THE MOTORISED ARK:

THE IMPACT OF MODERNITY ON ANIMALS

Peter Beatson

INTRODUCTION: THE HISTORICAL SETTING

This monograph is intended to provide a down-to-earth, beginner’s guide to the most
recent epoch in human history, the one that is commonly termed ‘modernity’, and to
explore the impact it has made on non-human animals. We will start off in the present
part with an introductory explanation of what the term ‘modernity’ means. In the
remaining parts, seven major features of the modernisation process will be picked out
and explored. With each of these features, a brief, historical description will be given
of what happened in the human world, after which there will be a longer discussion of
its significance for animals. (In using the latter term, I am, of course, fully aware that
humans are also animals. It would be more accurate to employ terms like ‘other
animals’ or ‘non-human animals’. These, however, are rather cumbersome, so in line
with most other writers on human-animal relations, I will omit the qualifying terms
and for convenience stick to just plain ‘animals’.)

A Word of Caution about Dates and Labels

In a moment I will embark upon an introductory explanation of what our key term
‘modernity’ entails. First, however, a word of caution is necessary. In what follows, I
will be dividing up the whole of human history, and modernity in particular, into large
slabs, variously called ‘periods’, ‘eras’, ‘epochs’ or ‘ages’. Each of these will have a
label attached – ‘modernity’ being an obvious example. Various stretches of time will
be allotted to those epochs, ranging from 100,000 years to a century. Furthermore,
specific round dates, like 1450 or 1850, will be tagged as turning points between one
epoch and the next.

I must emphasise that all these are very approximate. There is little agreement
amongst historians about how human history should be carved up into eras, about
what labels to use for those eras, how long each lasted, and the dates when they began
and ended. In large part this lack of scholarly consensus is because real life historical
processes are slow, uneven and complicated. Humanity does not collectively agree
that on a certain date they will all, let us say, stop being hunter-gatherers and start
being farmers instead. History moves through an uneven series of leaps and lags, with
transformations in one place being offset by inertia in others. Furthermore, even if
there is general academic agreement that such-and-such a date can be regarded as a
handy milestone along the road of human development, it is always only approximate,
as the change in question may have been simmering away quietly for decades or even

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centuries, and may take many future generations to work its way into the bloodstream
of the whole human world.

We do not want to get bogged down in such historical debates, nor in academic
quarrels about nomenclature (that is, what to call each historical period), so I am
going to take a deep breath and provide readers with some rough-and-ready, ballpark
figures, and some labels of convenience, on the understanding that we may have to
agree to disagree about the dates I am using, and the names I have attached to the
various epochs. If we don’t take a few short cuts, we’ll never get anywhere!

Still on the subject of short-cuts, I should stress at the outset that my intention in this
article is to highlight the main defining characteristics of modernity – that is, the
features which mark it off most distinctively from all preceding history. To do this, I
have painted my canvas with very broad brushstrokes, and employed bold, contrasting
colours. These inevitably mask many nuances, subtleties and exceptions, of which
readers with even a modest general knowledge of history will be aware. To take one
concrete example, I state near the start of the discussion, and reiterate later, that
premodern societies tended to be oriented to the past, whereas modernity looks
forward to the future. When making this generalisation, I am conscious that in
complex historical reality there are still many people today whose thought and
conduct are based upon traditions drawn from the past, and also that there were some
in former times whose eyes were fixed on the road up ahead. To say, as I will do, that
modernity is characteristically progressive in outlook, while earlier epochs of history
were conservative, is thus clearly an over-simplification.

Just as I asked the reader’s tolerance above for my rather impressionistic use of dates,
time periods and labels, I will beg the same indulgence for the bold contrasts I make
between ‘now’ and ‘then’. If I were to pause constantly to spell out possible historical
exceptions or complications, the text would grow unmanageably long and
cumbersomely over-loaded with scholarly details. Please bear with my over-
simplifications by keeping in mind that it is my intention to distinguish what is unique
about the modern world, not to describe overlaps and continuities with former epochs.

Before the Modern Period: Prehistory and Traditionalism

Accepting what was just said about my dates being only approximate, my labels
arbitrary, and my contrasts not sufficiently nuanced, let’s plunge in and start dividing
human history into various broad epochs, starting with the two that preceded our own
modern one. I will keep my evocation of those earlier epochs very brief, as they are
not our main subject.

Prehistory: 100,000-10,000 years ago

This is by far the longest epoch in the history of our species homo sapiens, lasting
from when we distinguished ourselves from our hominid prototypes like the
Neanderthals somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago (nobody knows for
sure) till our forebears began to relinquish their hunter-gatherer life style in favour of
the farming of domesticated crops and animals about 10,000 years ago. We call that
epoch ‘prehistory’ simply because hunter-gatherers left no written records, so we
know little about them. They will only be dim shadows in the distant background of
our present story.

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Traditional society: 8000 BC to 1450 AD
This period got off to a slow start around 10,000 years ago as people gradually
discovered farming techniques, began building towns and developed written
language. We get glimpses of its early days in texts like the epic Greek poems of
Homer, and in the biblical Old Testament. Even though it passed through a number of
different stages, bearing names like ‘Classical Antiquity’, ‘the Dark Ages’ and
‘Mediaevalism’, for our present purposes it can be treated as one great mega-epoch.

Naturally, a great deal happened during those long millennia: cities were built and
crumbled to dust, empires rose and fell, gods were invented and forgotten, peoples
moved across continents, technology was developed and disseminated, famines, wars
and plagues came and went. Even so, compared with the rate and scale of change that
occurred in the modern epoch, it is probably not doing too much injustice to all
former history to say that by and large things remained much the same down the
centuries. If time travellers from Homer or the Old Testament were able to jump
forward to the fifteenth century, they would still have found themselves in a
recognisable world. As in their own time, it was a world where the vast bulk of the
population scratched a subsistence living from the soil, where all production was done
on a one-off basis by hand, where the menial, dirty or dangerous work was performed
by slaves, where monarchs, the nobility and priests ruled the roost, and where
anything and everything was explained in terms of religion and magic. Above all, it
was a world in which the condition of animals and their relationship with human
society remained largely unchanged. The life of both wild and domestic animals at the
dawn of modernity was very similar to that of their ancient Greek or Hebrew
ancestors.

I do not know of any one, agreed-upon name for this great sweep of human time, so
here I will rather lamely call it ‘traditional society’, with ‘premodernity’ sometimes
used for variety. ‘Traditionalism’ has the advantage of indicating the major cultural
feature of that former time – namely, that people thought, felt and acted on the basis
of traditions handed down from the past. They lived with their eyes fixed on the rear-
vision mirror, their minds directed back to the customs of the ancestors. Modernity,
on the other hand, was resolutely future-oriented, lashed onwards by the secular high
priests of the new god Progress. Throughout this article, I will make regular if brief
references to how things used to be in the old world, in order to highlight the
significant changes that occurred in modernity.

Modernity and its Four Stages

Now we come to our main subject – modernity. In common parlance, the term
‘modern’ usually refers to things that are happening now, or happened in the recent
past. It is a synonym for ‘contemporary’. There is nothing wrong with this everyday
usage, except that academics tend to employ the term in a technical sense that is at
once more general and more specific. For them, modernity refers to a period of
history that dates back (depending on who is counting) between 200 and 600 years,
and which developed a range of characteristics that marked it off sharply from
traditionalism. Indeed, the accumulating differences between the modern and the
premodern became so great, and happened so comparatively quickly, many historians

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regard the advent of modernity as the greatest transformation humanity had
undergone since the domestication of crops and animals some 10,000 years before.

Although a very short epoch by comparison with the many thousands of years of
preceding history, modernity was not an undifferentiated lump. It can be usefully
divided up into four sub-epochs, each of which added new ingredients to the mix.
Here are their approximate dates and major features.

Early modernity: 1450-1650

It all began around the second half of the fifteenth century with a series of events to
which historians have attached names like ‘The Age of Discovery’, ‘the Renaissance’
and ‘the Reformation’, and it culminated in the seventeenth century with the dawn of
the ‘Age of Reason’. Important seeds of modernity were sewn during those 200 or so
years, but they will remain underground throughout most of our discussion, as we are
more interested in their germination and subsequent flowering in the three later
periods.

The modernist take-off: 1650-1850

These were the deadline centuries for modernity, when people in western Europe and
North America were forced to become consciously aware that their old, traditional
way of life was changing radically and ineluctably. Everything that has happened
since then was built on the foundations laid down during what has been termed ‘the
Age of Revolutions’.

There were four such revolutions to justify this name. The first was in the domain of
thought; labelled ‘the Age of Reason’ or ‘the Enlightenment’, it was characterised by
a vogue for science in intellectual circles, coupled with a radical challenge to existing
political, class and religious institutions. The second facet of the epoch saw this
challenge turned into action through a series of political revolutions in England,
America and France aimed at the absolute power of despotic monarchs and, in the
American case, at British colonialism.

Third, there were the twin industrial and agrarian revolutions which transformed the
economic infrastructure of the West, and ushered in the age of mass production.
Finally, there was a demographic revolution which saw the beginnings of the
worldwide population explosion, through which ever more human bodies cluttered up
the overloaded ark. The Age of Revolutions will figure quite prominently in our
narrative, as it was then, rather than in the early modernist period, that the familiar
contours of today’s world began to emerge clearly.

High modernity: 1850-1950

I have labelled this epoch ‘high’ modernity for three reasons. In the first place,
through what is sometimes termed ‘the second industrial revolution’, humanity
developed forms of knowledge, energy and technology that are still the mainstay of
economic and social life today. These included the harnessing of electricity and
petroleum, and inventions such as the internal combustion engine, planes, telegraphy,
phones, plastics, radio, movies - the list is endless. Second, it was a period during
which industrialisation spread from its British heartland to the rest of the world.
Finally, I call it ‘high’ modernity because much of humanity actively embraced and
promoted it. They believed in the great god Progress, through which the human

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species had defeated age-old enemies like poverty, disease and the harshness of
nature. It was the heroic epoch of modernity, to whose triumphal march even two
devastating world wars made many positive contributions.

Postmodernity: 1950-present
The term ‘postmodernity’ was riding high in intellectually fashionable circles 20
years ago, but has now rather dropped out of favour. Some people say that the half-
century or so since the end of World War II just continued patterns laid down earlier
in the century, and did not need a special name of its own. Others accepted that the
post-war period was qualitatively different in many respects from its predecessor, but
preferred to designate it by terms like ‘post-industrialism’, ‘post-Fordism’, ‘the
Information Age’ or ‘the Age of Spectacle’, rather than postmodernism. In this article,
I will stick to the latter term, even though it may irritate some people. It has the merit
of containing the core word ‘modern’, thus linking back to the previous stages of
modernity, while the ‘post-‘ in the title suggests not only that it was a new historical
phase, but that it transcended the more old-fashioned mode of modernity that
culminated in WWII.

Of special relevance to our present interests is the fact that this transcendence is
particularly noticeable in the way that humans in our own postmodern age think and
feel about their fellow passengers on the earth ark, and how they act towards them. It
is still a pretty bleak outlook for the animals down in the hold, but postmodern Noah
seems slightly more concerned about their wellbeing, at both the level of species
conservation and the level of individual suffering, than he was earlier in the journey
into modernity. It would be premature to call this ‘the Age of Animals’, but maybe it
is a turning point. My reason for such guarded optimism will emerge as the narrative
unfolds.

Seven Key Themes

Modernity is a vast field, involving changes in every sphere of society from culture
through politics to the economy. It is not my intention to attempt a total historical
coverage of events in the human world, as it is the animal side of the story which is to
be our main focus. To sharpen that focus, I have picked out seven features of
modernisation with most direct relevance to animals. It is they, after all, who are the
major actors in the present drama – the human world is just the stage setting. Here is a
brief preview of the seven key themes around which this article will be structured:

Globalisation
Science
Industrialisation
Population
Nature
Humanitarianism
Rights.

As was mentioned at the start, the discussion under each of those headings will begin
with a section called ‘The Human World’, in which I pick out aspects of modern
human history with clear and immediate relevance to animals. The history in question
is limited to the West, notably Britain, northwestern Europe and North America, as

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this was the seed ground of modernity. The human history will be followed by a
longer section within each theme entitled ‘The Animal Side of the Story’, where I
describe the impact on animals of the points thus singled out.

When narrating the animal side of the story, I will provide some basic facts, but more
importantly will attempt a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ of their impact on Noah’s
passengers. Some will be neutral in their consequences, others will be destructive, and
others again will enhance animal wellbeing. As in the human world, the impact of
modernisation on animals is a mixed bag, neither totally good nor bad. I hope to give
readers an overall feel for this mixture.

In conducting the reckoning, I will operate on two distinct levels, one concerning the
wellbeing of individual animals, the other that of entire species. It is necessary to
make this distinction, as human actions may cause suffering and death to countless
individual animals, yet in the long run benefit their species as a whole.

I must emphasise from the outset, that the account of the positive and negative
features of modernity is my own personal one, and that where I have strong feelings
about how modern humanity has treated animals, I do not hesitate to express them.
Readers are, of course, at perfect liberty to draw different conclusions from the facts I
present. However, it is time now to wind up the introductions and set out in Noah’s
newly motorised ark on our journey of discovery across the ocean of modernity.

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 PART ONE: GLOBALISATION
THE HUMAN WORLD

In the premodern world, the various continents and islands of the planet, once having
been originally settled by humans by around 12,000 years ago, remained largely
sealed off from one another by ocean barriers. With exceptions like the Polynesians in
the Pacific, people remained on the lands their ancestors had occupied for millennia,
venturing only small distances by sea.

This changed dramatically at the dawn of early modernity around the turn of the
sixteenth century, a period known to European historians as the Age of Discovery or
Age of Exploration, when Spanish and Portuguese explorers like Vasco da Gama,
Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan set out into the unknown. They went
off in small wooden sailing ships, equipped with primitive navigational technology
and sketchy, inaccurate or totally blank maps. Some turned east round the tip of South
Africa, headed across the Indian Ocean and eventually reached Japan. Others set off
west across the Atlantic, bumped by accident into a continent they called America
(which they hadn’t previously known about), found their way around it into the
Pacific, and finally completed the circumnavigation of the entire globe.

Spain and Portugal were subsequently joined and eclipsed in the race to discover,
chart and dominate the rest of the globe by other maritime nations along the western
European seaboard, notably the Netherlands, France and above all England. By the
mid-eighteenth century, with Captain Cook’s charting of New Zealand at the extreme
antipodes from England, the last ocean barriers to European knowledge, trade and
military domination were breached. Potentially, if not yet in actuality, the whole
world became one unified system, encapsulated in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan’s
catchy expression ‘the global village’. In effect, Planet Earth was shrinking in both
space and time.

This time-space shrinkage continued with increasing momentum in the age of high
modernity through the invention and deployment of ever more effective travel and
communications technology. When steamships were introduced from about 1850, the
time it took to get from England to New Zealand was cut from around six months to
six weeks, while the dangers of shipwreck and the hardships of sea travel were also
greatly reduced. At much the same time, telegraphic communication was pioneered:
cables were laid across the ocean beds, thereby enabling instantaneous
communication between many parts of the world. This was further enhanced in the
early twentieth century by the advent of telephones and the wireless. Then in the post-
modern period since World War II, there was another great leap forward with the
universal spread of commercial jet travel by air - you could now get from England to
New Zealand in 24 hours – and by spectacular advances in telecommunications
involving television, computers, satellites, cables, the internet, cell phones and the
integration of all these into one instantaneous, all-encompassing system of
communications. The whole planet was saturated in media messages. Those Spanish
and Portuguese explorers at the dawn of modernity could have had absolutely no
inkling of the globalising process they were setting in motion, and even Marshall

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McLuhan, writing about the global village on the cusp between high modernity and
postmodernity, didn’t know a fraction of what was to come.

Here, then, we have our first major theme – the first defining characteristic that
distinguishes modernity from human life on earth in the preceding 100,000 years or
so. Today, messages flow over the face of the entire globe in real time. If rather more
slowly, people and goods can travel quickly and in comparative safety by sea and air
from one part of the planet to another. As a result of these breakthroughs in
communication and travel, everyone in the world is instantly aware of what is
happening everywhere else, and their lives are unavoidably affected by decisions and
events in far-off places. Like it or hate it, the planet has become one place.

So much for the human side of the story. Now for our main interest – the impact that
globalisation has had on all the other passengers in Noah’s ark who have been taken
along for the ride.

THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY

As westerners from the sixteenth century on progressively conquered barriers of time
and space to transform Planet Earth into one interconnected global system, they
dragged all other animal species along with them into that system. The European
discovery of sea routes to the Americas and the Pacific, their later mastery of air
travel, and their saturation of the globe in telecommunications not only transformed
the face of the human landscape but also brought about equally major changes in the
lot of non-human animals who shared that space.

Animal Emigrants
Even though the sailing ships with which western European explorers, invaders and
settlers conquered the world’s sea routes were tiny and over-crowded, they almost
always contained an additional quota of animals from the homeland. In the premodern
world, apart from migrations along continuous land corridors, four-footed animals,
like their two-legged counterparts, tended to stay in much the same place down the
generations. They most certainly did not colonise other continents. Once the
modernisation process got under way, this enforced parochialism was replaced by the
wholesale internationalisation of the animal kingdom. Species once indigenous to just
one region could find themselves living almost anywhere on the globe.

The non-human colonists were of six broad categories. First, there were farm
livestock like cattle, pigs, hens and sheep, that provided food on the journey, but more
importantly were to form the basis of farming industries in the new colonies, along
with the working dogs that guarded and herded them. In the second place there were
members of the horse family, which were essential elements of military conquests,
and equally necessary for routine transport and haulage. Then there were the four-
footed crew members - cats and dogs who were taken along to keep shipboard vermin
down, but then went ashore and settled alongside humans in the colonies. Those
working cats and dogs overlapped with a fourth category of non-human immigrants
that need a mention – the pets which many sailors, and subsequent settlers, took along
as friends.

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The above four categories were all domesticated animals, habituated to association
with humans over the millennia. However, the ranks of such domesticated animal
colonists were swollen by two broad categories of wild animals. On the one hand,
outward-bound ships increasingly contained species intended for acclimatisation in
the newly established human homelands. Settlers wanted their new homes to contain
familiar features of their old ones, so they took along forms of wildlife to which they
were sentimentally attached, such as songbirds. They also chose for acclimatisation
species of game, like deer and trout, to be hunted for food or for fun in the new as in
the old world. When those wild colonial animals got out of hand, as happened with
deer, rabbits and possums in some countries, people then had the bright idea of
acclimatising yet more wild species like stoats, weasels and ferrets, to keep the pests
down.

This mention of pests brings us to the other broad category of non-domesticated

animals that took to sea along with humans. Unlike the ones chosen for
acclimatisation, these were not deliberately exported from Europe to the new world,
but were cheeky stowaways, like rats, mice, fleas and cockroaches, that infested all
sailing ships, then proceeded to overrun their new host country.

The upshot of this globalisation of other species was that all the lands on which
Europeans settled were made over zoologically in the image of western Europe. For
livestock and wildlife, as well as humans, it really was a global village. Wherever
Europeans set foot on colonised soil, they encountered familiar creatures – cattle,
sheep and horses in the fields, pigs and poultry in the farmyard, cats and dogs around
the house, magpies and thrushes in the trees, deer in the woods, and the whole place
overrun with rats and rabbits. At the dawn of modernity, travellers had met strange,
exotic creatures in each new land they explored; by the age of high modernity, this
exciting if sometimes unnerving sense of difference was replaced by near-universal
sameness.

What about the animals themselves? What would a cost-benefit reckoning of their
new global hegemony reveal? If we were sheep, for instance, how would we feel
about our transportation from Canterbury, England, to Canterbury, New Zealand?
Let’s focus for the moment on those who were actually born in the new country,
leaving a discussion of the voyage itself aside for a minute. How did the second
generation of emigrants and their descendants fare?

On the negative side of the ledger, life must have been wretched in the extreme if
there was an obvious mismatch between the biology of the species or breed in
question and the environment into which it was transplanted. An obvious example is
that of the unfortunate sheep that have been exposed to the sometimes lethally harsh
climate and terrain of the Australian outback. From a humanitarian point of view, it is
difficult to see how humans could justify condemning those unfortunate animals to
lives made miserable by extreme heat and drought for which their thick wool made
them totally unsuited.

Such cruel, humanly engineered mismatches of biology and environment apart,

though, I personally do not believe that the global spread of animals has had a
negative impact either on individuals or species. Most exported animals can probably
meet their individual needs – food, water, shelter, company, freedom of movement etc

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– much the same abroad as in their ancestral homelands. As for the welfare of entire
species, colonisation has been an actual boon. Whatever wild species may be heading
for extinction, those whom humans have taken under their wing have thrived as never
before under the modernising process.

Exotic Imports
The aspect of globalisation discussed above involved outward-bound animals settling
in new homes abroad. The other side of the coin is the flow of in-coming exotic
animals, or parts of dead animals, from the periphery of the world to its commercial
centres. First by sea, then by air, modernity was characterised by an ever-expanding
animal import trade. In part this comprised raw materials or artefacts harvested from
slaughtered wildlife. Some of these may have been killed to meet what we might call
legitimate functional needs, notably food, but by and large they simply pandered to
unnecessary fads and fashions in clothing and personal adornment, in recreational
pastimes, in curios, or in scientifically unfounded beliefs about the virility-enhancing
qualities of animal products.

We will come back to this side of the animal import game in a minute. However, it
wasn’t just bits and pieces of dead animals that poured from the periphery to the
centre. Modernity also witnessed a similar in-bound flood of live animal imports.
Monkeys, turtles, parrots, tigers, elephants, tuatara, wombats, giraffes, killer whales…
you name it, you can bet that somewhere there was someone prepared to pay good
money to own it. By the same token, there has been a worldwide network of people
willing to collect or poach such animals, transport them openly or illicitly, and to
market them in the developed world. Some of these enforced immigrants were
destined for the entertainment industry, notably circuses, zoos and marinelands, while
others were for personal display as faddish pets. A third broad category disappeared
behind the resolutely closed doors of industrial and biomedical laboratories.

Reckoning up the cost/benefit ledger for this aspect of globalisation, my guess would
be that the benefits lie almost all on the human side, while the costs fall heavily on the
animals. Zoo and circus animals are lifetime prisoners, sometimes in very unpleasant,
even downright cruel jails. Conditions in certain Western zoos have improved over
recent decades, and may be quite tolerable for some species, but it is nevertheless a
miserable spectacle to see what could have been free-ranging wild animals cooped up
behind barriers to be gawped at by humans. As for the tortures inflicted by science,
medicine and industry on laboratory animals, there is absolutely no question that they
pay a tragically high cost for whatever benefits humans may derive from experiments
and tests.

Travel Conditions
In the two preceding sections, the situation of animals moved from one part of the
global village to another has been discussed. Now let’s take a step back from the life
of migrants in their new homes to the conditions under which the first generation
actually got there. Here the story is almost universally miserable, if not heart-
breaking. Whether they were exported from the global heartland to the periphery, as
with sheep to New Zealand, or imported in the opposite direction, as with monkeys
bound for Western research laboratories, the animal suffering involved scarcely bears

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thinking about, especially but not uniquely in the old sailing days, when voyages were
so much longer than today. Conditions on those sailing ships were appalling for their
human crews, who suffered from poor food and hunger, foul water and thirst,
overcrowded conditions, endemic illnesses and all the hardships inflicted by climatic
extremes and punishing weather. Things must have been even more nightmarish for
the sheep, pigs, hens, cattle, goats and the like who were penned up on those ships in
small cages or crowded holds, where physical suffering would have been amplified by
the emotional stress any animal would experience when taken out of its natural setting
and imprisoned in an ocean-going hell. The inevitable result was the high death rate
on all such unsavoury Noah’s arks. Just to take one amongst countless examples,
during the Boer War, over 6,000 army horses died of hardship when shipped from
South America to the African war zone (note 1).

One would like to think such callousness was a thing of the past, but it still continues
today with the live shipment of large consignments of livestock from countries like
Australia to places such as the Middle East. It is considered an acceptable risk that a
large number of the unfortunate animals will die on the way of disease, overheating,
suffocation or just downright emotional stress; the wretchedness of the survivors is a
matter of indifference to the commercial calculations of their human owners and
shippers. Even the shorter process of plane transport almost always causes suffering
and not infrequently death to the animals involved, through being crammed into
overcrowded and badly ventilated crates, subjected to thirst, hunger and the
ubiquitous stress that accompanies all live animal shipment. The risks are particularly
great where the animals are being covertly smuggled, when not even token attempts
are made to protect their welfare, and whatever minimal provisions are made for
lawfully transported animals do not apply. Basically, from the time animals are driven
from the farm or snatched from their wild habitat to the time the survivors emerge on
another part of the earth’s surface, they disappear into a black hole, where few
humans know or care what physical and emotional torments they experience.

Fatal Contact
Till now, we have been dealing with those animals who get lugged by humans from
one part of the world to another. What about the ones who – along with indigenous
humans – already occupied the continents and islands that brash European explorers
claimed to have ‘discovered’? The impact upon animals native to such countries, from
the New Zealand huia and the dodo of Mauritius to American bison, was universally
negative – all cost and no benefit. It can be summed up in a term applied to the fate of
many colonised humans: ‘fatal contact’.

Throughout the entire history of our lethal species, there has been a tendency for local
animals to go abruptly extinct the minute humans appeared on the scene, as witness
the demise of the moa in New Zealand when Maori showed up. However, the rate of
extinctions increased cataclysmically during the modern epoch, partly due to the
globalising process we are now discussing, and partly to other features of modernity,
such as industrialisation and population change, to be discussed in later parts of this
monograph.

On the globalising front, the fatal contact occurred for two main reasons. In the first
place, once Europeans and their satellite colonists in America and elsewhere had

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conquered the world’s oceans, they unleashed a reign of commercially driven
genocide on all marketable species wherever they could be found on land, in the air or
at sea. In North America during the latter nineteenth century, they systematically
exterminated the native bison, while earlier, on the other side of the world, sealers
drove the mainland population of New Zealand fur seals to extinction. Out on the high
seas, Western whalers virtually denuded the oceans of whales. People in the
developed world had an insatiable greed for bits and pieces of dead animals: elephant
tusks for billiard balls, alligators for shoes and handbags, leopard skins for celebrities,
whalebone for corsets, feathers for headgear, rhino horns for limp but horny Asian
gentlemen… the list was endless. Humans have always had a hankering after animal
artefacts, but what was new in the modern period was the sheer scale on which the
carnage was conducted. Even scientific naturalists contributed to the slaughter, since
the term ‘conservation’ had not yet entered their vocabulary, and their main concern
was to kill, stuff and send home as many interesting specimens as they could manage;
the rarer the species, the more compulsive was the scientific impulse to bag the few
who remained.

Along with this human-inflicted carnage, the various forms of colonising animals
mentioned earlier, from livestock through pets to relocated wildlife, also wreaked
havoc on the native fauna. In some cases they killed and ate it, in other cases they
competed successfully for its food supplies, while in others again they destroyed its
natural habitat. We will have more to say about species extinction in our later
discussion of industrialisation. For the moment we are just highlighting the fact that
whatever benefits globalisation brought for human colonists and their animal
sidekicks, it had universally disastrous effects on the colonised fauna.

Global Awareness and Mobilisation

From the foregoing discussion, it would appear that the globalising processes that
drove modernisation brought good news and bad news for other animals. The good
news was for what we termed the ‘colonising animals’: life was hell for the first
generation during the journey, but once settled the species as a whole proliferated.
However, globalisation was very rough on wildlife in the newly colonised territories,
whether they stayed put and got decimated, or endured nightmarish journeys by ship
or plane to the global heartland, where they were imprisoned in zoos, circuses and
science labs. Other imports had mixed fates as household pets, but would probably, if
given the choice, have preferred their native ecosystem to a high-rise New York
apartment or wherever.

To end this section on a slightly brighter note, there is another aspect of global
modernity – other, that is, than the physical movement of people and goods around
the world – which is beginning to work in animals’ favour. This is contemporary
humanity’s capacity to mobilise itself on the grand scale on behalf of animals. It does
this through the creation of world-wide pro-animal organisations, through the
financial and human resources these are able to assemble and deploy, the growing
number of internationally influential treaties, conventions, declarations, embargoes
and the like which they promulgate, and their capacity through modern
telecommunication technology to instantaneously saturate the world with information,
ideas and images. A selective sample list would include:

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 • International Fund for Animal Welfare
• World Organisation for Animal Health (Organisation International des
Épizooties)
• World Wildlife Fund
• Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare
• Compassion in World Farming
• Green Peace
• International Society for Applied Ethology
• World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences
• International Whaling Commission
• World Society for the Protection of Animals
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora.

Such international organisations and agreements variously target those who

commercially exploit animals, governmental regulations, scientific researchers,
consumers of animal products, and taken-for-granted cultural attitudes. Between
them, they intervene to protect endangered species, to rescue animals from natural or
human-made disasters, and to defend them from all forms of cruelty, be this in
agribusiness, family farms, the entertainment industries, domestic households, city
streets or out in the wild. Thus, although globalisation has generated widespread
suffering and species extinction for the non-human animals caught up in the
modernisation project, it has also – if belatedly and inadequately – provided those
humans who care about the plight of animals with the means of acting worldwide on
their behalf.

13
 PART TWO: SCIENCE

THE HUMAN WORLD

The first strand of modernity involved a revolution in travel and communication
through which humans overcame geographical barriers, thereby transforming Planet
Earth into one integrated system. Our second theme concerns a revolution in the
domain of thought, although it had major flow-on physical consequences for our
capacity to master the natural world.

Epistemology and the Scientific Method

We might as well introduce a useful technical term right at the start. The modernist
transformation of humanity’s collective thought processes occurred in the branch of
philosophy known as ‘epistemology’. Epistemology involves speculations about how
knowledge is acquired and tested. It asks questions like: ‘How do I know what I
know?’; ‘Why do I believe what I believe?’; ‘What is Truth, and how do I find it?’.

In traditional societies, epistemology was founded on the authority of the past –

people knew and believed what their ancestors had known and believed – coupled
with total faith in the wisdom of religious experts like priests and theologians. The
masses were steeped in folklore, which was a confused mish-mash of superstition and
hearsay, passed down the generations through what we used to call ‘old wives’ tales’.
The small, educated elite, for their part, accepted on trust what they were told by the
fathers of the Church, which in turn was a mixture of truths deduced from the Bible,
from the writings of ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, and their own
metaphysical speculations. Anybody who departed from the orthodox canons of
accepted wisdom had their heretical inclinations curbed by the Church’s mind police,
at the limit being burned alive at the stake.

Then came the great modernist challenge to traditional epistemology. It can be

summed up in one word: ‘science’. It began around the seventeenth century in what
has been called the Age of Reason, when astronomers like Galileo Galilei and Isaac
Newton began figuring out how the cosmos really worked, and philosophers like
Renee Descartes and Francis Bacon provided both the theoretical justification for
such enquiries, and also proposals for the methodology by which they were conducted
(to which we will return in a moment).

The seeds planted in the seventeenth century Age of Reason bore a rich harvest in the
so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when progressive intellectuals
embraced the scientific mode of enquiry in increasing numbers, and applied it to ever
widening fields of investigation, some out of intellectual curiosity, others because of
its practical benefits for medicine and industry. The ferment of interest in science
amongst the thinking classes was reflected in the foundation of formal academies and
informal discussion groups dedicated to it, like the British Royal Society, founded in
the mid-seventeenth century, and the Lunar Society a century later, the latter giving
philosophers, scientists and hard-nosed industrialists a chance to intellectually cross-
fertilise one another.

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On the other side of the epistemological fence, the religious establishment felt
radically imperilled, since its monopoly on Truth, its social status and privileges, and
in some places its very existence were coming under increasing challenge. It therefore
mobilised its considerable forces, both rhetorical and coercive, to suppress, discredit,
out-argue or ridicule its new secular rival.

What, then, was this famous ‘scientific method’ that caused such a stir? It is
disarmingly easy to describe. It involved the sceptical dismissal of all second-hand
beliefs, be those the folklore of the uneducated masses or the learned pronouncements
of theologians, in favour of the first-hand observation of nature, and the application of
reason to what was observed. The key to it all was ‘empiricism’ – that is to say,
looking at the world for oneself, describing, measuring and classifying what one saw,
and wherever possible checking those observations out through the use of controlled
laboratory tests and experiments. From such empirical observations, theories or even
laws could be developed to explain the relationship between natural phenomena,
theories based upon a rigorous application of logic and expressed where possible in
mathematical terms. The approach encouraged a healthy scepticism towards all
beliefs that could not be subjected to such controlled scrutiny. The backward-looking
collective wisdom of the past was to be replaced by progressive individual enquiry.

The foundations of modern science were laid down during the Renaissance, the Age
of Reason and the subsequent Enlightenment, but it was really the epoch we are
calling ‘high modernity’ that institutionalised these promising beginnings into
something approaching a hegemonic, worldwide mind set. High modernity was the
age of the scientist. Not only did it spawn a myriad of new discoveries, theories and
laws, from the germ theory of disease and the Darwinian theory of the origins of
species in the nineteenth century, through nuclear fission, quantum mechanics and the
law of relativity in the early twentieth, to the structure of the genome in our own time,
but there was a more diffuse and general faith amongst lay people in science’s
problem-solving capacity. Modern humanity came to believe in scientists, as once
they had believed in shamans, witch doctors, tohunga, folk healers and priests.
Though most people still possessed a literal belief in the existence of the supernatural,
for practical everyday purposes they had shifted their allegiance from magic to the
marvels of modern science.

It should be added, though, that this modernist veneration for science abated
somewhat in the postmodern period, as people grew conscious of just how destructive
science’s offspring, like nuclear fission and industrial chemicals, could be, and also as
they grew aware of the limitations of its alleged omnipotence. In the postmodern
world, science thus lost some of the moral authority it had abrogated to itself during
high modernity. Even so, in most developed countries today outside the American
‘Bible Belt’ and theocracies such as Iran, scientists continue to exercise the influence
and command the respect once reserved for experts in the supernatural.

Although these modernist high priests presided over just about every aspect of human
life, there are four aspects of science which are worth picking out for a special
mention in light of their significance for animals. These are biology, medicine,
psychology and industrial chemistry. They will be briefly evoked now, and their
relevance for good or ill to animals will be examined in the next section.

15
Biology
Although scientists from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment on applied their
new brand of epistemology, combining mathematical reason, empirical observation
and experimentation, to every facet of the natural world from the behaviour of
chemicals to the motions of the planets, the branch of modern science with most
relevance for our story was biology – the science of life. (In parenthesis it should be
noted in the cause of scholarly accuracy that the actual term ‘biology’ did not come
into vogue until the nineteenth century; before that, it was subsumed under terms like
‘natural history’ or ‘naturalism’.) Starting with breakthroughs like William Harvey’s
discovery in the seventeenth century of how blood circulates, scientists we would now
call biologists undertook an increasingly intensive study of the anatomy of the living
organism (that is, how it was structured) and of its physiology (how its various
internal systems operated). As science developed, it was able to probe ever deeper
into the mysteries of living beings, delving below the level of individual cells to
finally reach the DNA code at the very foundation of life itself.

Medicine
The new science of biology was not driven by intellectual curiosity alone, although
that did play a significant motivating role. It went hand-in-hand with the application
of its findings to the medical domain – a field which in pre-modern times was based
on largely erroneous notions of how the human body operated, and therefore of how it
could be healed. The new discipline of ‘biomedicine’ which came on stream from
around the middle of the nineteenth century cracked a whole series of mysteries,
starting with the theory of how germs operated and culminating by World War II with
the discovery of how they could be fought with antibiotics like penicillin. More
generally, biomedicine developed a vast battery of therapeutic drugs to fix everything
from depression to impotence, of pain-killing anaesthetics, and of diagnostic, surgical
and palliative techniques.

Psychology
The third scientific development in the high modern period of relevance to our story is
the study of the human mind and its biological infrastructure in the brain. A whole
new scientific discipline called psychology came into existence, devoted to the
objective study of emotions, memory, learning, perception and the like. As with its
parent discipline biology, much psychological enquiry was motivated by sheer
intellectual curiosity – researchers wanted to find out precisely how the human brain
and nervous system functioned – but its findings became the basis of a branch of
medicine devoted to the treatment of mental and emotional disorders and
abnormalities, mainly by blitzing patients with chemical substances allegedly
possessing therapeutic or palliative properties.

Commercial chemistry
On a rather different branch of the tree of scientific knowledge to the ones discussed
above, there was a prolific growth during high modernity of what might be termed
either ‘industrial’ or ‘commercial’ chemicals. A brief representative list would include
cleaning products to make housework easier, cosmetics to transform ugly ducklings
into swans, fertilisers to ensure abundant harvests, and pesticides to eradicate pesky
insects. Furthermore, a vast array of chemicals was mixed in with other industrial
products, notably food and drinks, to enhance their commercial appeal. At the zenith

16
of high modernity, virtually the whole planet was becoming saturated in industrial
chemicals and their waste by-products.

Having highlighted those four aspects of the scientific revolution that distinguished
modernity from traditionalism, let us now turn to the animal kingdom and suggest
how they were experienced there.

THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY

Let’s now do a spot of speculative cost/benefit reckoning of the impact of modern
science on the animal kingdom, as we did with globalisation. This will also help
explain why it is that the four aspects of science evoked above were singled out for
special mention.

The Benefits of Medical Science for Animals

On the positive side of the ledger, the clearer understanding of life processes provided
by biology, and their applications to modern medicine, have undoubtedly been a
major boon to non-human as well as human animals. This was particularly the case
with the branch of medical science specific to animals, namely veterinary medicine,
of which the first school was founded in France in 1761. Today’s vets work in a wide
range of fields, from the personal care of household pets through to the control of
large-scale epidemics. Thanks to vets, all animals living under the dominion of
humanity now stand a much better chance of receiving adequate medical care, from
vaccination through drug treatment and painless surgery to euthanasia, than their
premodern forebears. If we accept that, despite its many blunders and wrong
directions, modern medicine on balance has ameliorated the human condition, it is
logical to accept that other animal species have also benefited from advances in
biomedicine (despite the high cost many animals have paid to achieve such progress –
a point I will come back to later).

This improvement is despite the fact that veterinary care is frequently provided not
out of selfless concern for the wellbeing of animals but for hard-nosed commercial
reasons. Sheep are drenched, racehorses medically cosseted, chickens drenched with
antibiotics and the like to make them more productive: healthy animals make for
wealthy owners and well-paid vets. Even granted that rather cynical point, it must be
conceded that veterinary medicine has had a positive role to play in ameliorating the
suffering inherent in animal husbandry, from castration at one end of the life cycle to
slaughter at the other. On balance, then, it would probably be fair to say that, with one
large proviso we will come to soon, modern biomedicine has benefited other animal
species along with humanity.

The Costs and Benefits of Zoology and its Offspring

I have reserved for a special mention the branch of biology most clearly focused on
non-human animals, namely zoology. In the traditional, premodern period, what most
people, even educated scholars, knew about other animals was largely a blend of
picturesque but inaccurate folk beliefs, moral fables, superstitions, religious edicts and
semi-scientific observations made way back in classical antiquity by writers such as

17
Aristotle and never subsequently checked out. The new, empirical approach to science
cleared away this clutter of erroneous folk beliefs and superstitions. Many of those,
such as the association of cats with black magic, could have appallingly cruel
consequences for the animals in question. Even at their most harmless, folklore and
superstition prevented people from gaining a clear, accurate understanding of
animals’ true nature - ignorance which led humans to inflict widespread animal
suffering through inadvertence. The new scientific discipline of zoology helped put an
end to such misunderstandings and the animal abuse to which it gave rise.

Taxonomy
Zoology (which, like biology, used to be subsumed under the terms ‘natural history’
or naturalism’) started out in an objective, quantitative way in the eighteenth century
with the collection and classification of specimens of fauna and flora. The grandfather
of such taxonomy (i.e. scientific classification) was the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus,
who developed the modern system of dividing organisms into ever more specific
pigeon holes labelled kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.

When natural history took off in a burst of academic excitement about discovering,
naming, classifying and collecting specimens of new species, the results could be
rather devastating for the unfortunate fauna thus discovered. There was nothing
harmful in itself about the fashion for slotting ever more species into Linnaeus’s
taxonomic system, but the problem, as mentioned earlier, was that the collecting craze
frequently involved the indiscriminate slaughter of specimens. Many of the carcasses
were preserved and shipped back to moulder in museums, but some naturalists,
including Charles Darwin, seemed to knock the objects of their study off for no
reason other than the fun of it.

Zoos
To add insult to injury, members of certain exotic species with public appeal were
captured and sent back to drag out short and miserable lives behind bars in zoos. From
their inception around the eighteenth century, such zoological institutions (originally
called ‘menageries’) frequently legitimised their existence by evoking their services to
natural history: they facilitated the study of overseas wildlife and promoted public
education about it. Such rhetorical appeals to the scientific cause, however, were thin
veneers for the principle function of zoological gardens – to make money by
pandering to idle public curiosity.

Let’s now move from the debit to the credit side of the ledger, beginning with the
zoos we have just slated. It must be conceded that although life in a zoo may be a
miserable affair for individual inmates, in the postmodern period it has come to serve
a valuable function for endangered species as a whole. Many of these are being
pushed to extinction out in the wild, and the rearguard species-preservation
programmes conducted in the more enlightened zoos, such as attempts to get the rare
giant pandas to breed in captivity, may offer them a slim chance of survival.

Ecology
Along with these programmes of species-recovery, there have been three other recent
developments in zoology that have had potentially positive spin-offs for animals.
First, there was the new, holistic study of ecology – that is, of entire, inter-connected
life systems. One of the key founding texts of postmodern ecology was Aldo

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Leopold’s 1949 A Sand County Almanac. Rather than collecting specimens of
individual species out of context, scientists increasingly study them as integral
elements in larger natural systems of fauna, flora, earth, water, air and climate.

This, in turn, has led ecologists to become activists for the preservation of such
systems and the endangered animals they contain. These zoologists-turned-
conservationists have been in the forefront of emergency interventions – animal
triage, if you like – on behalf of critically threatened species, as when in New Zealand
the black robin was pulled back from the very brink of extinction by the scientist Don
Merton, or when in the same country off-shore and mainland sanctuaries were
scientifically established for the preservation of other rare indigenous species.

Zoology thus began in the eighteenth century with the discovery and classification of
diverse species, but in our own time has taken the further step of protecting the ones
that modernisation is driving to extinction. Science to the rescue! We must surely put
the commitment of scientific conservationists to species-preservation as a plus in our
cost-benefit calculations.

Ethology
The postmodern period also witnessed the flowering of another offshoot from
zoology, namely the science of ethology, first pioneered in Charles Darwin’s 1872
book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and developed more
recently in books like Donald Griffin’s 1992 Animal Minds and Jeffrey Masson’s
1996 When Elephants Weep. Contemporary ethology attempts to achieve an
empathetic understanding of the social life, emotional and cognitive capacities and
communicative abilities of other species out in the wild.

The study of creatures in their natural habitats has served at least two major functions
for the research subjects themselves, over and above satisfying the intellectual
curiosity of the human researchers. On the one hand, ethological field workers have
often been led to throw themselves into the conservation cause on behalf of the
animals they studied, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, on occasions at the cost of
their own lives. On the other hand, cognitive ethologists like Donald Griffin have
given humans increasing insight into the social and psychological lives of animals,
which has led to an appreciation, in some quarters, that non-humans have the same
kind of subjectivity as humans. Like us they possess self-awareness, and are capable
of the same range of emotions, from suffering and grief to love, playfulness and joy.
This is a far cry from the attitude towards animals that prevailed throughout much of
the modern period, starting with the pronouncement of the seventeenth century
philosopher Renee Descartes that animals were non-feeling automata. It has been a
long, hard struggle, but contemporary ethologists have finally begun to convince other
scientists that animals are not just soft machines, devoid of consciousness and
therefore fair game for whatever abuses of the scientific method researchers may
choose to inflict upon them. The recent scientific ‘discovery’ of animal consciousness
(something which lay people of good sense have known all along) clearly belongs on
the positive side of the ledger.

Animal Welfare Science

A third positive development in the zoological domain flowed logically from the
ethological discoveries just mentioned. By the 1990s, it was growing increasingly

19
difficult for scientists involved with animals to ignore the emotional and cognitive
faculties of their subjects, and the consequent ethical implications of animal research.
The scientific establishment finally accepted that its members had to acknowledge
their responsibility for the welfare of the creatures upon whom they practised. This
emerging ethical awareness found expression in the creation of a new academic
discipline – Animal Welfare Science – devoted not to animal research as such, but to
the alleviation of suffering and the promotion of animal wellbeing. Having denied or
ignored animal sentience ever since its birth in the Age of Reason, modern science
has finally placed such sentience on its moral agenda. Its newfound conscience about
animal suffering, however, cannot efface the cruelty which science has inflicted upon
animals down the centuries, and continues to inflict today. It is to this particularly
ugly side of the scientific revolution we will now turn.

Costs of Science to Animals

So far, our cost/benefit calculations about the impact of science on animals has been a
mixed bag, but we have tried to accentuate the positive. The time has now come to
focus squarely on the negative side of the ledger by picking up on the remark we just
made about the long-held and still widely prevalent scientific view, dating back to
Descartes in the Age of Reason, that animals are just non-thinking, non-feeling
machines.

Whether or not they had read Descartes and used him as their philosophical
legitimation, scientists over the last 300 years or more have found it expedient to deny
sentience, notably the capacity to experience suffering and happiness, to all the
unfortunate animals that fell into their hands. This has happened in all five branches
of science outlined above – biology, medicine, psychology, industrial chemistry and
even zoology. The issue can be summed up in one word – research. Progress in
modern science – its capacity to understand and thereby control nature – has been
achieved at the expense of a systematic reign of terror imposed in laboratories on
animal subjects of experiments and tests.

In biology, increased understanding of anatomy and physiology, such as Harvey’s

discovery of how blood circulates, were made through the vivisection of animals,
often done without benefit of anaesthesia. In medicine, all drugs had to be tested on
animals before being released for human consumption. In psychology, the cognitive
and emotional faculties of humans were traced to their natural origins by tormenting
countless generations of lab animals. The safety of industrial chemicals was checked
out by inflicting their prototypes on animals. Research and teaching of zoology was
conducted through the capture and dissection of specimens. Finally – a point we have
not yet touched on - the efficacy and the consequences of modern biological, chemical
and nuclear weaponry have frequently been researched through its infliction on
animals.

The indisputable and tragic fact of the matter is that whatever benefits have accrued to
humanity from scientific progress, it has been paid for at a terrible price by the captive
animals inside research laboratories. It is true that there have been some positive spin-
offs for animals themselves from certain types of research in the field of veterinary
science, but many experiments and tests have been conducted either out of idle human
curiosity, or commercial interests, or to enhance the professional standing and career

20
opportunities of academic researchers. From the point of view of animal welfare,
animal sacrifice in the name of science is arguably the bleakest face of modernity.

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 PART THREE: INDUSTRIALISATION
THE HUMAN WORLD
We are now entering the economic zone of the social map where goods are produced,
services are provided and money changes hands. What marked modernity off from all
preceding history was a massive increase in humanity’s productive capacity. In
traditional societies, most people most of the time lived in a state of material
deprivation, since food and goods were usually scarce. Today, human society has the
capacity to meet all human wants and needs, were its products distributed equitably.

The modern surge in productivity began around the middle of the eighteenth century
with twin economic revolutions, one in the city, the other in the countryside, known
respectively as the industrial and the agricultural (or agrarian) revolutions. The former
involved a transformation in the way goods were manufactured, the latter in the way
that farm products were grown. These two revolutions had separate origins, but we
will treat them here as different facets of the same more general process termed
‘industrialisation’, since by the twentieth century manufacturing and agricultural
techniques had converged into one over-arching economic system, characterised by
standardised mass production, be this of manufactured goods or animal products.

The First, Second and Third Industrial Revolutions

The first phase of the industrial revolution got under way in the English textile
industry from the mid-eighteenth century. Before then, manufacturing had been a
small-scale affair, carried out by family firms of craftspeople who worked by hand
and produced goods on a one-off basis: that is, individual artisans performed all the
different stages of the productive process themselves. The industrial revolution
displaced this traditional method of craftwork with factory-based manufacturing.
Large armies of unskilled or semi-skilled workers were brought together in one
building, and a division of labour introduced, whereby individuals performed just one
small operation, like sewing buttonholes, of the larger manufacturing process.
Moreover, wherever possible human labour was replaced by that of newly invented,
steam-driven machines. At first these machines were just stationary adjuncts to the
mining and manufacturing industries, but by the 1830s they had been set on wheels
and used for transport and haulage: enter that most triumphant symbol of the first
industrial revolution – the coal-devouring, steam-belching iron horse.

These innovations in technology and the way labour was organised, of course, were
very expensive, hence another defining characteristic of industrialisation – the
investment of large amounts of capital in the manufacturing sector, and the
consequent increase in its potential profitability. The traditional family firms of
modest artisans could not compete with a new greed of capitalist Captains of Industry.

The age of high modernity was inaugurated from around 1850 by what is sometimes
called ‘the second industrial revolution’. There were two reasons for this label. On the
one hand, from the mid-nineteenth century the revolution in British manufacturing
spread to other countries, first in western Europe and the United States, then

22
eventually to the rest of the world. On the other hand, new generations of technology,
such as the internal combustion engine, were invented to replace the clunky old
steam-driven machines, new forms of energy (notably oil products and electricity)
were harnessed to those machines, and the productivity of human labour was
intensified.

The latter was achieved through major innovations in factory work, named after their
pioneers Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor. Fordism introduced the moving assembly
line to the factory, while Taylorism involved the rigorous application of techniques of
scientific management to every aspect of the productive process.

Our own postmodern age (sometimes referred to as post-Fordism or post-

industrialism) has witnessed a further surge in productivity, which might be termed a
third industrial revolution, typified by innovations like miniaturised computer chips,
integrated telecommunication systems, a new, world-wide division of labour within
vast transnational corporations, and the specialised production of luxury goods for
niche markets.

The Agricultural Revolution

As these evolving phases of urban manufacturing unfolded, something equally epoch-
making was stirring down on the farm. The English agricultural revolution began with
‘the enclosure movement’, which had begun in the sixteenth century and was a major
feature of agriculture by the mid-eighteenth. What was formerly common land was
enclosed as their own private property by a new breed of capitalist farmers: poor
family farmers, each owning a handful of livestock, were driven off the land to be
replaced by large flocks of sheep. At the same time, scientifically minded farmers
began experimenting with the breeding of sheep and cattle to produce custom-
designed new breeds specialising in commercially desirable traits like thicker wool or
greater milk yield. In effect, they were engaged in genetic engineering, although the
actual name was not used until the postmodern period.

From the high modern epoch, farming increasingly became a business enterprise
rather than a traditional, subsistence way of life, as ever more industrial techniques
and technologies were applied out in the fields. Threshing machines replaced human
labour, tractors supplanted horses and oxen, cows were milked by machine rather than
by hand, the land was blitzed with industrial chemicals, the assembly line (or, more
accurately, the disassembly line) was introduced into slaughterhouses, and finally
farms themselves were transformed into factories. As with urban manufacturing, this
industrialisation of the rural sector was expensive to introduce, so just as urban
artisans were put out of business by industrial capitalists, so also small-scale farmers
were often driven off the land by a new breed of wealthy businessmen: ‘farming’ was
transformed into ‘agribusiness’.

The Mass Media

We will conclude this lightning sketch of modernity’s industrial face with a
development that actually preceded the eighteenth century industrial revolution by
around 300 years, but which was to become one of the most important defining

23
characteristics of high modernity and postmodernity. We are talking about the mass
media.

It all began around the middle of the fifteenth century with the invention of the
printing press by the German Johannes Gutenberg. Up till then, texts had to be
laboriously transcribed and illustrated on a one-off basis by hand: books were
consequently rare and expensive. Gutenberg’s invention enabled the mass production
of printed words and images – a prototype of the more general mass production
usually only associated with the industrial revolution 300 years later. Subsequently,
the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in the Gutenberg print galaxy with the
advent of mass circulation newspapers and public lending libraries. In the twentieth,
there was an extension of the mass media from print into the domains of music, the
spoken word and moving visual images through inventions such as photography,
sound recording, radio, films, television, satellite and cable transmission, and finally
the internet. These developments have already been touched on during our discussion
of globalisation, but are worth reiterating here, since it was during the age of high
modernity, and even more of postmodernity, that the dissemination of information
and entertainment (sometimes fused into ‘infotainment’) on the grand scale became
an integral component of popular culture for the masses.

THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY

Counting the Costs 1: the agricultural revolution
We will start our account of the impact of industrialisation on animals in the logical
place – the farming sector. There, as with urban manufacturing, modernisation
involved a transition from small-scale to mass production. Furthermore, the
astronomic increase in the rearing and processing of livestock that occurred from
around the eighteenth century, first in England, then over time in the rest of the world,
was marked by much the same four features as typified the mass production of
manufactured goods. First, farming became a capital-intensive business, every aspect
of which was geared towards the maximisation of profits on investments. In the
second place, farm animals, like industrial workers, were organised on the grand
scale, eventually being packed, like those same workers, in large factories or factory-
like buildings. Third, intensive techniques of scientific management, akin to
Taylorism and Fordism in the industrial factory, were applied to every stage of rearing
and processing farm animals. Finally, the production process was thoroughly
mechanised, as with the introduction of milking machines and aerial top dressing, and
was enhanced by the wholesale application of industrial chemicals.

There can be little doubt about the benefits of animal mass production for humans:
there was more food and other animal products than ever before in the history of our
species. Furthermore, for big agribusinesses there were profits to be made on the
grand scale, unlike the bare subsistence living offered by peasant farming in
traditional societies. On the other side of the ledger, however, progress in the farming
sector, as in the scientific domain, was largely achieved through a great increase in
animal suffering.

24
Increased scale of pastoralism

One cause of the increase in animal suffering was a massive expansion in the sheer
size of herds and flocks, brought about by the opening up of vast expanses of pastoral
land in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. As a result of this quantitative
change, pastoral animals (notably sheep) in ‘the New World’ did not – and still do not
– benefit from the qualitative, personalised husbandry accorded their British and
European counterparts. Being left to their own devices for months on end in the
harshness of the Australian outback or New Zealand’s South Island high country,
sheep suffer and die on a scale that would be shocking, were it not considered
perfectly normal and acceptable by antipodean farmers.

Two examples will suffice to illustrate the welfare problems that result from a lack of
micro-management. In the first place, without the benefit of regular inspection, sheep
are the victims of ‘fly strike’, which results in their being infested by larvae, maggots
and bacteria. To counter this, merino lambs are subjected to a revolting procedure
called ‘mulesing’, which involves cutting away most of their backsides without any
pain relief – a form of mutilation almost as distressing as the condition it guards
against.

In the second place, left without shelter and personalised attention during the lambing
season (which is frequently induced to coincide with the harshest period of late
winter) new-born New Zealand lambs die of exposure in their thousands. Almost
every year, New Zealand TV audiences have their hearts wrung by images of dead
lambs in the snow, and by interviews with farmers bemoaning the surprising
inclemency of the weather. What is really surprising, though, is the farmers’ surprise
itself: the wretched deaths of so many lambs and the misery of the survivors are not
the unpredictable outcome of meteorological waywardness, but the routine
consequence of a shepherding regimen based on institutionalised callousness – a far
cry from the idealised image of the Biblical Good Shepherd.

It is a regimen that is due partly to the inaccessibility of the terrain into which the
sheep are turned loose, partly to the low economic value of each individual sheep, and
partly to a half-baked Darwinian philosophy amongst some sheep farmers, who
believe it is in the long-term evolutionary interest of the stock to let the harshness of
nature take its own course, without ‘artificial’ human intervention. However, to return
to our subject in this section, a major causal component in the large-scale suffering is
the sheer magnitude of the flocks involved. Modernity was typified by an extension of
pastoralism from micro- to macro-production: human producers and consumers
benefited from the increase in scale, but pastoral animals paid a high price in terms of
individual well-being.

Mass slaughter
The modern mass production of live animals was matched by a similar expansion in
the production of dead ones. We are talking here about the industrialisation of
slaughter and the processing of carcasses that began on a large scale in Chicago in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. Henry Ford was famous for introducing the
assembly line into car factories, but it is said that he actually got the idea from seeing
the ‘disassembly lines’ of the Chicago slaughterhouses, where carcasses were swung
along on hooks, being progressively stripped down by workers who specialised in just

25
one small part of the butchering process: the mass production of animal death was
thus the industrial prototype of Fordist manufacturing.

However, what happens to the animals’ dead bodies is not our main focus here. This
is on the welfare of the animals as they are being killed. They undoubtedly experience
high levels of stress, physical discomfort and finally acute pain in the mass
slaughtering process itself, but whether this is worse in kind, as opposed to sheer
quantity, than their experience of being slaughtered by peasant farmers or city
butchers in premodern times is anybody’s guess. The only advantage of modern
slaughterhouses for animal welfare is that, in principle at least, they afford
opportunities for inspection and regulation of the killing process not practised in
traditional societies.

Where a large increase in suffering can certainly be laid at the door of modernity’s
mass production of death is in what happens to animals from the time they leave the
farm till they reach the slaughterhouse. They suffer a great deal from hunger, thirst,
overcrowding, exhaustion and stress in the process of being trucked, shipped or
trained in large numbers to their final destination – something they were largely
spared in traditional societies where for the most part slaughter took place on the
home farm. In this respect, the industrialisation of animal husbandry probably brought
about a major change for the worse in terms of animal well being. Being killed is in
itself a terrifying and painful affair, but the suffering inflicted by mass slaughter has
been greatly magnified by the inhumane treatment of condemned animals in the hours
or even days that precede it.

Factory farms
The two aspects of agricultural modernisation discussed above – the increased scale
of pastoralism and of slaughter – had become institutionalised by the end of the
nineteenth century. A third feature, however, was the brainchild of the twentieth. This
most recent phase of the agrarian revolution goes by the name of ‘factory farming’. Its
disastrous consequences for animals were first denounced by Ruth Harrison in her
influential 1964 book Animal machines: The new factory farming industry, so
presumably the system was already well established by then. Factory farming is an
extension to animal production and processing of four aspects of industrial
manufacturing which were mentioned earlier, but will bear repetition here.

First, farms become capital-intensive agribusinesses, where all facets of rearing and
processing animals are subordinate to the maximisation of profit. Second, farm
animals, particularly pigs and poultry, are packed together inside buildings, instead of
being able to range freely. In the third place, within those factories their lives are
dominated by impersonal technology from milking machines to mechanical feeders.
Finally, and most significantly for our present purposes, every part of the production
process is subjected to the kind of intensive scientific management associated in the
human work place with Taylorism. The biological organisms of animals are under
constant surveillance and unremitting pressure to produce more eggs, milk, meat and
offspring as possible in the shortest possible time. Their bodies are regularly mutilated
to this end, or are forced far beyond the limits of normal growth. Furthermore, the
natural patterns of their social existence are destroyed, and their emotional lives are
stunted and mutilated.

26
It is true, as the advocates of factory farming claim, that such animals are provided
with the basics of life. They have shelter – but under such cramped and overcrowded
conditions it must be a torment rather than a boon. They are provided with food, but
in unnaturally large quantities and force-fed. They receive medical attention, but this
typically involves drenching them with antibiotics to counter the diseases rampant
within the factory. In order to squeeze the last drop of profit out of them, factory
farmed animals are reduced to the state of mere ‘things’, subjected at every moment
of their lives to the exigencies of the production process. Not the slightest recognition
is given to the fact that they, like us, are sentient creatures, as capable as humans of
experiencing pain, suffering and deprivation, and deriving as much happiness as us
from the expression of their natural needs. Karl Marx believed that human workers in
industrial factories were alienated from what he termed their ‘species being’: we
could say exactly the same about the animals who are exploited in factory farms.

This is the darkest side of industrial modernity for animals, as laboratory research is
in the domain of modern science. In both cases, animal well being has been ruthlessly
and systematically sacrificed on the altar of human progress.

Counting the Costs 2: Collateral Damage

A second large bill that animals have had to pick up in the wake of industrial
‘progress’ may be given that obscene euphemism beloved of Western politicians and
generals – ‘collateral damage’. It refers to the innocent, accidental victims of other
people’s wars, but could be equally applied to the animals who had the bad luck to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time as the industrial revolution swept through their
neck of the woods.

On the one hand, the industrialising process is a great devourer of natural habitats.
Jungles and woods have to be felled or burned, deposits of fossil fuels and minerals
quarried, valleys flooded, and wetlands drained to provide raw material for the ever-
hungry industrial giant, to clear the way for commercial crops and livestock, to build
dams, or to make room for ever-expanding cities and motorways. Wherever original
ecosystems are thus destroyed, so too are all the species of fauna they contain. This
obviously inflicts appalling suffering on individual animals who are burnt, drowned
or starved when their homes are destroyed. Such wholesale suffering apart, in many
cases entire species are wiped out, or at least driven to the brink of extinction, by the
relentless commercialism that sees value in palm oil plantations, but none in the
gentle and intelligent orang-utans who are burned to death as the ground is cleared to
make way for those plantations.

On the other hand, countless animals are crippled or killed by the pollution that
industrialisation spews out. Whether we are talking about poisoned waterways and
oceans, acid rain, plastic detritus, radioactivity, oil spills, toxic chemical dumps or
whatever, the whole animal kingdom, not just humans (about whom most concern is
expressed) suffers the consequences. Whether pushed aside to make way for the
relentless march of industrial development, or maimed and killed by its waste matter,
there is no bright side for animals in this aspect of modernisation.

27
Liberation through Internal Combustion
The industrial side of the modernisation story has been pretty bleak to this point, with
farm animals being turned into robotised production units in factory farms, and wild
ones being sacrificed on the altar of material progress. To balance the ledger, let’s end
on a far more cheerful note. To give industrialisation credit where credit is due, it has
been the agent of animal liberation – or at least liberation for certain species – on the
grand scale. New industrial technology did more for the cause of animal liberation
than all the sales of Peter Singer’s book of that name and all the activities of the
Animal Liberation Front put together.

We are talking about the successive generations of machinery, driven first by steam
power, then by oil products and/or electricity, and now by an experimental range of
renewable energy sources, that progressively replaced animal power from the mid-
eighteenth century. In traditional societies (and even now in some parts of the world)
most haulage and transport, along with heavy, repetitive labour like operating pumps
and mills, was performed by animals such as oxen, members of the horse family,
elephants and camels (where available) and even dogs. These were phased out first by
the introduction of stationary machines, then by self-propelling ones – the steam-
driven locomotive in the early nineteenth century, then horseless carriages powered
by the internal combustion engine from around the start of the twentieth. The output
of those machines was still measured in terms of ‘horse power’, but real horses, mules
and donkeys were unhitched from their harnesses and shafts, their role as beasts of
burden taken over by cars, motorbikes, trucks, trams, buses, trains, cranes, bulldozers,
tractors and the like.

This liberation from bondage applied in military as well as civilian life. Well into the
twentieth century, the kinds of work animals mentioned above were universally
conscripted into army service to be ridden in the front lines by the cavalry, and to
provide the transport and haulage infrastructure behind the lines, pulling cannons,
carts, wagons, carriages and all the other mobile paraphernalia essential for military
undertakings. If life had been wretched for civilian animals, frequently overworked,
underfed, and tormented by goads, whips and spurs, it was absolute hell when they
were dragged into human wars, where they were further subjected to the terror of
active duty, and to the same physical mutilation and agonised deaths as their human
counterparts. The internal combustion engine had done away with most of this by
World War II when warfare, like civil life, was industrialised. Animals, of course,
continued to be the victims of collateral damage from bombs, shells, poison gas, land
mines, nuclear explosions and the like, but at least they were not, in the main,
expected to be active combatants as in all previous human warfare.

Here, then, we have a definite spot of good news to report on the industrial front, to
balance the universally gloomy stories from the factory farm. Human slavery was
abolished in the British Empire in the 1830s, and by the Russians and the Americans
in the 1860s. By the mid-twentieth century, a similar emancipation of animal slaves
had been achieved. The horse had been taken out of horsepower.

Of course, humans themselves were not conscious of the potential consequences of

industrialisation for other species. When the engine driver stepped up into the cab of
the first steam locomotive in 1825 and it chuffed off down the tracks at nine miles an

28
hour, he didn’t murmur to himself: “That's one small step for man, but one giant leap
for animal kind”. Nevertheless, it was inevitable, given how deeply intertwined the
destinies of humanity and other species have always been, that major changes in the
economic activities of the former would radically transform the lives of the animals in
their vicinity. Anything that Noah and his family did aboard the earth ark, especially
something as epochal as revolutionising industry, was bound to affect their fellow
passengers.

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 PART FOUR: POPULATION
THE HUMAN WORLD
The scientific and industrial revolutions were accompanied by a quieter but equally
massive transition in the demographic domain. It began in the eighteenth century and
has since transformed life on this planet. It involved major changes in the size, the
distribution and the composition of the human population.

Size: The Population Explosion

The change in size was so dramatic it has been called ‘the population explosion’. In
traditional societies, the size of populations tended to rise and fall depending on the
abundance of food, the prevalence of infectious diseases, natural calamities and the
genocidal consequences of whatever wars happened to be raging. The world’s human
population grew noticeably as the centuries ticked by, but by modern standards only
at a snail’s pace. Things were to change dramatically with the advent of modernity.
Here are a few indicative figures (note 2):
Year 1: 200 million
1000: 275 million
1500: 450 million
1650: 500 million
1750: 700 million
1804: 1 billion
1850: 1.2 billion
1900: 1.6 billion
1927: 2 billion
1950: 2.55 billion
1960: 3 billion
1980: 4.5 billion
1990: 5.3 billion
1999: 6 billion
2007: 6.6 billion

As you can see, between the first year of the Christian epoch and the year 1000, the
estimated world population only grew by around 70 million. In the 50 years from
1750 to 1800 – that is, the dawn of the Scientific, Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions
- it surged by 300,000 to reach the one billion mark. This upward trend continued to
accelerate as those three revolutions spread from the West to the rest of the world:
today there are over 6.5 billion of us humans, and still growing.

Distribution: Urbanisation
So much for the sheer size of the human population. There was another equally
important demographic revolution occurring at the same time, caused directly by the
combined effects of the agrarian and industrial revolutions. It is summed up in the one
word ‘urbanisation’.

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Up to the eighteenth century, the overwhelming bulk of humanity lived on the land.
There were not many cities, and even fewer giant metropolises like London: at the
beginning of the nineteenth century there were scarcely two dozen cities in Europe
with a population of 100,000. However, things were changing fast, and by1900 there
were more than 150 cities of this size (ibid).

The great urban migration was caused by a ‘pushme-pullyou’ process. Ever larger
numbers of country folk were driven off the land by the enclosure movement
mentioned above, and drawn into the expanding cities such as Manchester, where the
new factory-based, machine-driven industries offered alternative employment
prospects. By the mid-nineteenth century, over half the population of England was
living in big cities; today, over half the whole human species has been urbanised.

Composition 1: The Rise of the Middle Class

Going hand-in-hand with this process of urbanisation was a significant change in the
class composition of Western society. It is packaged in history texts under the label
‘the rise of the middle class’ or, more pompously, ‘embourgeoisement’. By the
middle class is meant those who achieved wealth, status and influence not from an
accident of birth and the ownership of rural land, as was the case with monarchs,
aristocrats and the country gentry, but through business, as with financiers and
industrialists, or else through education and profession, as with ‘white collar workers’
such as lawyers, scientists, doctors, managers and men of letters. They were self-made
men, distinguished by personal merit rather than blue blood, who regarded themselves
as superior in achievement to the common herd of peasants and factory workers, and
superior morally to the decadent and parasitical nobility.

These middle classes grew in absolute numbers down the centuries, and today
constitute the majority in developed countries. More importantly for our story, they
also grew in economic, political and cultural influence. It was they who spearheaded
the scientific, industrial and agrarian revolutions already described, and the moral and
political ones to be discussed later. We will only give them a brief mention here, but
they are worth bearing in mind, since it was they, rather than aristocrats or manual
workers, who provided the shock troops for most of the modernist revolutions we are
evoking throughout this paper. As a rough rule of thumb, the more influential the
middle classes in any given society, the more ‘modern’ it is likely to be.

Composition 2: Family Structure

The final demographic change worth a quick mention involved an alteration in the
structure of the family. In all traditional societies, people had lived in extended
families of one sort or another, where individuals were embedded in large kin systems
encompassing several generations and many degrees of relatedness. Extended families
may have been claustrophobic for their members, but had the merit of protecting them
from social isolation. They were slowly eclipsed during the urbanisation process by
the new ‘nuclear’ family, comprising just parents and children, with only a few odd
relatives tagged on. In our own postmodern age, this template of a nuclear family
comprising Mum, Dad and 2.5 kids has itself to some extent been eclipsed by a
miscellaneous range of family types – childless couples, one-parent households,
same-sex partnerships, reconstituted families and the like. This latter-day emergence

31
of the ‘post-nuclear family’ may have intensified the risks of loneliness already
inherent in the nuclear family.

THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY

Population Explosion: Bad News and Good
The human population explosion was really bad news at the species level for animals
with homes out in the wild, but a bonanza for those living under the human umbrella.
As far as wild animals went, the story is simple. The more the human population
expanded, the more room it occupied, and there was correspondingly less for wildlife.
Humans cleared away natural ecosystems to make way for farms, cities and transport
networks to accommodate the needs of their ever-growing numbers. It perhaps would
not be quite so bad if industrial societies were not so hell-bent on what they are
pleased to call ‘development’, but our commitment to the march of material progress
being what it is, there is just not enough room both for us and undeveloped gorillas,
rhinos, lions, hippos, elephants, wolves, native birds or whatever. Indeed, some
conservationists hold that the human population explosion is the single most
dangerous threat to the on-going survival of endangered species, especially in places
like South America, Africa, India, China and Indonesia, where – unlike in the West –
populations continue to grow apace.

However, if animals living out in the wild have been crowded out by the sheer
number of humans, those who came in from the cold to live under the protection of
the human umbrella have done very nicely, at least at the species level. In fact, they
have themselves become part of the crowd that elbows wildlife aside. On the one
hand, domesticated farm, work and pet animals have been encouraged to go forth and
multiply as part of that globalising project we discussed near the start. On the other
hand, there are undomesticated wild animals - cockroaches, ants, mice, rats, pigeons,
seagulls and the like, who live rich, parasitical lives by scavenging around the fringes
of human society. Logically, the more humans, the better the pickings. Thus, the
human population explosion has endangered wild species that many of us are fond of,
like elephants, the big cats and primates, while fostering the proliferation of those we
detest as vermin.

Urbanisation: The Three Zones

The massive increase in both the number and size of large cities during the modern
period, and the increasing proportion of people who have migrated from the
countryside to the town, have had mixed consequences for other animals. Whether the
intensification of city life has been good, bad or just neutral for other species depends
to some extent on which moment in history you are looking at, and who is doing the
looking.

Going back in time a few centuries, humans and other animals – wild ones, farm ones,
companions or vermin – tended to share hugger-mugger lives along side one another.
This intimate co-existence was particularly true out in the countryside, where animals
were often housed inside human habitations, and wild animals were never far off, but
even in big cities like London and Paris, humans and animals regularly rubbed

32
shoulders. This was most evident in the vast numbers of horses, donkeys and mules
that clip-clopped around urban streets well into the twentieth century, but cities also
teamed with farm animals to supply the local market with food and animal products.
It was even not unknown for wild animals like wolves to make predatory raids into
large cities such as Paris. There were no distinct zones where only one type of human-
animal relationship existed: in town and country, humans and animals were all
jumbled up together.

It was only in the twentieth century that such zones came into existence. In developed
countries today, there are three of them, each with its own specific animal inhabitants
and mode of human-animal interaction. At the periphery there is the last remaining
wilderness with its imperilled wild inhabitants, some of which are still hunted, while
others are protected within national parks and wildlife sanctuaries of one sort or
another. Moving closer to the centre, the second zone is the agricultural belt, inhabited
chiefly by farm animals and those (mainly dogs and horses) doing farm-related work.
The dominant mode of relationship there is husbandry.

The third and innermost zone, of course, is the city. This contains large populations of
undomesticated or feral scavengers (rats, stray cats, pigeons etc.) and small, sad
enclaves of captive wild animals in zoos. In the main, however, it would probably be
accurate to say that the city is pretty much the domain of the companion animal.
Dogs, cats, songbirds, hamsters, guinea pigs, white rabbits, tropical fish and a whole
host of more exotic novelty lines like pythons and alligators rule the city roost. These
are the animals urbanites are most likely to encounter in their everyday lives (bar
pesky vermin and incontinent pigeons). Humans today can pass their entire lives
never glimpsing a wild animal in the flesh, and may perhaps be equally unfamiliar
with run-of-the-mill farm animals.

As for the impact of this separation of the animal kingdom into urban pets, rural farm
animals and remote denizens of the wilderness, my personal assessment is that it is
really neither here nor there. It’s just a fact of postmodern existence. True, during the
first phases of modernity life in big cities for farm and work animals must have been
pretty hellish, especially as the tempo and the overcrowding of those cities increased,
but that is now largely a thing of the past. It is also true that being commandeered as
an urban pet, and kept cooped up in a cage, small aquarium or high-rise apartment
must be unpleasant for species not habituated by breeding to confinement in such an
alien environment. That said, now the new spatial ordering of wild, farm and
companion animals has settled into place I don’t personally see that this aspect of
modernisation makes much difference to animals segregated in the three zones. On
the contrary, they are arguably comfortable enough where they are. Household pets
would probably be miserable out in the wilderness, farm animals would feel at home
neither in the city nor the wild, and wild ones would not take kindly either to being
farmed or cooped up in a city ghetto.

The Middle Class and the Nuclear Family

The growth of big modern cities was accompanied by two other demographic
phenomena introduced at the start of this part, namely the rise in size and influence of
the middle class, and the transformation of the extended family into the nuclear and
then the post-nuclear one. These two features of modernity logically belong in

33
different conceptual compartments, but for our present purposes they are so
intertwined, we will talk about them in the same breath.

Setting the social tone

The increasing influence, or what might be termed ‘moral authority’, of the middle
classes in the period of high modernity had significant and positive implications for
the treatment of animals in all spheres of social life. This is not to say that aristocrats
and gentry could not be very attached to some types of animals, notably hunting
horses, hounds and hawks. Furthermore, certain members of the English upper classes
played an important role in getting animal protection legislation passed and in
monitoring its application. Equally, there have always been manual workers who were
kind to their favourite animals. It would probably be fair to say, though, that from the
eighteenth century on, it was the middle class that set the social tone for how animals
in the future were to be regarded and treated. This is particularly the case with the
educated, professional middle class. Going one step further, it would also probably be
fair to say that the biggest influence for the good was likely to have been exercised by
middle class women.

If these generalisations about the significance for animals of the increased moral
authority of the middle classes are justified, it would be because they tended to take
the lead in three modernist developments which all eventually had positive spin-offs
for other species. These are the ‘back to nature’ movement, the rising tide of
humanitarianism, and finally the struggle for human rights. We will only note these in
passing here, since they will be developed more fully in the next three parts. Our point
for the moment is simply that the new middle class hegemony in the high modernist
period expressed itself in a number of ways of thinking, feeling and acting which in
the long run had major benefits for animals out in the wild, on farms or in the
household.

The pet cult

We will leave those three big cultural movements on the back burner for the moment,
and turn our attention to a cosier domestic aspect of middle class life within the new
nuclear family. Perhaps because there were fewer people rattling around in the house
and people began to feel a bit lonely, perhaps because middle class families had more
disposable income than working ones, perhaps because parents were catering more to
the emotional lives of their children, perhaps because there were increasing numbers
of socially isolated old people, perhaps because of the romantic cultivation of
sentimentality, perhaps… For whatever reason, the high modern period became the
Age of the Pet. Indeed, by our own postmodern age, this had turned into something
approaching a cult, not to mention a multi-billion industry for firms that catered to it.

So far as we know, people have adopted young animals into the family as far back as
the time of hunter-gatherers (note 3), and since then there have been individuals
throughout history who have developed a soft spot for certain favoured animals, with
horses probably top of the list. Keeping caged birds for their looks or their songs
seems to have been a near-universal custom, and fashionable ladies paraded pampered
lap dogs well before the advent of modernity. Thus, keeping animals around the house
was not a uniquely modernist practice. That said, by the high modernist period there
had been such a quantitative and qualitative change – that is, such a massive increase
in the number of household animals, and such an emotional transformation in the way

34
they were regarded - we might justifiably regard pet-keeping as a defining feature of
the epoch. By the nineteenth century, cats and dogs in particular were accepted as
honorary members of the middle class family in and for themselves.

It is difficult to judge whether or not, on balance, the institutionalisation of household

pet keeping has benefited the animals themselves, as opposed to their human owners.
A heart-breakingly large amount of cruelty and neglect goes on behind closed doors,
often perpetrated by the very children (particularly boys, I surmise) whose tender
emotions they are intended to foster. Who knows? – the world might be a safer place
for animals if certain forms of pet ownership were banned outright (e.g. caged birds)
and all the rest were at least far more rigorously regulated. On the other hand, middle
class pet keeping may well have had a positive spin-off in the form of the
humanitarian stream that entered the English psyche in the nineteenth century. It was
in part their affection for their own pets that turned some of the Victorian middle class
into crusaders for other animals, especially when their pets were kidnapped by
unsavoury members of the working class to be skinned for their fur, turned into pies,
or sold to vivisectionists. Love for their own family companions flowed on into
empathy for animals generally. Victorians like the novelist Charles Dickens even
crusaded against the popular practice of keeping wild songbirds in cages, taking their
lead, perhaps, from the words of the eighteenth century romantic poet William Blake:
‘A robin redbreast in a cage/ Puts all heaven in a rage’. We should add to the positive
side of the ledger the fact that many household animals unquestioningly develop
strong emotional bonds with their human companions: to ‘liberate’ them would cause
them intense emotional anguish.

35
 PART FIVE: BACK TO NATURE
THE HUMAN WORLD
In the remaining three parts, we are going to explore aspects of modernity which in
some ways run counter to the four that have occupied us till now. They will constitute
a kind of in-built antidote or resistance to the worst faces of globalisation, scientism,
industrialism and urbanisation, all of which in their different ways celebrated the
triumphant march of material progress. The ones we will look at now also embrace
the concept of progress, but define it in very different, non-materialist terms. They are
just as ‘modern’ as the four discussed above, in that they represent a radical break
with the ethos of traditional society, yet offer a different and gentler vision of what
modernity could and should be.

In the present part, we will look at changing attitudes towards the natural world since
the mid-eighteenth century. Let’s start with a paradox. In traditional societies, humans
lived physically much closer to nature, yet mentally and emotionally distanced
themselves from it. Modernity reversed this: most people lived at a physical distance
from raw nature, but imaginatively identified with it.

To elaborate the former observation, premodern humanity did not romanticise the
natural world, as they knew it only too well from first-hand experience. If you have to
laboriously and unremittingly wrest your livelihood from nature, as did over 90
percent of the human race, you are unlikely to wax sentimental about its
picturesqueness. Even the learned scholars of the Enlightenment contrasted life in a
state of nature unfavourably with the blessings conferred upon humanity by the
progress of civilisation. Here, for instance, is a very famous passage from the
seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book Leviathan, in which he
clearly prefers the triumphs of civilised life to the nastiness of nature:

In such condition [the state of nature] there is no place for industry,

because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the
earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by
sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing
such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth;
no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all,
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This philosophic aversion to nature changed radically from the mid-eighteenth

century with the advent of Romanticism, a movement in literature and the arts that
was accompanied by a transformation of Western middle class sensibility, and was
underpinned by a new current in philosophy. The most influential Romantic
philosopher of the eighteenth century was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while the
movement received later literary expression in English Romantic poets like
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, amongst many other European
writers. Even though the actual term “Romanticism’ went out of favour from the latter
part of the nineteenth century, what it stood for – notably its attitude towards nature -

36
remained an abiding feature of high and postmodernity, making a major come-back
over the last half century or so to become something approaching a dominant
ideology amongst the Western middle classes.

In effect, Rousseau and his heirs turned Thomas Hobbes’s views on the comparative
virtues of nature and civilisation on their head. Putting it crudely, they reversed
Hobbes’s formula: ‘Civilisation good; nature bad’. Rousseau maintained that far from
civilisation redeeming humanity from the brutishness of the state of nature, it had
corrupted our natural goodness. This notion of ‘natural goodness’ was in itself a
revolutionary notion, since the Church had always preached the opposite doctrine of
‘original sin’ – i.e. that humans are naturally evil.

Rousseau’s discovery of virtue rather than brutishness in nature seized the popular
imagination of future generations, and triggered off a widespread ‘return to nature’
movement amongst the urban middle classes. Either in imagination (with the help of
writers and painters), or by physically hiking off into the countryside, city dwellers
reimmersed themselves in the purifying baptismal waters of the natural world,
expressed in a newly-found appreciation of cutely picturesque or savagely sublime
landscapes. It was given an extra edge by the revulsion of many people for the urban
ugliness and squalor spawned by the industrial revolution, and its ‘dark satanic mills’,
in William Blake’s words.

This ‘back to nature’ movement received further impetus from Henry David
Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden or Life in the Woods, which celebrated the detached
contemplation of unspoilt nature. Charles Darwin also deserves a mention, since
although he was not a Romantic as such, his assertion of the integral overlap between
the human and other species, explored most fully in The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals, encouraged his readers to see their affinity with other creatures,
where formerly they had only seen a great divide. The upshot was that by the start of
the twentieth century, people were getting back to nature in droves through a whole
host of activities, some accepted as normal, others viewed as a bit cranky. The list
would include rambling, hiking, mountaineering, scouting, amateur botany, bird
watching, collecting butterflies, nudism, neo-pagan rituals and a growing appetite for
books about nature.

Many of those activities were motivated by a semi-mystical desire amongst nature-

lovers to harmonise themselves with the rhythms and inhabitants of the natural world.
This tender-minded veneration of nature was not the whole story, however. A rawer,
more red-blooded manifestation of urban man’s penchant for rediscovering his natural
roots was the cult of hunting and big game fishing, through which the male of the
human species proved his manhood to himself by getting in touch with the primordial
hunter within.

By the postmodern epoch, as mentioned above, human self-identification with the

natural world, whether tough- or tender-minded, had become something approaching
a dominant ideology. It was fed imaginatively by nature documentaries such as the
1953 Walt Disney film The Living Desert and the scores of television nature
programmes made by David Attenborough. It received philosophical expression in the
mid-1970s in James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’, which speculated that the entire
planet was one integrated, living organism, and in Edward Wilson’s ‘biophilia

37
hypothesis’ of the mid-1990s, proposing that the human species may have evolved
with an in-built love of all forms of life. As we mentioned in our earlier discussion of
postmodern science, an empathetic approach to the natural world was also fostered by
the new sciences of ecology and ethology. Mysticism came to the postmodern party in
the form of New Age philosophy, with its veneration for a spiritualised natural world.
Ecotourism became a big international business, while latter-day Thoreaus set up their
own versions of Walden, first in hippy communes, then in more individualised ‘life
style’ blocks.

The postmodern attachment to nature even entered the political domain: Green parties
contended elections in a number of Western democracies, while the freelance
Greenpeace organisation launched militant interventions on behalf of the beleaguered
natural world around the globe. Even national governments and international
corporations polished their green halos by making at least token gestures on behalf of
the natural environment. Whole nations, notably New Zealand, marketed their exports
on the back of their self-proclaimed ‘clean green image’. Green, in fact, became the
brand colour of the contemporary world.

This greening of postmodernity was the culminating expression of a strand of Western

thought that had its wellspring in Rousseau’s challenge to the traditional enmity
between humanity and nature. It is founded on the uniquely modern premise that
unspoilt nature is the repository not only of physical health and aesthetic beauty, but
moral and even spiritual value. This would have scandalised Enlightenment
philosophers, for whom civilisation was the pinnacle of human achievement, and
would have made no sense at all to your average mediaeval peasant, for whom life
close to nature was indeed nasty, brutish and short. Today, the conviction that virtue
resides in pristine nature seems – well, ‘natural’. It is important to remember,
therefore, that it is actually a cultural construct of comparatively recent origin: it is a
uniquely modernist invention.

THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY

The relevance for animals of the human back to nature movement probably does not
need much spelling out, as it flows directly from what was said above. To summarise:
starting with Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and culminating in New Age natural
mysticism in our own postmodern epoch, some human beings (mainly middle class
Westerners) have rebelled against the hyper-rationality and acquisitive materialism of
the scientific and industrial revolutions, and against the urban life style, to rebaptise
themselves in an idealised conception of Nature, sometimes blending spirituality and
scientific precision into a new synthesis. Since animals are inhabitants of the natural
world, it automatically followed that they were included in that all-encompassing
concern for the non-human environment. Indeed, as sentient beings like ourselves,
they were often singled out as objects of particular affection.

This was expressed in the widespread enthusiasm for physically getting out into the
wild and watching birds and whales, or going on photographic safaris. With less
personal inconvenience, people flocked in large numbers to urban zoos, where real
life wild animals were put on display for them. A more vicarious interest in animals
was manifested in the immense popularity of documentary books, films and TV
programmes about them, like the Disney and Attenborough ones mentioned above,

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and for factual accounts of human-animal relationships like Joy Adamson’s 1960
Born Free and Dian Fossey’s 1983 Gorillas in the Mist. Equally popular amongst
modern and postmodern consumers were the large numbers of novels and films based
on fictional biographies, and even autobiographies, of animal heroes. A short sample
list of titles would include Black Beauty, The Call of the Wild, Tarka the Otter,
Bambi, Lassie Come Home, My Friend Flicka, Watership Down, A Thousand and
One Dalmatians, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Free Willy and Babe. Through such
representations in books and movies, humans could forge strong emotional bonds
with individual animal characters, just as real in the imagination as flesh-and-blood
relationships.

All this was very much the hallmark of the modernist sensibility. In traditional
societies, people tended not to be self-conscious animal lovers for the simple reason
that they were already totally immersed in nature, and therefore had regular and
sometimes disagreeable contact with animals. True, they spun all sorts of stories about
such animals, but these were of a qualitatively different order from modern ones.
Modern animal narratives are almost always based upon sympathy and affection for
their non-human heroes. Furthermore, those modern animal heroes are represented
with considerable fidelity to nature: it is true that they are given certain human
qualities (notably language) but in essence remain horses, dogs, whales, birds or
whatever. The folk tales and fables of premodern times, on the contrary, tended to be
highly anthropomorphic (their animals were little more than humans in drag), and
they were not intended to evoke empathy with real life animals. Premodern humans
felt no obligation either to understand other animals in naturalistic terms or to love
them in human ones; modernists are the opposite. Little Red Riding Hood tells us
nothing about the real nature of wolves, nor arouses our empathy with them; Jack
London’s wolf novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang do both.

The Cost/Benefit Reckoning

What about the positive and negative consequences of the back to nature movement
for the animals on the receiving end of humanity’s newly discovered attachment to
them? The first thing to say is that for most animals, most of the time, there is
absolutely no significance at all in the fact that besotted animal-lovers spend a great
deal of time and money observing them, either in the flesh as with ‘twitchers’ (i.e.
birdwatchers) or through the virtual reality of the popular media. If I were a whale, I
wouldn’t spare a spout for the ecotourists who come out in their boatloads to gawp at
me (although my exhibitionist cousins the dolphins seem to get a kick out of it).
Similarly, were I a deer, I wouldn’t give a toss of my antlers for all the bucket loads of
tears shed over the death of Bambi’s mother. Postmodern humans may live
vicariously through the emotional bonds we develop with animals, but these are
usually one-sided: animals go their own way regardless.

From contemplation to action

The situation alters markedly, however, when recreational contemplation or
imaginative identification change to affirmative action. Probably the world’s first
conservation movement began when nineteenth century British bird-watchers became
aware that the on-going survival of some of their favourite species was in danger. In
our own time, Bambi-lovers were responsible for having deer reintroduced and
protected in American states like Montana, and Jack London’s fans did the same for

39
wolves. A spot of whale watching off Kaikoura may well turn an idle ecotourist into a
staunch supporter of Greenpeace’s direct actions on behalf of endangered species of
whales. On another front, people who have seen the films Born Free and Gorillas in
the Mist may well join the ranks of those fighting to protect lions, primates and other
charismatic African mega fauna from poachers and from the destruction of their
natural habitat. In many such ways, a love of animals that began with passive
contemplation may be translated into conservationist action. Again adopting the
viewpoint of a deer or whale, I could well be grateful to Walt Disney for Bambi if it
indirectly led to my being able to graze undisturbed in suburban gardens in Montana
(though I mightn’t be so happy about the wolves), or to commercial whale-watching
enterprises if they help to protect me and my mates from harpoon-happy Japanese
scientists.

Hunting
If the ‘back to nature’ impulse within modernity has positive spin-offs for endangered
animals, both at the individual and the species level, it also has its darker sides. One
of these already discussed is the proliferation of zoos in big urban centres, where wild
animals are forcibly removed from their natural habitat and cooped up to pander to the
idle curiosity of the general public. True, such curiosity may be a manifestation of that
attachment to animals we have singled out as a positive feature of modernity, but if so
it is surely a rather perverse one, as it involves the infliction of suffering upon the
very animals of which we are ostensibly fond.

The romantic urge to discard the artificial trappings of civilisation by answering the
call of the wild has even more toxic consequences than does gaping at caged lions
when it involves going off into the wilderness with high-powered rifles and shooting
them. Humans from the very start have always been hunters of wild game – hence our
primeval ancestors’ designation as ‘hunter-gatherers’ - but it is worth differentiating
between three quite distinct functions such hunting can serve.

In the first place, as with the hunter-gatherers just mentioned, it is a subsistence

necessity: humans kill and consume animals, and they convert their body parts into
artefacts like clothes, shelters and tools, in order to survive. Hunting has a direct ‘use
value’ for those involved. In its second form, the use value of the animal quarry is
supplanted by its ‘exchange value’. Commercial hunters, trappers and fishers do not
kill in order to meet their own immediate needs, but to market their catch for financial
gain. Finally, there is purely recreational hunting, undertaken not to satisfy the
hunter’s own immediate needs nor to make a commercial livelihood, but as a form of
sport, to be enjoyed for the thrill of the chase and the kill, for the outdoor life style,
and for the kudos accorded the accumulation of trophies such as antlers. In what
follows, it is only on such recreational killing that we will focus.

Throughout the entire premodern period, hunting was an important feature of social
life, partly as a way of supplementing meagre supplies of farm meat, but also as a
status symbol of aristocrats and gentry. Indeed, right up to the nineteenth century, the
approving epithet ‘sportsmen’ was reserved for a well-born elite devoted to the
fashionable rural recreations of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, whose victims were
euphemistically termed ‘game’. Leaving aside this unwholesome equation of
bloodletting with sport, my point is that there is nothing uniquely modern about
killing wildlife. When wealthy nineteenth century European adventurers went off on

40
safari in their newly-acquired imperial estates in Africa or India to add yet more
elephant tusks, tiger skins or whatever to their piles of trophies, they were only doing
on a grander scale, in fresh territories and with more lethal weapons, what the upper
classes had always done.

That said, I would suggest there are two significant differences between today’s
‘sportsmen’ and those of yesteryear. The first is that in the postmodern age,
traditionally prestigious targets of recreational killers have become rarer: in fact, big
game hunting itself had a major role to play in converting abundant species into
endangered ones. For this reason, by our own period the trophy hunting of charismatic
megafauna like the big cats, elephants, bears, rhinos, hippos, great white sharks and
crocodiles no longer confers kudos on its practitioners and has dropped out of fashion.
Recreational hunting is still popular amongst a small proportion of the male of the
human species, but the quarry tends to be limited to animals like deer, goats and wild
pigs, which are sometimes over-abundant, and whose killing can be legitimised as
pest control. This was certainly the case with Barry Crump’s cult 1960 book A Good
Keen Man, which is drenched in the blood of deer, pigs, goats, rabbits and possums,
the shedding of which was justified as government-sponsored pest eradication.

The demographic profile of today’s hunters is also different from that of their
forebears. The latter tended to be country-based aristocrats or gentry and their
retinues, whereas the majority now are sedentary middle class city dwellers, taking
time out from the urban rat race and household responsibilities. That is, they are part
of that self-conscious ‘back to nature’ movement we have been discussing. Putting it
simply, they are play-acting. For them, getting out into the wild represents a major
break from their habitual daily round, not a natural extension of it, as it had been for
their rural predecessors.

Paradoxically, modern hunters and fishers often claim to be amongst the most
dedicated of animal lovers, their discourse abounding in eulogies to the courage and
nobility of their quarry, who are portrayed as worthy adversaries to whom the utmost
respect and admiration are due. The more poetic of such sportsmen even wax lyrical
about the ‘spiritual’ bond that mystically unites them with their quarry. Even without
such pseudo-religious trappings, the relationship between hunter and hunted is always
portrayed as a heroic contest between equals. This is to ignore the fact that the battle
is never in fact equal, since unlike the original Tarzan of the Apes, our postmodern
Tarzans do not kill with their bare hands but at a safe distance from behind telescopic
sights or using up-market fishing tackle. Their prey doesn’t stand much of a chance,
especially when the ‘safari’ is stage-managed by commercial entrepreneurs,
guaranteeing their clients an easy kill by the use of fenced or decoyed quarries, or
ones released on the spot.

Furthermore, whether or not the climactic kill is commercially orchestrated, the

‘combat’ often does not end with the quarry’s quick death, brought down by one
accurate shot from an expert marksman. Frequently the victim is only maimed and left
to drag out a long, slow, agonising death. If this is love of animals, it is even more
perverse, one might say cowardly, than the kind that gives people pleasure staring at
imprisoned zoo animals.

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However, let’s end this section by giving the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ brigade
credit where it is due. Even though animals suffer at their hands, some hunters and
fishers nevertheless regard themselves as dedicated conservationists. They pride
themselves on being nature-lovers. They enjoy getting out in the bush or beside wild
patches of water, and they want these kept out of the hands of developers. This is
partly because they wish to keep right on killing the fauna who inhabit such idyllic
settings, but is also out of a strong emotional attachment to the natural world itself. A
classic example from the early twentieth century was the American President
Theodore Roosevelt, whose favourite recreation was big game hunting, but who used
his executive powers to set aside large national parks and other nature reserves
dedicated to the conservation of wildlife and its natural habitat. Thus, while they
cause widespread suffering amongst individual members of their target species,
hunters and fishers claim to be playing a significant role in the on-going conservation
of species as a whole. Whether that claim is justified is another matter: opponents of
hunting regard its conservationist ethos as simply an ideological smokescreen for the
unsavoury pleasure derived from the infliction of suffering on fellow creatures.
However they are regarded, though, the latter-day avatars of our primordial ancestors
clearly participate in the self-conscious back to nature movement that is a defining
feature of the paradoxically anti-modern strand of modernity.

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 PART SIX: HUMANITARIANISM
THE HUMAN WORLD
This part of the story concerns a fundamental transformation in the domain of
morality that began in England around the middle of the eighteenth century. At the
risk of sounding mushy, I will call it ‘a softening of the European heart’.

In traditional societies, morality involved the adherence to rigid codes of conduct –

sets of commandments and interdictions - that were rooted in the past and backed up
by religious dogmas and sanctions. To be regarded as a moral human being, all you
had to do was to stick to the rules. You were motivated to observe the ‘thou shalts’
and ‘thou shalt nots’ of your community through fear of punishment by society or a
supernatural being, and by hopes of reward in this or the next life. Thus, being ‘good’
was basically a selfish business. It had little if anything to do with altruistic emotions
like fellow feeling, sympathy or compassion. Indeed, traditional morality could be an
austere and harsh affair that actually militated against such positive sentiments.

I am not saying that warm-hearted emotions were absent in traditional societies.

Countless individuals down the ages must have felt pity for the sufferings of others,
been revolted by cruelty and performed acts of kindness. My point, though, is that
these were not enjoined by traditional morality: they were discretionary personal
feelings. The exception is the often-quoted Gospel injunction of Jesus Christ to do
unto others as you would have them do unto you. This was known as ‘the Golden
Rule’, but in practice it was honoured by Christians more in the breach than the
observation. The Church maintained its hold over people’s minds more by terror and
bribery - the threat of hell and promise of heaven - than by kindness.

The new, more tender-minded morality that began to infiltrate the English sensibility
around 250 years ago shifted the emphasis away from the strict observance of
customary codes and religious injunctions in favour of qualities I will call
‘humanitarianism’. I am using this as an umbrella term to cover a whole range of
selfless emotions like pity, sympathy, kindness, altruism, fellow-feeling, benevolence,
philanthropy and humaneness. Another good word for this cluster is ‘compassion’,
since it means ‘to suffer along with’. That gets to the essence of the new, gentler face
of ethics that emerged in the modern period, since it was based upon the empathetic
ability to feel for the sufferings of others, especially when these were caused by wilful
cruelty.

The new ethics were fed from three main sources. One was the Enlightenment, which
as well as the enthusiasm for science discussed earlier was also typified by revulsion
for the many forms of cruelty by which social life was infested. Thus, satirical novels
by Enlightenment writers like Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels and François-
Marie Voltaire’s 1759 Candide were steeped in revulsion for human brutality and
stupidity. The reforming spirit that drove such satirists culminated at the end of the
eighteenth century in the work of Jeremy Bentham, the founding father of a current in
moral and political philosophy known as Utilitarianism, whose entire morality was
based on the one simple principle – promote happiness by reducing suffering.

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The second major wellspring of humanitarianism was the Romantic movement
initially inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As well as generating the ‘return to
nature’ movement discussed earlier, Romanticism valued emotions higher than
reason. In the seventeenth century, Renee Descartes had proclaimed: ‘I think,
therefore I am’, which in the hands of subsequent philosophers came to mean the
elevation of Reason as the supreme human faculty. The Romantics would have
preferred another adage: ‘I feel, therefore I am’. They – and particularly the female of
the species – came to pride themselves on their capacity to experience strong
emotions, ranging from self-inflicted Gothic palpitations to soggy sentimentality. Of
most relevance for our present story, however, was the inclusion of sympathy, and the
corollary condemnation of cruelty, amongst those cherished emotions. To put it a little
cynically, it became fashionable for one’s heart to bleed at the sufferings of others.
Furthermore, public displays of kind-heartedness allowed members of the respectable
middle class to pride themselves on their moral superiority to the aristocracy above
and working classes below them on the status hierarchy, both of whom were regarded
by those in the middle as callous barbarians. Scepticism about motives apart, there
was nevertheless a profound difference in kind between the old, traditional morality
and the emerging modern ethics: the former was based on authoritarianism and
repression, the latter on empathy and generosity.

The final catalyst for the softening of the European heart came from a new brand of
populist Christianity embraced amongst others by the Methodist movement founded
by John Wesley. As noted above, Christianity had not distinguished itself by other
than token compassion down the centuries, but kindness was near the heart of
Wesley’s mission. Furthermore, he enjoined that his followers should love all God’s
creatures, not just their fellow humans – a doctrine with obvious significance for the
treatment of animals. Methodism helped soften the sensibility of the working class as
Romanticism had done for the middle class, and the Enlightenment the educated elite.

The first practical manifestation of humanitarianism as a form of collective ethics,

rather than individual kindness, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. It was the movement led by the evangelical philanthropist William
Wilberforce to abolish slavery within the British Empire. This was the prototype of
many later reformist movements motivated by the humane ideal of eliminating the
suffering that flows from human oppression and exploitation. Even in Wilberforce’s
own time, explicit parallels were often drawn between the plight of human slaves and
the lot of animals under human dominion. It is to the implications of this parallel that
we will now turn.

THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY

Animals were amongst the first beneficiaries of what I termed above the softening of
the European heart, which began amongst the English middle class from around the
mid-eighteenth century, and became a defining characteristic of Western sensibility in
the high modern period. Before that time, although there were undoubtedly many
individuals who cared for specific animals or felt pity for abused or neglected ones in
general, it would probably be fair to say that in the West (Hinduism and Buddhism
were another matter) systematic cruelty towards animals was the norm, compassion
the exception. Wild animals suffered painful death or maiming at the hands of
hunters, while domesticated ones, depending on the species, were frequently

44
underfed, overworked, beaten, goaded, and ruthlessly discarded or killed when no
longer of use to their human owners. Worse, some species were singled out as objects
of bloodthirsty public sports, like bear and badger baiting or dog and cock fighting.
Each culture had its own speciality. In Latin countries there were the bullfights,
during which not only were the bulls tormented but untold numbers of sad, worn-out
old horses were horribly disembowelled. In Paris, they burned cats alive for fun on
certain fête days. In England, there was foxhunting, which the writer Oscar Wilde
termed ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible’. Then there were the universally
popular performing bears, dogs and monkeys to be seen in city streets and at fairs,
whose training always involved systematic brutality.

All of this went on well into the nineteenth century in self-proclaimed ‘civilised’
countries, and much continues unchecked in many parts of the world today.
Nevertheless from the European Enlightenment and the dawn of romanticism, there
was first a murmur and then an outcry of disgust at these forms of callousness towards
animals. It went hand-in-hand with the ‘back to nature’ movement, but whereas that
tended to benefit animals at the species level through the work of conservationists, the
anti-cruelty movement targeted individual animal suffering, regardless of whether its
victim belonged to an endangered species. It was as concerned about exhausted horses
as it was about the extinction of the dodo.

Cruelty to animals was fought on two fronts simultaneously. On the one hand,
crusaders for animal welfare worked at the street level in what is termed ‘civil
society’ (i.e. everything outside the orbit of the state), while on the other they
campaigned within the corridors of political power to gain legislative protection for
abused or neglected animals. This part will deal with the former, the next with
political struggles for animal welfare.

In the nineteenth century it became increasingly common for kind-hearted humans to

intervene on behalf of animals in everyday social life (note 4). Such interventions
targeted those perpetrating the cruelty through campaigns of education and
propaganda, through public denunciations, through religious exhortations, through
tear-jerking poems and novels, and sometimes through personal attacks on individual
cab drivers, cattle drovers, costermongers and the like who abused animals in public
places. In the later part of the century, much of the criticism turned from working
class targets to middle class vivisectionists. At the same time, an increasing number of
pro-animal campaigners altered their own life styles in line with their convictions by
becoming vegetarians.

The pro-animal activities of individuals were organised and focused from the 1820s
by what are now termed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that provided
practical assistance for suffering animals and spoke up publicly on their behalf. The
first was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824 with a
general brief to prevent cruelty. Later organisations offered specific forms of relief or
triage. One, for instance, installed drinking troughs for thirsty city animals, another
offered free veterinary treatment for the dogs of the poor, while yet another formed
the Blue Cross that sent vets into the First World War to look after army animals.

In our postmodern world, both forms of practical compassion for animals just
mentioned – dissuasion of perpetrators on the one hand, relief work on the other –

45
have increased greatly in scale and also in intensity. New NGOs like Compassion in
World Farming, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a proliferation of
animal refuges and Humane Societies have come on the scene, mass demonstrations
have been held against the long-distance transport of live animals, while small activist
cells of radical, underground organisations like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)
have taken direct action against those involved in the fur trade, factory farming and
laboratory research. On the triage front, branches of the SPCA and humane societies
have been set up in many countries, where they have their hands more than full caring
for abandoned animals, rescuing those in danger, and monitoring animal welfare
regulations.

Concern for animals amongst members of civil society is such a deeply rooted and
widespread aspect of modernity, we tend to take it for granted. It needs a leap of the
historical imagination (or a visit to the world’s poorer countries) to realise how recent
and culturally specific has been this replacement of institutionalised callousness
towards our fellow creatures by institutionalised compassion. Three centuries ago, it
would have been greeted with blank incomprehension, not just by the masses but also
by philosophers like Descartes, to whom animals were non-sentient machines. In this
respect, at least, modernity has been an unmixed blessing for our companions on
Noah’s ark.

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 PART SEVEN: RIGHTS
THE HUMAN WORLD
In this final part, we will explore the political and legal domain of modern human
society, and its significance for non-human animals. This is a dauntingly vast field, as
there are so many ways in which the political landscape was transformed by the
transition from traditionalism to modernity. The transformations were set in motion
by major political earthquakes that occurred during ‘the Age of Revolutions’ from the
mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, were followed by a series of giant
after-shocks throughout the whole modern period, and are still reshaping the
geopolitical map of the world today. A short sample list of topics calling out for
discussion in the wake of these seismic upheavals would include: the colonisation of
the rest of the world by the West, and subsequent liberation struggles by colonised
people against Western imperialism; the rise to power of absolute monarchs, and the
subsequent replacement of monarchical absolutism by democracy; the rise and decline
of Marxist-Leninist socialism; two world wars, and the subsequent cold war between
the Western and Eastern blocks; the resurgence of Arab nationalism and Islamic
fundamentalism; the erosion of national sovereignty by transnational corporations….

We could keep adding to the list of political themes that have characterised the
changing topography of the modern world, but the preceding sample will suffice to
evoke the size and complexity of the terrain by which we are confronted when
attempting to map the political differences between the modern and premodern
worlds.

Fortunately, for our present purposes it is unnecessary to embark upon any such all-
encompassing cartographical exercise. In the political domain, as in the previous
dimensions of modernity we have been exploring, our interest is not in modern human
history as such, but the effect it has had upon our fellow passengers on the ark.
Although the various themes mentioned in the preceding paragraph must all have had
indirect consequences for animals, there is one we have not yet mentioned with more
direct relevance for those animals, since they themselves became the central objects
of political and legal struggles. This theme can be summed up in the one word
‘rights’.

One of the major defining features of the modern epoch has been the campaigns
waged by oppressed, exploited, stigmatised or excluded groups of people for the
acquisition of various forms of rights, campaigns which have been defined by those
who conducted them as ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation’ struggles, while branded by those
who opposed them as ‘treason’, ‘sedition’, ‘terrorism’, or some equally opprobrious
term. Today, what has been called ‘rights rhetoric’ or ‘rights discourse’ – the
tendency for issues to be defined and debated in terms of rights of one sort or another
– has become so deeply entrenched and widespread, we might well add another label
to those already fastened to our own epoch, and call it ‘the Age of Rights’.

47
Rights Defined
Before giving our usual potted history of this dimension of modernity, it would be
prudent to explain how the vexing term ‘rights’ is to be defined in what follows. Such
an explanation is necessary, since although most people nowadays passionately
believe they possess rights, it is not always clear what precisely the term means, nor
on what philosophical grounds the rights in question are based – that is, where they
are supposed to come from. Furthermore, there is a bewildering profusion of rights on
offer: there are God-ordained rights and natural rights, there are civil, human,
dignitary, economic, political, legal, social and customary ones, along with rights
claimed by specific categories like women, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples,
gays and people with disabilities.

To avoid getting lost in the thickets, I will pick out three intertwined threads to guide
us through them – three features which all rights discourse have in common. I will
also suggest the hard, political grounds (as opposed to contentious philosophical
speculations) on which modern rights are based. I must concede that my definitions
may themselves be contentious, and that some readers may take issue with my
formulations. I emphasise that the following is not for a moment intended as a
definitive resolution of the knotty question: ‘What is a right?’. It is just a set of
provisional, working definitions on which I hope we might agree for the duration of
the present discussion, in order to find our way through the conceptual thickets. The
attempt I make here to provide a down-to-earth explanation will take on particular
relevance later on, when we address the even thornier issue of ‘animal rights’. Here,
then, are the three common threads running through all uses of the shape-shifting term
‘rights’.

Protection
The primary defining quality of a right is that it protects individuals or groups from
external harm. The harm may come from the state, from other citizens, or even from
vicissitudes inherent in the human condition, like extreme poverty or disease.
Probably the oldest and most famous of such rights was ‘habeas corpus’, guaranteeing
protection from arbitrary imprisonment, which was granted the English nobility as far
back as the Magna Carta of 1215, but which remains the cornerstone of all subsequent
modern rights. Such rights do not actually grant anything positive, like the right to
vote or receive free education; they simply shield the rights-bearer from harm of one
sort or another. For this reason, they are sometimes termed ‘negative rights’.

Entitlement
In their second form, rights take on a more active dimension, hence their designation
as ‘positive rights’. They do not just protect us, but also entitle us to make claims on
the state or our fellow citizens. One of the most fundamental forms of such
entitlements is the right to private property: once individuals or groups have acquired
possessions by legal means, they have the right to dispose of them as they will. A
second cherished right in democracies is political enfranchisement – the right to stand
for public office, and participate in elections. Since the advent of the social
democratic welfare state around the mid-twentieth century, a host of other positive
rights came on stream, with people becoming entitled by right of citizenship to state-
provided services (such as free education), goods (like subsidised pharmaceuticals),

48
and financial assistance (like the unemployment benefit). The point of such positive
entitlements is that they empower their recipients to lead more fulfilled lives.

Freedom
Now we come to the third ingredient in the rights recipe, represented by the
synonymous words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’. By freedom is meant our capacity as
individuals, groups or entire nations to control our own lives, rather than living under
the domination of others, to develop our potential to the maximum, to participate fully
in mainstream society, and to find fulfilment on our own terms. Some freedoms stem
from negative rights (i.e. protections) and involve ‘freedom from…’ Obviously, for
instance, I am free if I am protected from arbitrary imprisonment. Others involve
‘freedom to…’, which is where positive rights come in. I am free to develop my own
potential, for instance, if I am entitled to free state education.

It is not always easy to make hard, down-to-earth legal provisions guaranteeing

people ‘liberty’, since it can sometimes be a rather vague and amorphous quality.
Nevertheless, a definition of rights would not be complete without the inclusion of
freedom. It has been on the lips of all those who have crusaded for rights from the
dawn of modernity, to the point where the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ are virtually
interchangeable: rights campaigners seek liberty; freedom fighters demand rights. The
intimate link between rights and liberty can be illustrated most graphically in cases
where one category of people has been literally owned by another, as with slaves and
also with women in many societies. Neither group could acquire full rights of
citizenship until they ceased being the property of others.

The legislative basis of rights

Now we must address the vexing question of the origin of rights. In some quarters,
their source is alleged to be a supernatural domain – hence ‘God-given rights’. In
other quarters, they are said to derive from the customs of our forebears – hence
‘customary rights’. By others, they are sourced to the natural world – hence ‘natural
rights’. For other people again, we possess them simply through dint of being a
member of the human species – hence ‘human rights’. Without going into explanatory
detail, I will simply say that all such grand, philosophical claims are far too vague to
be of any practical use when we try to identify precisely from whence rights are
derived. The eighteenth century legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham called such vague
philosophical assertions ‘nonsense upon stilts’ (note 5).

As Bentham pointed out, in cold, practical reality, rights are political and legal
constructs: ‘Rights are . . . the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no
rights without law - no rights contrary to the law - no rights anterior to the law . . .
There are no other than legal rights; - no natural rights - no rights of man, anterior or
superior to those created by the laws’ (ibid). Thus in the modern world, for all intents
and purposes the source of rights resides in sovereign governments and the legal
systems they uphold. Whatever ideal rights I may claim in virtue of being either a
human being or a specific sub-set of the species like female, black, gay or disabled, in
hard, pragmatic reality I only possess such rights as the government of the state of
which I am a resident has enshrined in legislation, and which have been upheld and
implemented by the law courts.

49
The Expanding Circle of Human Rights
Rights rhetoric is a major defining characteristic of modernity, distinguishing it from
all hitherto existing human history. Admittedly, there is nothing uniquely ‘modern’
about humans possessing rights, if we take ‘rights’ to mean the special privileges
accorded different social categories. What is specifically modern, however, is the
source of such rights, the form they take, and the categories of humans to whom they
are extended. In the traditional world, they tended to be acquired through sex, age,
religion and above all lineage. By and large, men had more special privileges than
women, the elderly had more than the young, priests more than lay people, those of
high birth more than commoners, and free men more than slaves. These were laid
down by ancestral custom and backed up by the supernatural. They did not change
over the generations, and could not be challenged.

It was precisely such challenging of age-old privileges, and the corollary assertion of
a quite new conception of rights, that typified modernity during the Age of
Revolutions. Those revolutions began with England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688,
that curbed the absolute power of the king. The ideals of that revolution were
enshrined in the 1688 Bill of Rights, which is still regarded as one of the main
wellsprings of the British constitution. Around a century later, England’s American
colonies launched their own revolution in 1775, which turned into a war of liberation
from the mother country. As with the English revolutionaries before them, rights were
in the forefront of America’s founding fathers’ minds. They, too, promulgated a Bill
of Rights for their new nation, and the term figured prominently in the famous
opening passage of their 1776 Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.’

The third great political earthquake of the age was the 1789 French Revolution, which
once again couched its principles in terms of rights – the 1789 Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The spirit of the whole age was subsequently given
expression in Tom Paine’s 1791 best-selling The Rights of Man. Thus, by the end of
the eighteenth century, rights were firmly inscribed near the top of the modernist
agenda, where they have remained ever since.

At the outset, however, the rights in question were very restricted. Their main
objective was to limit the arbitrary, despotic powers of the monarchy, coupled in the
American case with the desire for self-government, and in France with an antipathy
for the special privileges of the aristocracy and clergy. The revolutionaries were after
freedom from state tyranny and the corollary right to participate in government. In
short, they wanted democracy, but it was democracy of a very narrow kind. Few of
the many rights on offer today were contemplated. Furthermore, even the
comparatively modest rights at issue were reserved only for a small inner circle of
white, property-owning males. They would have thought it ludicrous, when not
downright dangerous, to suggest that the rights about which they were so passionate
for themselves should be extended to slaves, women, property less labourers, savages
or – God forbid! – homosexuals.

50
The story of the rest of modernity from the mid-nineteenth century involves the
progressive expansion of that originally small circle of rights and rights-holders. On
the one hand, the term ‘rights’ itself was defined ever more widely, from the
protection of women and children from industrial exploitation, through the provision
of social services, to the outlawing of social discrimination. People have rights today
of which the original revolutionaries would never have dreamed nor desired. On the
other hand, the expanding circle encompassed ever more social categories, beginning
with the emancipation of slaves in the nineteenth century and culminating in the
postmodern period with what are sometimes termed ‘the new social movements’,
demanding rights for ethnic minorities, women, indigenous people, the disabled, gays
and other oppressed, exploited, stigmatised or socially excluded categories.

At every step of the way, and in every site of struggle, there was social upheaval and
often bloodshed, as rights activists and freedom fighters ran up against resistance
from entrenched groups whose wealth, power and status were threatened. Every time
one group asserts its rights, another fears it will lose its privileges.

In the course of these rights movements, the role of the state underwent a major
realignment. For the early revolutionaries, rights in the first instance were a shield
against the despotism of central government, as personified in the monarch. However,
as the circle of rights expanded, government was increasingly appealed to as their
champion. After all, it was really only the state, with its sovereign power to make and
enforce laws, its financial resources, its coordinating capacity and its moral authority,
that could protect children from capitalist exploitation, provide social services, ensure
financial security, stamp out overt forms of discrimination and the like. Thus, from
being the opponent of rights at the outset of modernity, the state increasingly became
their source. Today, to reinforce a point made earlier, we possess such rights as the
government decrees we may have.

The upshot of this brief historical sketch is that modernity became increasingly
saturated in rights discourse. Everyone today is convinced that he or she has rights of
one sort or another, a conviction which is endorsed by the proliferation of Bills of
Rights, Human Rights Acts and Human Rights Commissions, along with various
Declarations of international bodies like the United Nations, either on Universal
Human Rights, or on rights for specific categories like women, children and disabled
people. There is endless and acrimonious debate about what precisely those rights
entail, and how far they should extend, but the fundamental notion of ‘rights’ itself
has worked its way so far into the collective bloodstream, few would dare challenge
it.

Looking back over the last three centuries or so, struggles for human rights have
brought about a huge expansion of what is sometimes termed ‘the moral community’.
By this is meant the community of those meriting our fellow feeling, and therefore
our concern, protection, assistance and respect. In the early days, the moral
community was defined narrowly as a small inner circle of privileged white males. Its
circumference has expanded over the succeeding centuries and now – at least in
principle – encompasses all human beings. Rights are declared to be universal, and so
too is the moral community of human fellowship. My task in the rest of this paper is
to explore the significance for animals of the rights movements and liberation
struggles that have been waged in the human domain.

51
THE ANIMAL SIDE OF THE STORY
At the time that the French revolutionaries’ proclamation of the universal Rights of
Man was grabbing world-wide headlines, the far more radical notion of extending
such rights across the species divide to other animals at first only inspired a few
marginal comments. It would not be for the best part of two centuries till the paired
ideals of animal rights and animal liberation were to generate the kinds of mass
movements that had begun in the human world in the Age of Revolutions. The vast
majority of people back then, if they thought about animal rights at all, would
probably have dismissed them in some term similar to Bentham’s ‘nonsense upon
stilts’.

A characteristic attitude was expressed in an anonymous little book of 1792 entitled A

Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Its title might look promising to pro-animal
advocates, but in fact it was a satire on the early feminist Mary Wollstoncraft’s
publication of that year entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (note 6). The
intention of the satire was to demonstrate that demanding rights for women was as
palpably absurd as to make the same claim for animals. Its underlying premise, of
course, was that it was self-evidently nonsensical to talk about animals having rights –
a point on which the author assumed universal agreement.

Bentham on animal rights

In the event, however, there actually were a few English visionaries in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century who were already daring to suggest the
desirability of extending rights from humans to animals. The first (or at least the most
famous) explicit reference to this appeared as a passing remark in a book called An
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) by that Utilitarian
philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham whom I have already quoted.
Bentham believed that laws should only serve one end – to reduce suffering as much
as possible, and thereby to enhance the individual pursuit of happiness. The core right
in this system is the right not to suffer. As Bentham notes in the following passage,
this could and should have radical implications for animals:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those
rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand
of tyranny… What is it should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty
of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or
dog is, beyond comparison, a more rational, as well as more conversable
animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose
the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they
reason? nor, Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer? (note 7)

This comment was ignored for many years, but today gets quoted in just about
everything written on animal rights. It is important for two main reasons. First, it
dares use the R-word in relation to animals. Second, it establishes the key principle
that justifies granting them rights – namely, their capacity to suffer.

52
The Legislative Road to Animal Rights
The granting of customary and/or legal rights to animals is not in itself a uniquely
modernist practice. From earliest biblical times, for instance, Hebraic law required
oxen to be given a day off ploughing on the Sabbath. Going considerably further, in
medieval Europe, animals accused of crimes such as despoiling crops or injuring
humans were entitled to a trial and the services of a defence lawyer. In such instances,
animals have been accorded similar protections and privileges to human beings. That
said, these were exceptional cases. By and large, where traditional customs, religious
edicts, legal codes or court rulings related to animals, the rights involved were purely
human ones, usually concerning the privileges and responsibilities of property
ownership (since animals were regarded as human property). Animals in traditional
societies were not regarded as possessing any intrinsic qualities that justified singling
them out for special protections, entitlements or freedoms in and for themselves. It
was only in England in the nineteenth century that minimal protective rights were first
legally accorded certain classes of animals, and only in our own postmodern period
that a full-blown ‘animal rights’ or ‘animal liberation’ movement emerged. It would
thus be fair to say that despite some traditional precursors, making legal and moral
claims on behalf of animals in terms that are relevant to the animals themselves
(which those medieval trials most certainly were not) is a uniquely modern social
phenomenon.

It all began at the very start of the nineteenth century. Whether or not they had
actually read and been influenced by Bentham’s passing aside, from the beginning of
that century there were a growing number of English humanitarians who began to put
pressure on politicians to pass laws to protect animals from the worst excesses of
human cruelty. In effect, the legislation they were calling for would confer certain
limited rights on the animals it covered, if we accept that a minimal definition of the
term right is: ‘a form of protection endorsed by government and upheld by law
courts’. By that definition certain English animals started acquiring their own rights
back in the 1820s, even though they were not explicitly termed ‘rights’ as such. To
adapt a quote about homosexual love from Oscar Wilde, they were the rights that
dared not speak their name.

The legislative road to animal protection began with (initially unsuccessful)

parliamentary attempts to have blood sports like bear-baiting, bull-baiting, dog-
fighting and cock-fighting outlawed in Britain. The first actual legislative success, and
therefore a major milestone in the world history of human/animal relations, was an
Act promoted by Richard Martin in 1822 that made it an offence punishable by fines
and imprisonment to wantonly and cruelly beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare,
gelding, mule, ass, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle (note 8).

A meagre but significant trickle of further legislative measures followed the lead set
by Martin’s Act. Bull baiting and bear baiting, for instance, were banned in a
tightening-up of the 1822 Act in the 1835 Animal Protection Act. Legal protection
was extended from cattle to all domestic animals in 1849, and in 1868 an Act was
passed to protect endangered birds. In 1876, a Cruelty to Animals Act introduced
some minimal protective regulations for laboratory animals. Then in 1911, 90 years of
protective legislation culminated in the Protection of Animals Act, which was to
remain the cornerstone of British animal welfare law for many decades to come.

53
Similar protective legislation was enacted in other English-speaking countries in the
nineteenth century. In the United States, for instance, a watershed New York animal
protection law inspired by the pro-animal campaigner Henry Bergh was passed in
1866, followed in the remainder of the century by similar Acts in other states. On the
other side of the world, New Zealand’s 1884 Police Offences Act introduced a new
strand in animal welfare by outlawing not only cruelty to animals but also their
neglect.

Henry Salt on animals’ rights

Thus, by the start of the twentieth century, a modest precedent had been laid down for
the legal protection of animals. If we accept as a minimal definition of a right that it is
constituted by the legislative guarantee of protection from cruelty, it follows logically
that from the day that Martin’s Act went on the British statue books back in 1822,
animal rights had become a reality. Today, there are still many people who are
dismissive of the concept of animals having rights, but they are standing around the
open door of an empty stable: the horse itself bolted a long time ago!

The most notable of those who actually dared to speak of animal rights by their name
was the socialist humanist Henry Salt. Writing a century later than Bentham, Salt
expanded the latter’s short note on animal rights into a full-length manifesto,
significantly entitled Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress
(1892). Salt was one of those humanitarians we discussed in the previous part who
believed that the essence of morality – and therefore of a legal system derived from
morality – resides in compassion. We have an ethical duty to reduce suffering,
especially when this is caused by the actions of human beings. Since animals are
sentient beings and therefore capable of suffering, we surely have exactly the same
duty to combat cruelty to animals as cruelty to humans. In the case of humans, we
couch this in terms of ‘rights’, and although Salt himself was not enamoured of this
rather fuzzy word, he saw no reason why it should not be applied to animals if it was
to humans.

In putting forward this argument, Salt was expanding on Bentham’s original remarks,
but he went one important step further than Bentham. The latter limited his goal to the
reduction of suffering. Salt added the notion – still hotly contested today – that
animals possess a quality he called ‘individuality’. Like us, they are self-aware
creatures, each with its own unique personality. To use a term introduced much later
by the philosopher Tom Regan, animals are ‘subjects of their own lives’. Being thus
self-aware, they have not only personal interest in avoiding pain but in having the
freedom to express themselves and – within restrictions placed on them by their
relationship to others – to seek happiness. Salt thereby laid down what were to remain
the two foundations of later animal rights or liberation theorists: animals must have
the negative right to be free from pain and suffering, and also the positive right to
self-fulfilment, even happiness.

A fifty-year hiatus
At the dawn of the twentieth century, prospects for animals were looking much
brighter than they had 100 years earlier. On the one hand, in at least a few Western
countries they had been taken under the protective wing of government, while on the
other hand their rights had been given philosophical formulation and justification,

54
even if only in the margins of the reform agenda. Unfortunately for the animal
kingdom, however, action on the animal front stalled in the first half of last century,
making little progress from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 till the 1970s.
Henry Salt’s humanely reasoned call for animals’ rights seems to have sunk virtually
without trace until it was salvaged by a later generation of philosophers, while few
parliamentary measures were taken to build on the legal foundations laid down before
WWI.

During that half-century, the human world was too preoccupied with its own political,
economic and social problems to spare much thought for those of other animals. It
experienced the prolonged traumas of two world wars and the great depression
between them, which generated so much human suffering that it appeared frivolous to
many people to worry about animals. Furthermore, the political energies of the time
were harnessed by two major ideologies – class struggle and militaristic nationalism –
that appeared so vast, compelling and all-encompassing, there was little room left
over for other causes such as the fragile hope of making the world a safer place for
animals.

It was really only after the wounds of the two world wars and the Great Depression
began to heal that the animal cause came back on the reform agenda. Now, however,
it took on two distinct forms. On the one hand, it continued down the road of
legislative reform begun by Martin’s Act in 1822. On the other hand, Bentham’s and
Salt’s long-ignored philosophical call for animal rights, along with an even more
radical demand for full-blown animal liberation, seized the public imagination, as
human rights had done two centuries earlier, and generated a mass social movement.
We will continue to follow the legislative road in the rest of this section, then pick up
on the animal liberation movement in the next.

Post-war animal legislation

After WWII, the legislative programme for the promotion of animal welfare, that had
been stalled for the best part of 50 years, began to pick up momentum again.
Throughout the West, there was a growing body of laws, regulations and
governmental moral injunctions promoting animal welfare. Some of these were
targeted at specific kinds of animals like marine mammals and wild horses, while
others were directed towards particular human practices, such as laboratory
experimentation, the transport of farm animals, the international trade in endangered
species, and cruelty to companion animals. Other pieces of legislation, like the 1966
American Animal Welfare Act, were more global in scope, laying down general
welfare frameworks within which human-animal interactions should take place. Two
of the most recent, comprehensive and allegedly enlightened of such pieces of general
legislation were the New Zealand 1999 Animal Welfare Act, and the 2006 UK Act of
the same name.

As well as such legal rights (those enshrined in legislation and backed up by

punishments for their violation) Western governments have thrown their moral
authority behind a growing number of codes for the ethical treatment of animals,
whose aim is to persuade but not directly coerce farmers, researchers, pet-owners and
others to treat their animals more considerately. Perhaps the best known and most
influential of these ethical codes was given expression in ‘the five freedoms’. These
were proposed in Britain by the government-appointed Brambell Committee in the

55
1960s, in response to Ruth Harrison’s denunciation of factory farming in Animal
Machines, and they were adopted from the mid-1980s by the Farm Animal Welfare
Council in that country. Here they are:

1. Freedom from thirst, hunger and malnutrition - by ready access to fresh water
and a diet to maintain full health and vigour.
2. Freedom from discomfort - by providing a suitable environment including
shelter and a comfortable resting area.
3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease - by prevention or rapid diagnosis and
treatment.
4. Freedom from fear and distress - by ensuring conditions that avoid mental
suffering.
5. Freedom to express normal behaviour for its species - by providing sufficient
space, proper facilities and company of the animal's own kind.

The first three of those concern an animal’s physical needs. It must be protected from
hunger and thirst, from physical discomfort and from disease or injury. It therefore
has the corollary entitlement to adequate nourishment, housing and medical care. The
last two are considerably more generous (and therefore controversial). The fourth
freedom acknowledges something Descartes and many generations of later scientists
denied – that animals have meaningful emotional lives, and are therefore capable of
experiencing mental as well as purely physical distress. The final principle goes even
further, as it requires that farm animals have the freedom to express themselves
through behaviour normal to their species. If it is normal for hens to range around
their natural environment at will, scratching, pecking and sand-bathing, or fluttering
up to roost in trees, then clearly it is a violation of that freedom to coop them up for
life in cramped and barren cages.

In effect, the fourth and fifth freedoms come close to acknowledging that animals,
like humans, possess what Salt termed ‘individuality’, and might also be termed
‘selfhood’ or ‘personhood’. They don’t just exist as physical objects to serve human
ends: their lives matter to them, as ours do to us. Put together, the five freedoms cover
the entire rights continuum, from minimal welfare measures, through
acknowledgement of their states of mind, to the demand for their liberty to freely
express their inherent nature. If actually practised, they would probably be the optimal
expression of the legislative approach to animal rights.

The welfare approach

On occasions, law-makers have placed outright bans on certain practices deemed to
be unacceptably cruel in any shape or form, as happened in England with bull- and
bear-baiting back in the 1830s, and with fox-hunting in that country in 2004. On the
whole, however, governments have tended to limit themselves to reforming existing
human-animal relations by providing a high level of protection in some areas (notably
freedom from wanton cruelty and flagrant neglect), a rather more limited range of
legal entitlements (such as the provision of adequate food, water, shelter and
veterinary care), and an extremely curtailed amount of freedom for animals to give
expression to their intrinsic natures (such as being able to move around and forage at
liberty).

56
The generally used blanket term for this approach is ‘welfarism’, but it might also be
termed the ‘reformist’, ‘ameliorative’ or ‘protectionist’ approach. It expresses the
widespread public revulsion for the wanton abuse of animals, but at the same time it
reflects the unwillingness of governments to trespass too intrusively on the interests
of big business, the biomedical establishment, employees in animal-based sectors of
the economy, owners of animals, and consumers of animal products.

Above all, the welfare approach is in line with the majority of public opinion, which
holds as a matter of ‘common sense’ that non-human animals exist primarily to serve
the function of catering to human needs and desires. Within this instrumental nexus,
animals should be treated as kindly as is practicable, but their basic subordination to
humans is not to be questioned.

Good and Bad news for the animals themselves

Let’s pause at this moment to do some of our regular cost-benefit reckoning of the
welfare approach, as embodied in a long line of laws from the 1822 Martin’s Act to
the 2006 Animal Welfare Act, as well as in softer governmental injunctions like the
five freedoms. The good news is that, so far as it goes, the score is almost certainly on
the positive side of the ledger. It is impossible to quantify, but countless animals must
have been better off, both at the individual and the species levels, as a result of such
protectionist and ameliorative measures. In this respect, high and postmodernity have
distinguished themselves as different in kind and superior in kindness to all preceding
human history in their treatment of animals.

Let’s not go overboard, though. Above, two little provisos were included which may
cast doubt on the achievements of governmental legislative measures and moral
imperatives. These were: ‘if actually practised’ and ‘so far as it goes’. For many of
today’s animal rights campaigners, the welfare approach does not go nearly far
enough, and the protections it does actually provide often exist on paper rather than in
actuality.

Taking the first of those points, the protections on offer are often very minimal.
Above all, legislators and animal welfare councils shy away from sites where the
worst and most widespread forms of institutionalised suffering are experienced,
notably factory farming, the research laboratory, and animal-based entertainment. So
many vested interests are involved, and such large claims are made about the human
benefits of such activities, they are put into the ‘too hard basket’ by reformers. Thus,
while the law may forbid people from mutilating caged songbirds or injecting their
pet dogs with toxic substances, farmers and researchers can inflict precisely such
cruelty on chickens or lab dogs with legal impunity.

The second problem is that even where cruel practices are outlawed or at least
strongly morally condemned, in real life those prohibitions are frequently honoured
more in the breach than the observation. For instance, the fourth and fifth of those
famous five freedoms – freedom from emotional distress and freedom to express their
intrinsic nature – are almost universally disregarded by those who make a living out
of processing animals.

One reason for this is that governments tend to back away from hard-nosed legal
sanctions in favour of gentler forms of moral persuasion and non-coercive

57
negotiation. The state requests people to treat animals kindly. It proffers guidelines
like the five freedoms, or asks people to draw up codes of conduct which they then
monitor themselves. It permits compliance to some regulations to be voluntary, and
allows plenty of scope for the infliction of ‘necessary’, ‘reasonable’ or ‘unavoidable’
suffering – vague terms which cover a multitude of sins.

One of the most glaring deficiencies in the reformist and voluntary approach to
animal welfare is in the domain of laboratory research. Here, the equivalent form of
moral persuasion to the five freedoms of the farming sector is the much-vaunted
‘three Rs’ – replacement, refinement and reduction. Researchers are politely asked by
bodies like the New Zealand National Animal ethics Advisory Committee if they
could reduce animal suffering by using fewer numbers, finding alternative research
methods, and adopting more humane procedures. Somewhere in the distant
background presumably lurks one of the most fundamental of all rights – the right not
to be tortured. However, despite campaigns against vivisection mounted ever since
the nineteenth century, this right is regularly abrogated by scientific researchers, an
abrogation only marginally affected by the promulgation of the three Rs, as they are
merely moral guidelines, not legally binding state injunctions.

Even when welfare provisions are legally binding, and are backed up by fines or
imprisonment, their enforcement is much laxer than with other laws, and judges are
considerably more lenient with offenders against animal rights than against human
ones. The law does not cautiously suggest to human parents that they should refrain
from abusing or neglecting their children: it orders them. This is often not the case
with similar or far worse abuse or neglect of animals, which tends to be trivialised by
the legal system.

The upshot of these observations is that while it may be undoubtedly true that the
ameliorative approach to animal welfare has caused countless animals to be treated
more humanely than if it had never been implemented, it has left an unquantifiable
but large amount of animal suffering untouched.

Even this, however, is not the main charge levelled against the welfare approach by
those who espouse the cause of total animal liberation. Their objection to the welfarist
approach is that it fails to address the fundamental root of the whole problem of
human-animal relations – the assumption that animals exist as instrumental means for
the fulfilment of human wants. Welfarism accepts the rightness and inevitability of
human dominion over all other species, and simply tries to soften its impact. It is like
telling slave-owners to be kinder to their slaves, while leaving the institution of
slavery untouched. This observation brings us to the second strand of the post-WWII
pro-animal campaign that was mentioned briefly above, and which will now be
ushered centre-stage.

The Animal Rights Mass movement

We now come to the latest and most significant chapter in the story of human-animal
relations in modernity. Its significance lies in the fact that for the first time in the
entire sweep of human history, people began to organise, agitate and educate en
masse on behalf of animals. It would probably be fair to say that the reformist path to
animal welfare discussed above had been fairly much a minority interest, promoted

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passionately by dedicated animal lovers but of little interest to the general public or
the mass media. Things were to change dramatically from the 1970s, with the
publication of influential books like Peter Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation and Tom
Regan’s 1983 The Case for Animal Rights, which picked up on the premonitory hints
of visionaries like Bentham and Salt, and developed them into a full-blown
philosophy of animal liberation (on the part of Singer) and moral rights for animals
(Regan).

Probably even more influential than such philosophical tracts were the campaigns
waged by pro-animal activist groups like the underground Animal Liberation Front
(ALF) and the more public and populist People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) founded respectively in 1976 and 1980. Such organisations were the shock
troops, as it were, of the new animal rights movement, fighting in the front line to
expose and denounce animal oppression by humans, and to keep drawing the
sometimes fickle attention of the mass media to their cause. The activists’ exposures
of particularly distressing cases of animal abuse gained that cause growing support
from a wide cross-section of the general public.

Taking the lead set by a number of new social movements that emerged from the
1950s, including those of ethnic minorities, feminists, gays, indigenous people and the
disabled, pro-animal campaigners embraced the terms ‘rights’ and ‘liberation’ which
the more cautious animal welfare approach had carefully avoided. They employed
those terms as rallying cries for what was going to become one of the biggest
postmodern mass movements of all. This movement added another ‘-ism’ to the
growing list of oppressive practices denounced in the postmodern world. Racism,
sexism, heterosexism and ablism were joined by ‘speciesism’.

Like the other social movements of the time, the campaign for animal rights and/or
animal liberation had the revolutionary long-term goal of transforming the entire
social mindset of the age and the practices based upon that mindset. Pro-animal
crusaders did not just want people to be a bit kinder to animals (although that was
certainly one of their goals), nor did they limit their own activities to providing rescue
services or refuges for animals. They had the more visionary ambition of persuading
society to totally re-think the human-animal nexus, and to radically alter its treatment
of our fellow creatures.

The movement employed the same wide spectrum of strategies and tactics as the other
social movements on which it was modelled. At the apex of the political pyramid, it
continued the work first started by Richard Martin and his allies back in 1822 by
pressuring politicians to enact more comprehensive and harder-hitting legislation on
behalf of animals. Also on the legal front, a new generation of pro-animal lawyers
came on stream at the start of the 21st century, backed up by growing numbers of
university courses in animal rights law, who used their special expertise in the law to
promote legal rights for animals. (An influential book in this respect was Steven
Wise’s 2000 Rattling the Cage: Towards legal rights for animals). As was noted
above, however, it was apparent that governmental laws, regulations and moral
exhortations of the purely welfarist variety were not going to put an end to the
prevailing, widespread cruelty being inflicted on animals. Legislation had to be
supplemented, enforced and in some cases by-passed by direct action of one sort or
another.

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One obvious form of action open to all was to alter their own life styles in line with
their ideals by abstaining from activities based directly or indirectly on animal
suffering, such as consuming animal-based food, purchasing animal products like fur,
leather and wool, attending animal spectacles and entertainments, and even owning
pets. As well as enabling animal sympathisers to put their principles into practice in
their own lives, such boycotts were hoped eventually to erode the whole economic
infrastructure of animal-based industries: if enough people refused to buy battery-
farmed chickens and eggs, for instance, it could eventually lead to intensive poultry
farming being phased out. This, however, was an extremely long-term strategy, as it
would take many years (if ever) for such consumer boycotts to achieve the critical
mass necessary to close down multi-billion dollar industries.

In the shorter term, more direct, proactive strategies were employed to gain public
support for the animal cause and to deter those responsible for on-going institutional
cruelty to animals. PETA, for instance, launched media campaigns and educational
programmes in schools to convert public opinion to their cause, often benefiting from
support by high-profile celebrities like Sir Paul McCartney and Spike Milligan. More
radically, PETA and other organisations, notably ALF, on occasions crossed the line
from peaceful persuasion to militant dissuasion by directly targeting individuals or
organisations complicit in the exploitation or oppression of animals. Targets included
fashion designers working in fur, shops selling animal food or products, factory
farms, research establishments, fox hunters, seal cullers, and trucks driving live
animals to the slaughterhouse – to give just a short sample list. In some cases, it was a
matter of ‘naming and shaming’ individuals or firms, as when videos were taken of
animal abuse inside the closed doors of battery farms or research laboratories, then
aired on the mass media. (A very readable and colourful account of PETA’s
campaigns can be found in Dan Mathews’s 2007 Committed: A rabble-rouser’s
Memoir.)

In undertaking such forms of direct action, pro-animal activists almost inevitably

sometimes crossed the line from legal to non-legal forms of protest. In most cases,
infringements tended to be of a fairly minor nature –misdemeanours like civil
disobedience and disturbances, unauthorised sit-ins, trespass, graffiti, splashing fake
blood around and the like, rather than serious crimes. They have not been alone in
such minor flouting of the law, as it has been a common practice in all social
movements, whose more radical activists have not infrequently spent time in police
cells for making public nuisances of themselves. Infringement of minor laws tends to
be regarded as a legitimate tactic, justified by the higher cause by which protestors are
motivated. It may even be applauded by more law-abiding animal advocates, if it
succeeds in exposing and thereby putting a stop to the worst excesses of animal abuse.

However, there have been a number of highly publicised incidents since the 1970s
where direct action took on a considerably more aggressive aspect. There have been
actual or threatened acts of sabotage, property destruction, letter- and fire-bombing,
and personal attacks on alleged perpetrators of cruelty and those who abet them. Such
tactics go considerably further than mere ‘naming and shaming’: they are openly
intimidating. Indeed, the term ‘terrorism’ is not too extreme for some attacks, since
their overt intention has been to strike terror amongst those associated with animal
cruelty.

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One of the most widely publicised campaigns of systematic harassment over recent
years was conducted against the animal-testing laboratories of Huntingdon Life
Sciences by an underground organisation called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
(SHAC), which not only launched direct attacks against the firm and its staff,
including fire-bombing, but threatened the economic viability of any organisations or
individuals who had dealings with the laboratory. That is, people were personally
intimidated, while the entire financial infrastructure of the company was undermined
(note 9).

In cases like the SHAC campaign against Huntingdon, and similar ones mounted by
organisations such as the clandestine ALF and the even more shadowy Justice
Department and Animal Rights Militia, the pro-animal campaign has been conducted
by cells of loosely structured underground organisations, and have only involved a
small number of highly radicalised and ideologically committed individuals. It is their
intimidatory tactics that have become associated in the public imagination with the
term ‘animal rights’, and caused the entire movement to come under the same
suspicion as other movements with fringe terrorist wings.

However, violent action by underground cells is only one small, if notorious, strand of
the wider animal rights movement. At the other extreme, mass rallies have mobilised
a wide cross-section of the general public to take part in large protests that might on
occasions have stepped slightly outside the law, but have done nothing to merit the
‘terrorist’ label. In England in 2004-05, for instance, direct mass action was taken to
physically block the shipment of live animals from that country to the European
mainland. Protestors there were following the path of passive resistance and civil
disobedience practised before them by Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther
King in the United States, and were a far cry from the callous brutality of a real
terrorist organisation like Al Qaeda. It is important to emphasise, therefore, that
within the broad umbrella term ‘animal rights’ there is a wide spectrum of pro-animal
activities, ranging from entirely peaceful ones like practising veganism, running
animal refuges and conducting educational programmes, through minor infractions of
the law like civil disruption and trespass, to hate campaigns and life-threatening
attacks.

Similarly, pro-animal campaigners can adopt a variety of different attitudes and styles
of discourse with their opponents, from conciliatory discussion to head-on
confrontation. By and large, organisations such as PETA, and its New Zealand
counterpart Save Animals from Exploitation (SAFE) have opted for the friendly, non-
threatening approach, having learned from experience that a good-natured appeal to
people’s consciences is a more effective way of gaining converts than aggressive
confrontation.

Within the broad range of tactics and styles just evoked, it is also useful to distinguish
between what might be termed ‘reformers’ and ‘revolutionaries’ amongst animal
rights campaigners. The former are frustrated by current limitations and weaknesses
of government welfare legislation, and would therefore like a great deal more to be
done to eliminate cruelty towards animals. On the one hand, they want certain
particularly cruel practices to be outlawed, including battery farming, live animal
shipments and tests that cause severe suffering. On the other hand, they call for

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existing laws, regulations and codes to be more strictly monitored and enforced. Even
so, they do not demand the total abolition of all use of animals for human ends. They
may, for instance, continue to consume food and products derived from animals, so
long as they can be assured the animals in question are farmed and slaughtered
humanely.

Total abolition is the domain of the revolutionary animal liberation wing of the animal
rights movement. Animal liberationists do not want to tinker around with surface
reforms: their ideal is to free all animals entirely from the yoke of human bondage.
For them, animal rights do not involve simply more protections and entitlements, but
a final end to the age-old domination of other species by humanity. No more animal
farms; no more animal research; no more pets; no more animal-based spectacles and
entertainments. This extreme liberationist approach is only a minority position
amongst today’s extremely large and diverse pro-animal movement, but in the minds
of the general public, the mass media, and even leading scholars in the field of
human-animal studies, there is a tendency to confuse the broad term ‘animal rights’
with the much more radical ideal of total ‘animal liberation’.

Even amongst the ranks of total abolitionists, all of whom are agreed that the long-
term goal is complete animal liberation, there is disagreement (sometimes rancorous)
about short- and medium-term tactics. The issue here can be summed up in the term
‘incrumentalism’. Should the animal liberation movement ‘go for broke’ and demand
the more-or-less immediate social renunciation of all forms of animal exploitation?
Alternatively, should it pursue its long-range goal through a series of incremental
reforms – freeing hens from battery cages here, releasing stir-crazy sows from
gestation stalls there, ameliorating painful husbandry practices elsewhere, and so on?
In other words, how far should animal liberationists be prepared to compromise their
ideals in order to achieve specific incremental improvements within what they regard
as a fundamentally iniquitous system? Hard-core fundamentalists tend to regard any
compromises with that system as a sell-out to the very welfarism they themselves
have rejected. Thus, even amongst the most committed exponents of animal rights
(i.e. those dedicated to total liberation) internecine warfare can rage between
revolutionary fundamentalists and pragmatic incrumentalists.

Pros and cons of direct action

Although it cannot be quantified, many animals must have benefited enormously from
the combined efforts of all those involved in the mass animal rights movement of the
postmodern period. For one thing, the improved animal welfare legislation that has
been passed over the last 30 or so years has been partly driven by activists in that
movement. Their pressure has also brought about a significant change of heart
amongst those engaged in hands-on dealings with animals. Many large cosmetic
companies, for instance, have stopped testing their products on live animals, some
farmers and researchers have taken the five freedoms and three Rs to heart,
departments of animal welfare science have been established in universities, the
fashion-conscious no longer parade their support for the fur trade, more people are
becoming vegetarians or vegans, and the public generally are more sensitive to the
whole matter of animal welfare. Government legislation alone could never have
achieved these improvements: they have needed decades of committed action on the
part of the whole spectrum of the animal rights movement.

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It is possible, however, that the radical idealism of some animal rights extremists,
particularly those dedicated to total animal liberation and/or who have employed
physical violence and hate campaigns to achieve their goals, may have indirectly set
back the very cause they espouse. under threat of personal or financial attack, certain
animal-based occupations have closed ranks and become more covert in their
activities, thereby making it more difficult for those activities to be monitored and
regulated. Claiming fear of attack or harassment, for instance, the animal research
establishment tends to shroud itself in a veil of secrecy. If not confronted so
aggressively, researchers might be more open to public scrutiny. On a broader front, it
is possible that the general public, along with the politicians who represent it, though
sympathetic in principle to the cause of animal welfare, has been alienated by media
reports of the actions of a few extremists in groups like the Justice Department and
the Animal Rights Militia. In the context of the wider fear of terrorism that has
engulfed the West since the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, radical pro-
animal activism may have tainted the whole animal rights movement, and thereby
impeded rather than encouraged its progress.

Here, though, we are entering the domain of the kind of speculation that surrounds all
social movements: does unlawful direct action advance or damage their long-term
goals? Frustrated by the continuing amount of cruelty still inflicted upon animals,
some rights activists – notably those at the liberation extreme of the animal rights
spectrum – have taken their version of justice into their own hands. Whether animals
on aggregate have themselves benefited from such summary justice, or have suffered
from the resulting backlash, is an open question.

This question centres on a moral dilemma which confronts all forms of political
activism: when do the ends justify the means? If your goal is pure and high-minded
(in this case the reduction of animal suffering) are you justified in adopting illegal
means to achieve it? Nobody has come up with a universally satisfactory solution to
this age-old ethical conundrum, and I do not intend attempting one myself. All we can
say for sure is that when the means/ends issue is applied to the rights of animals it is a
uniquely postmodern quandary. The whole idea of a large section of the populace
mobilising on behalf of animals, with the resulting dilemma about the means to be
employed in pursuing that cause, would have quite literally been unthinkable a
hundred years ago.

A FINAL RECKONING
I am not going to attempt any grand rhetorical flourishes to wind up this overview of
the impact of modernity on animals. I will content myself with a modest attempt to do
one final cost-benefit reckoning right across the board. We cannot say that modernity
has on balance been advantageous or disadvantageous for our fellow passengers on
the ark, as it is too complex and many-faceted to allow for a tidy, overall balance. I
will try instead for a piecemeal summary of what has been said earlier.

In some cases, the situation of animals has undoubtedly been transformed, but it is
hard to see that they are either better or worse off as a consequence. This is the case,
for instance, with the global spread of animals that were once limited to western
Europe. It is also the case with the emergence of three zones – the city, the farming

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belt and the wilderness – each characterised by a different mode of human-animal
relationship. These are objective features of modernity, but so far as I can tell they are
neither here nor there in terms of animal wellbeing.

In other instances, the lot of animals has taken a definite turn for the worse under
modernity. In particular, their intrinsic nature is mutilated by factory farming as it was
not by pre-modern husbandry, they have been subjected in research laboratories to
forms of prolonged and systematic torture that far exceed the random cruelties of the
past, and wild ones have been the accidental victims on the grand scale of global
industrial development and pollution.

To end on a brighter note, modernisation has brought certain major benefits in its
wake for animals. The invention of the internal combustion engine on its own brought
about wholesale liberation for work animals. Science has enhanced the medical care
of animals, as it has of humans. Finally, the combined effect of the back-to-nature
movement, humanitarianism and the campaign for animal rights has been to generate
an empathy for animals, and therefore a will to promote their wellbeing, quite unlike
anything that prevailed before the modern period. To some extent, this concern for the
condition of animals has counteracted other, uglier consequences of modernisation,
although it is still far from cancelling them out.

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 END NOTES
1. Kean, H. (1998). Animal rights: Political and social change in Britain since
1800. London: Reaction Books.

2. http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm

3. Serpell, J. (1989). Pet-keeping and animal domestication: a reappraisal. In The

walking larder. J. Clutton-Brock (ed.). London: Unwin Hyman Ltd.

4. The historical material in this section, and also in the following Part on animal
rights, was compiled from the following books:
• Armstrong, S. & Botzler, R. (Eds.). (2003). The animal ethics reader.
[Introduction]. London. New York: Routledge.
• Franklin, A. (1999). Animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-
animal relations in modernity. London: Sage.
• Kean, H. Op cit.
• MAF. (2005). Animal welfare in New Zealand. Wellington: MAF.

5. Quoted in Regan, T. (1983). The case for animal rights. Berkeley: University
of California Press.

6. Quoted in Singer, P. (1975). Animal liberation. New York: Ecco.

7. Ibid.

8. Quoted in Kean, H. Op cit.

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Huntingdon_Animal_Cruelty

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