Mobilizing Traditions in the First Wave of the British Animal Defense Movement

Chien-hui Li

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781137526502
• eBook ISBN: 9781137526519
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: British History

This book explores the British animal defense movement's mobilization of the cultural and intellectual traditions of its time- from Christianity and literature, to natural history, evolutionism and political radicalism- in its struggle for the cause of animals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Each chapter examines the process whereby the animal protection movement interpreted and drew upon varied intellectual, moral and cultural resources in order to achieve its manifold objectives, participate in the ongoing re-creation of the current traditions of thought, and re-shape human-animal relations in wider society. Placing at its center of analysis the movement's mediating power in relation to its surrounding traditions, Li's original perspective uncovers the oft-ignored cultural work of the movement whilst restoring its agency in explaining social change.  Looking forward, it points at the same time to the potential of all traditions, through ongoing mobilization, to effect change in the human-animal relations of the future.

© The Author(s) 2019

C.-h. LiMobilizing Traditions in the First Wave of the British Animal Defense MovementThe Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52651-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Mobilizing Traditions for Animals

Chien-hui Li¹

(1)

National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

End Abstract

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an organized movement to improve conditions for animals. From the first successfully maintained anti-cruelty society founded in 1824 to the gradual emergence of hundreds of similar societies and their local branches all over Britain and its sphere of imperial influence, the movement for the protection of animals gradually took shape. Throughout the course of the so-called long nineteenth century, that extended up to the First World War, the movement not only effected changes in people’s treatment of, and attitudes toward, animals, but also helped to incorporate kindness to animals as a crucial element of the British national identity that continues to this day. By the time of the outbreak of the Great War, it had developed most of the fundamental objectives, arguments, and tactics that guide it to this day. Another century of action has led, directly or indirectly, to a lively global movement for the promotion of the interests of animals, with a growing awareness of the urgent need to re-examine human–animal relations in the Anthropocene, as well as a fast-growing “animal turn” in academic research and teaching, which is as much a product of the long history of animal protection initiatives as a contributory force to their further development.

Thus my work traces from present-day initiatives to their key antecedent—the first wave of the movement for the protection of animals in Britain. It captures the movement in its process of formation by examining its mobilization of the cultural and intellectual traditions of its time—Christianity, political radicalism , natural history, evolutionism, and literature . I argue that, through engaging in such diverse theoretical interactions to meet its various mobilizing needs, the movement not only sustained and advanced its work but also played a part in recreating and energizing these traditions, which in turn helped to promote human–animal relationships in the wider society. However, as no knowledge can be divorced from the larger social and intellectual context that shaped it, this work, while focusing on the early history of the movement, simultaneously draws its strength and inspiration from the contemporary world of action for animals as well as from the lively historical scholarship that has accompanied it.

Historiography of the Nineteenth-Century British Animal Protection Movement

Setting aside a few earlier chroniclers, the long history of the animal protection movement in Britain was rediscovered almost simultaneously and collectively by many writers, as an effect of the rise in ethical concern for animals in the 1970s. Critics and activists, as well as historians, whose roles often overlapped, were all involved. Often perceived as part of the rise of a “modern sensibility” toward animals and the natural world, the early movement was explained in various ways in serious studies produced in the 1970s and 1980s as well as in popular narratives of the time. The explanations offered ranged from the intellectual to the socio-economic, and even the socio-psychological.

Firstly, with the common privileging of the power of ideas over the course of history, or with a common-sense assumption that ideas beget actions, scholars first traced the origins of the modern animal protection movement to intellectual developments since the early modern and Enlightenment periods. They cited literary and philosophical works that expressed humanitarian sentiments, and scientific discoveries that revised the relations between humans and other animals, etc.¹ As attention to “great thinkers” is commonly observed in conventional intellectual history, the ideas of canonical philosophers and scientists, such as René Descartes, Jeremy Bentham, and Charles Darwin and others stood out in the historical narratives and were credited with a power to effect epoch-making changes in the collective mentality. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the material determinism of the Marxist school carried the day, particularly in social and political history, socio-economic analysis featured prominently also in the early historiography of the nineteenth-century animal protection movement. The industrialization process that supposedly excluded animals from the principal modes of production, the urbanization process that withdrew city people from real encounters with animals, the pampering of pets by the rising middle class , the hegemonic control of the middle and upper classes over the laboring poor, have all been offered as explanations for the emergence of the organized animal protection efforts that first originated from within the urban middle classes.² The socio-psychological approach was often combined with elements of the socio-economic in explaining the movement’s rise and its ongoing difficulties as effects of the hidden desires and fears of its supporters. For example, in the most substantial history of the nineteenth-century anti-vivisection movement, Antivivisection and the Medical Science in Victorian Society (1975), Richard French first offered an in-depth analysis of “The mind of antivivisection,”³ finding the key to its fervor in the anti-vivisectionists’ love for pets, which was then explained in terms of a “fear of the physical and of the dark and terrible ‘lower self’ lurking within man” in sexually repressed Victorian society.⁴ Subsequent works, such as James Turner’s Reckoning with the Beast and Carol Lansbury’s The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985), similarly delved deeply into the inner psychological realm. For Turner, the Victorian animal lovers or activists were principally people who sought to resolve their complex emotional anxieties and guilt related to sex, human animality, and societal strains through their love and actions for animals. The promotion of the virtue of kindness to animals thus conveniently served as “a surest refutation of human being’s bestial savagery” in the post-Darwinian age, and “a psychological bulwark against the onslaught of modernization” for urban people suffering from the trauma caused by the industrial age, but it also displaced attention “from exploited workers to maltreated brutes” in the “guilt-ridden new middle classes.”⁵ Lansbury too argued that the many workers and women who rallied behind the “Brown Dog” in the Edwardian period were actually drawn to the anti-vivisection cause not out of a genuine concern for the plight of vivisected animals, but rather due to their own similar experience under the oppressive industrial or patriarchal systems. Some of the female reformers were even accused of having “a masochistic desire to be subdued and made to suffer like the animals they saw bound to operating tables.”⁶ These hidden identities and impulses , that ruled out any real concern for animals according to Lansbury, also partly accounted for the demise of the anti-vivisection cause in the early-twentieth century.⁷

These major modes of explanation—intellectual, socio-economic, and socio-psychological —have implications for our proper understanding of the animal protection movement. Firstly, the intellectual and socio-economic approaches, while helpful in locating the movement within the larger historical context, often presented ideas and material circumstances unrelated to animal cruelty as sufficient to account for the movement’s emergence and development, thus turning it into a direct if unconscious expression of these extraneous factors.⁸ Yet how did the chaotic and competing world of ideas in the abstract realm come to exercise an influence at the level of concrete events and action? Through what processes did historical agents with their differing agendas make use of and create meanings for themselves from the competing ideas surrounding them? The mediating roles and agency of the animal protection movement itself in recasting the ideational resources and material circumstances around them have simply been ignored by the theorists. In works that privileged socio-psychological explanations for expressions of sympathy with animals, the proclaimed motives of the movement’s participants were often simply circumvented or sidelined in order to uncover the “real” motives lying deep in the psychological complexes or unconscious minds of the historical subjects. As a result, the participants’ motives for action on behalf of animals were transposed from a rational to an irrational level,⁹ implying a flat denial of the psychological mechanism of sympathy for the suffering animals as proclaimed by the reformers themselves, despite the heavy historical evidence in support of it.¹⁰ All of these tendencies, unfortunately, not only closed up historical inquiries into the actual reasoning and working of the movement, but also colluded with the contemporary bias toward viewing animal activists as sentimental, morbid and irrational, thereby hampering a true understanding of the cause.

However, with the continuing “democratizing influence” of “history from below” brought about by social history with its radical edge, and with the upsurge in cultural history and animal history since the 1980s, studies that either looked directly into the movement or tangentially touched upon it continued to flourish, creating a plurality of subjects and analytical viewpoints. Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights: Social and Political Change since 1800, that privileged the influence of sight as a source of historical change, remains perhaps the most comprehensive account of the nineteenth-century animal protection movement.¹¹ Other important studies that examined different aspects of the movement—visual, textual, anti-vivisection, hunting, vegetarianism—or approached it from angles such as class , gender , race, nation, and empire, burgeoned also, further complicating our understanding of the movement.¹² Of central importance regarding the development of the field of nineteenth-century human–animal relations was The Animal Estate by Harriet Ritvo which, with a scope of exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Mobilizing Traditions for Animals
• 2. Mobilizing the Christian Tradition: True Patriots and the Sacrificial Spirit of Christ
• 3. Mobilizing Political Traditions: We Want Justice, Not Charity
• 4. Mobilizing the Natural History Tradition: The Intelligent Dog and the Affectionate Spider
• 5. Mobilizing the Evolutionary Tradition: A Darwinian Revolution in Animal Ethics?
• 6. Mobilizing Literary Traditions: “The Ultimate Word Will Be Spoken…by the Heart”
• 7. Final Reflections
• Back Matter