The animals' cause : a selection of papers contributed to the international anti-vivisection and animal protection congress, held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, London, July 6th-10th, 1909 / edited by L. Lind-af-Hageby.

  • International Anti-Vivisection and Animal Protection Congress (1909 : London, England)
Date:
[1909?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The animals' cause : a selection of papers contributed to the international anti-vivisection and animal protection congress, held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, London, July 6th-10th, 1909 / edited by L. Lind-af-Hageby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is descriptive of our average attitude towards the domestic animals, except when we make “ pets ” of them—and then our kindness is perhaps more fatal than our cruelty. Must we not feel that the main cause of our wrong-doing, kind or cruel, is the lingering belief that animals are mere things, an irrational race of beings wholly separate from the human, and that, as this superstition dies out, our present stupid and unfeeling treatment of our ‘1 rudimentary brethren ” will be replaced by a more sane and sympathetic one? It is the denial of “ personality ” to animals that is at the root of the evil. So, too, as regards the wild animals; for though we have not the same social duties towards these, as towards the domestic, for ser- vices performed, yet we are morally bound to do them no unneces- sary wrong, and it is to be hoped that the public conscience will enforce this duty by legislation. The absurdity of the present state of the English law, which forbids cruelty to domestic animals, while it permits almost any sort of atrocity to be wreaked on wild ones, and further insists on classing as ferce natural such practically domesticated, if not domestic, creatures as the park-fed stag, the bagged rabbit, and the caged pigeon, is acknowledged on all hands, and is rapidly becoming sufficiently scandalous to give some hope of a reform. For wild animals also have their own individuality and character; they are not stocks and stones, but living, sentient beings; and the more this is felt and understood, the more their rights will be respected, and the less will rational and civilised persons be disposed to indulge in “sport” (or “blood-sport,” as it should properly be called, to distinguish it from the manlier games of the gymnasium or cricket-field), that pastime of idle gentlemen who, in a civilised era, have not yet emerged from old-world savagery. The distinctive feature of blood-sport, among the various tradi- tional habits that infringe the rights of animals, is its wantonncss. To kill may be justifiable, is often justifiable; but to take pleasure in killing can never be otherwise than immoral in a man who claims to be civilised. In strong contrast to the childishness of sport stands the deliberateness of vivisection—-yet I think it must be recognised that this, too, springs from a common origin—the lack of any real con- ception that the lower animals are intelligent beings with a rational purpose in their lives. Given a race of “ brute beasts,” which* [sic] are assumed to exist for the sole object of ministering to human convenience, and it was inevitable that they should be used and ill- used in various ways according to the whims and fancies, or the more serious inclinations, of their masters. Thus regarded from Schopenhauer, in his Foundation of Morality,” has commented on the English use of the neuter pronoun, it, when animals are referred to, as if they were inanimate objects. Nothing is more shocking,” he says, than this idiom, especially when the ;primates are spoken of.”