Document type: article published in Sentient Media
Authors: Kim Stallwood, Martine Rowe
Preview: Two centuries ago, on July 22, 1822 to be precise, Richard Martin learned that King George IV had signed into law An Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle. The Galway-born U.K. parliamentarian, called “Humanity Dick” by the king, went down in history as the sponsor of the first animal welfare legislation in a modern democracy.
For good and for ill, the law laid down a new marker for animal welfare legislation. Because the Act considered some animals but not others, it didn’t disrupt the reasons why animals were exploited. In essence, the Act codified that exploitation. Yet it was also a necessary recognition that you couldn’t just do what you wanted with the animals you owned, which was a radical idea two centuries ago. [...]
The Act’s passage was galvanizing. [...] Yet Martin’s Act was limited in scope. It sought to reduce cruel and unnecessary suffering for cattle, horses and sheep, but didn’t inhibit their customary use or question whether they should be worked or eaten at all. It didn’t protect birds, whom Martin (the largest landowner in Ireland) liked to shoot, or animals who were hunted, which Martin did with relish.
Even though Martin and other aristocrats wanted the leisure activities of the urban working-class, like bear-baiting or dog-fighting, banned because they feared they corrupted their morals, they wanted the “sports” they valued (horse-racing, foxhunting, shooting, and fishing among them) to remain relatively unregulated. [...]
In his remaining years in parliament, Humanity Dick tried to ban bear- and badgerbaiting, end dog fights, regulate the treatment of horses awaiting slaughter, and extend his Act to dogs, cats, monkeys, and other animals. These, and all the other welfare bills he introduced, failed. Many were considered beneath the proper concern of parliamentarians.
Nonetheless, his was the work of democracy: to persuade people that animals mattered, and that they deserved to have some rights independent of their utility to us
Our task in the U.S. and U.K. is to continue that work: to ensure that advocates argue for animals’ welfare within all major political parties [...]. Galvanizing the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities on behalf of legislative change offers a multipronged approach to animal rights.
There’s reason for some hope. In the last several decades, ethologists have demonstrated the depth and breadth of animal cognition, sociality and sentience, including with creatures—like fishes, octopuses, crustaceans, and even insects—once assumed to possess none. To assign a personal pronoun to an animal (as we do here) no longer seems weird. Legislatively, the U.K. Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act, passed in April this year, recognizes that animals have wishes, needs and desires [...].
Our view of the next three decades is mixed. It may be that when we discover robots have feelings, we’ll reconsider our ruthless manipulation of beings made of flesh and blood, like us. Further development of plant-, fungal-, or cultivated-meat substitutes may curtail animal exploitation, just as the combustion engine did with horse power. The deepening climate crisis, and animal agriculture’s outsized impact on it, may force us to redirect food, water, and land toward nourishing people rather than raising animals or feedstock, or destroying biodiversity. COVID’s unmasking of the increasing spread of zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance due to nontherapeutic antibiotic use, and the heartless treatment of humans and animals in industrial slaughterhouses may lead to greater awareness of how animal exploitation is a public health catastrophe, as well as an ecological disaster.
