prey of the stronger, for there (apart from the fact that co-operation largely modifies competition) the weaker races at least live their own lives and take their chance in the game, whereas the victims of the human carnivora are bred, and fed, and from the first pre-destined to untimely slaughter, so that their whole mode of living is warped from its natural standard, and they are scarcely more than animated beef or mutton or pork. It has been well said that “to keep a man (slave or servant) for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may eat it, is a lie. You cannot look that man or animal in the face.”[30]

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.”