Animal Rights

ANIMAL RIGHTS. Although an extensive literature questioning anthropocentrism and urging greater harmony in the relations between humankind and other animals has existed in the Western world for centuries, the modern movement for animal rights emerged only in the late nineteenth century. At first the notion that animals, too, had rights was little more than a side issue in platforms of other reform movements regarded as major, notably abolitionism and woman suffrage. One of the first Americans to declare that animals, even insects, “have the same right to life that I have” was Unitarian anti-slavery spokesman William Ellery Channing, but he gave little emphasis to this aspect of his thought in his published writings. Similarly, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, and many other woman’s rights advocates took up the cause of vegetarianism (a current closely allied to animal rights), but it never became a focus of their agitation.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first organization in the Western hemisphere devoted to better treatment of other species, was founded in New York in 1866, and like-minded groups soon formed all over the country. Such groups were not concerned with defending animals’ rights in the broader sense, but rather in securing legislation against what they regarded as excessive cruelty. A major function of the Humane Society, founded in Chicago in 1877, was to provide public water-troughs for horses in crowded downtown areas.

With the 1892 publication in London of the book Animals’ Rights by British socialist Henry S. Salt (a New York edition appeared two years later), animal rights came to be recognized as a distinct movement, and it began to attract the active support of other reformers. Popular feminist author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote tales and tracts depicting the horrors of vivisection. All through the nineties, feminists, dress-reformers, and pioneer conservationists joined animal rights advocates in an eventually successful campaign against the use of stuffed birds and exotic plumage in women’s hats. Frequently, these activists worked in women’s, child, and animal protection movements, understanding connections between patriarchy, domestic abuse, and animal abuse.

Significant as it is that the international animal rights movement was founded by a socialist, it is no less significant that Salt’s socialism was rooted in the pre-Marxian radicalism of two poets: the militant vegetarian Shelley and that ardent champion of wilderness, Thoreau. The notion of a reconciliation of humans and other animals figured prominently in much Utopian literature, notably in Charles Fourier’s dream of “universal harmony” (which had reverberated throughout the pre–Civil War United States). It was also prominent in the works of Edward Bellamy, especially with the publication of his Equality (1897), in which America’s greatest Utopian made it clear that recognition of animals’ rights was a key feature of the new society. As Marxism became the dominant mode of socialism, the “animal question” tended to be shoved aside. Neither Marx nor Engels ever troubled to write on the subject in detail, but their scattered references to vegetarians, antivivisectionists, and animal exploitation are not sympathetic. At a time when idealist and religious theories prevailed, Marx and Engels applied scientific naturalism and evolutionary theory to understand human beings as natural beings who evolved from nonhuman animal existence. Their efforts, nonetheless, to clearly distinguish human animals from nonhuman animals on the grounds that humans produce through imagination and animals by instinct, spawned intense debates over just how sharply Marx and Engels understood these differences and whether or not they were traditional “speciesists” (Benton) who subjugated animals to human needs, or whether in fact they advocated a more contemporary view of animal liberation while envisioning a harmony between the human and natural world (Foster and Brett). The vagueness and fragmentary nature of remarks, or seeming indifference on the part of Marxism’s founding fathers, made it easier for later guardians of Marxian orthodoxy to dismiss any interest in the rights of other species as merely another form of “petit-bourgeois deviation.” Of the major figures in the Marxian tradition, only Polish-born Rosa Luxemburg, in some of her letters, approached a conception of animal rights. In this area as in others, Utopian dreams survived far from the Marxist mainstream, in various heretical currents such as the Frankfurt School, Wilhelm Reich’s “Sex-Pol,” and above all in the anarchist movement.

In pre–World War I American socialism, at least in part because of Bellamy’s enduring legacy and because of the tolerance of diversity in such mass movements as Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), animal rights was, albeit marginal, not so taboo a topic as it was in the narrower, more ideology-conscious European movement. In 1906 America’s premier socialist publishing house, Charles H. Kerr’s cooperative, brought out The Universal Kinship by Chicago high school zoology teacher J. Howard Moore—a work highly praised by Henry Salt himself as a major contribution to the animal rights cause. Moore’s book was promoted in the influential International Socialist Review as well as in the IWW press, and Kerr, who was himself a vegetarian, published several other books by the same author. More dramatically, the last work by America’s best-known socialist writer, Michael, Brother of Jerry (1917) by Jack London, was a militant animal rights novel, portraying the evils of circus animal-training. In his preface London urged one and all to join the struggle for animal welfare.

But the voices for animal rights never were more than a faint undertone in the Socialist Party’s heyday. Many socialists doubtless agreed with Upton Sinclair that “some day” society would be able to get along “without the maintenance of the slaughterhouse,” but persuaded themselves, as the author of The Jungle persuaded himself, that the question could safely be postponed till “after the Revolution.” For the Communists who seized the mantle of Marxism in the early 1920s and held it for decades, the question did not even exist.

Interestingly, however, as the socialists’ involvement in the animal rights movement all but ceased, the movement itself virtually collapsed. Older groups grew increasingly conservative and made their peace with a social order that required the brutal exploitation of animals. Gassing to death stray dogs and cats became the chief work of many “anti-cruelty” societies, and in some states such groups made a business of supplying strays to laboratories for “experimentation.” From the Great Depression through the Vietnam War the cause of animal rights in the United States was in eclipse.

Not until the 1970s, after a decade of civil rights New Left, and antiwar agitation, did a new and even more radical animal rights movement arise. An important link between the older struggle for socialism and the new animal rights activism were Helen and Scott Nearing, whose radicalism extended back decades—in Scott’s case to Debsian days—and whose later vision of decentralism and “the good life” involved them in a two-person crusade against the “slaughterhouse diet.” As they wrote in 1979, “We cannot conceive of kindly, considerate, aware people consuming carcasses of perceptive, defenseless animals who were raised in captivity for slaughter.”

Vastly larger than the movement of Salt’s day (the Coalition for Nonviolent Food comprises more than four hundred organizations with a membership in the millions), the new animal rights movement has acknowledged a far-reaching range of inspirations, including Salt himself (his Animals’ Rights was reprinted in 1980), Thoreau and Gandhi and the whole current of nonviolence, Eastern religions (especially Taoism and Buddhism), and above all radical environmental movements such as Greenpeace and Earth First! These last have provided more recent activists not only with impressive examples of the effectiveness of direct action, but also with a broad, nonanthropocentric, radical ecological perspective. The new movement has tended to be a youthful one and has readily employed methods of struggle learned from civil rights and student struggles of the 1960s: sit-ins, boycotts, blockades, sabotage, and so on.

Cutting across social classes and conventional political affiliations, the post-1960s movement continued to be as diverse organizationally as it is ideologically. One of its most prominent spokespersons, longtime radical labor activist Henry Spira, coordinator of many notable struggles (including the successful campaign against experimentation on cats at New York’s Museum of Natural History in the 1970s), expressed an orientation that seems to be shared by a great majority of activists: that the end for which the movement was formed—reduction of the slaughter and suffering of our fellow creatures—should never be obscured by the particular ambitions or needs of any of its constituent groups. Diversity as well as decentralization thus remain essential features of this movement, whose adherents range from traditional anti-vivisectionists with a focus on education to the clandestine “guerrillas” of the Animal Liberation Front, who conduct “raids” on animal-testing laboratories, filming cruel procedures and confinement conditions, seizing incriminating files, and liberating captive animals (finding homes for them later via an “underground railway”).

In lively book, pamphlet, and periodical literature modern animal rights activists set forth polemics against the movement’s opponents—the hunting and gun lobby; the fur, meat, and cosmetics industries; the Christian churches; and the scientific establishment—and elaborate their critique of the effects and implications of the mass slaughter of animals in advanced industrial society. The monthly Animal Agenda appeared on popular newsstands. Without abandoning their traditional moral/ethical emphasis, they have carefully detailed the environmental devastation and health hazards wrought by animal abuse. Earlier advocates were often content simply to point out the moral wrong of meat eating and the nutritional superiority of a vegetarian diet. Newer activists tend to be more aggressive, and their view of the larger picture more concrete. In discussing the link between a meat diet and cancer, for example, recent animal rights literature points to the fact that over half the public land in the United States is heavily subsidized by the federal government to promote the billion-dollar cattle industry, thus relating the questions of meat diet and cancer to a wider context of industrial/corporate abuse of the entire planet.

In 1990 the fast-food chain McDonald’s sued two activists who had used such terms as “McTorture” and “McMurder” to describe the chain’s treatment of animals. Although the suit ended in 1997 in a technical victory for the chain, the judge’s ruling scored McDonald’s “culpable responsibility for cruel practices” toward animals and brought enormous publicity to the animal rights cause.

The movement’s leading manifesto, Animal Liberation, by the Australian Peter Singer, appeared as a mass-market paperback in 1975 and in a revised edition in 1990. The book popularized the term speciesism (by analogy with racism and sexism) to signify human arrogance toward other species. Its first chapter, titled “All Animals Are Equal,” argues that “supporters of liberation for Blacks and women should support Animal Liberation too.” Other animal rights activists have adopted the IWW slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Until the 1980s, when US philosopher Tom Regan wrote his book, The Case for Animal Rights (1986), the US animal advocacy movement was grounded in utilitarian ethics and welfarist positions that sought to reduce animal suffering, without advocating the elimination of exploitative institutions and the speciesist mindsets underpinning them. In opposition to Singer’s utilitarian positions, Regan drew from a Kantian, deontological tradition that emphasized the inviolable rights of animals and our strong duties not to exploit them, whatever the potentially beneficial consequences for human interests. Thus, animal rights in the US and elsewhere can be seen as a modern-day abolitionist movement with strong parallels to the 19th century anti-slavery movement.

The welfare, rights, and direct action approaches to be found within the US animal advocacy movement suggested a broad and diverse array of approaches to the problem of human exploitation of animals. In the post-9/11 United States, the radical tactics of the Animal Liberation Front and its “sister group” the Earth Liberation Front were branded by the FBI as the nations’ top two “domestic terrorist” groups, while awareness dawned over increasing numbers of people of the connection between the global meat production industry and the growing climate change emergency. By the end of the twentieth century, however, amidst a diverse field of political struggle, there was growing insight into the overlapping of multiple forms of oppressions (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, and speciesism). The inclusion of speciesism, in particular, generated novel and illuminating forms of theory that came to be known as “intersectionality” with many of these rooted in feminist, anarchist, and animal studies. Politically, the call to build bridges and form expansive alliances among diverse social movements became identified as a “total liberation” movement. Intended to be more inclusive and expansive than anything preceding it in history, the total liberation approach sought to transcend the limitations of humanist politics, however broad, and to combine animal, human, and earth liberation movements in a radical alliance. This alliance is to be anti-capitalist, anti-speciesist, anti-anthropocentric, and critical of all forms of hierarchy, while typically linked more to anarchist than Marxist politics, although in the twenty-first century there is growing interest and scholarship around the question of Marxism and animal liberation

Benton, Ted. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice. London: Verso Books, 1993.

Best, Steven. The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century. New York:Roman and Littlefield, 2014.

Boyd, B. R. Animal Rights and Human Liberation. San Francisco: Taterhill Press, 1986.

Foster, John Bellamy and Clark, Brett. “Marx and the Critique of Alienated Speciesism
Replies to Benton,” Monthly Review, Volume 71, Number 1, 2018.

Jasper, James M., and Dorothy Nelkin. The Animal Rights Crusade. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Mason, Jim, and Peter Singer. Animal Factories. New York: Harmony Books, 1990.

Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

“Singer Talks with Spira.” Animal Liberation (Australia), January–March 1989.