Animal Rights

A very interesting article in the same issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas by Rod Preece of Wilfrid Laurier University. He examines the effect of Darwinism on moral debates about treatment of animals during the 19th century, and concludes that Darwinism had little appreciable effect. Many of the animal rights advocates of that time were Christians, mostly non-Conformist Evangelicals (Preece cites Paul Johnson to this effect). Preece concludes, “The customary tale of how Darwin’s theory of evolution occasioned the most fundamental revolution in animal ethics needs to be rethought and retold. From a moral perspective Darwinism added nothing that had not been long proclaimed. From a practical perspective at least the more prominent of the Darwinians were far less sympathetic to animals in experimentation than some prominent Christians . . . . Much of our contemporary analysis reads more like ideology than history. The prevailing premises of the history of animal ethics require a thorough reinvestigation.”

Just one quotation will suffice to illustrate the attitudes of certain Christians to cruel treatment of animals. Basil Wilberforce, Archdeacon of Westminster, said in a 1909 sermon: “I believe that no greater cruelty is perpetrated on this earth than that which is committed in the name of science in some physiological laboratories . . . . The cause which we are championing is no fanatical protest based on ignorant sentimentality, but a claim of simple justice not only on the transcendent truths of the immanence of the divine truth in all that lives, but also upon the irrefutable logic of ascertained fact.”