Abstract
This chapter is intended as an overview of the major trends of the development of Western attitudes to animals from early biblical times to the present. Although Western culture, in its subservience to commercial, industrial and technological innovation, has scarcely been what is commonly called “at one with nature,” a concern with the status of our fellow animal relatives has never been entirely absent from Western consciousness. The history of animal ethics in Western culture is not, however, a story of a consistent ethic in any one era developing into a different ethic in a succeeding era. Rather, it is the evolution of an unresolved debate in which adversaries offer alternative conceptions of the human–animal relationship and alternative conceptions of our obligation to our fellow animals.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Whitlock and Westerlund (1975), p. 36. Spelling modernized.
- 2.
Quoted in Nicholson and Preece (1999), p. 72.
- 3.
Quoted in Harwood (1928), p. 104.
- 4.
Quoted in the original French in Boas (1932), p. 141.
- 5.
Quoted in Lovejoy (1933), p. 124.
- 6.
A. O. Lovejoy. The Great Chain of Being, p. 186.
- 7.
This does not invalidate the earlier statement on the failure of Cartesianism in its animal sentience dimensions. These neo-Cartesians did not doubt the sentience of animals, indeed they relied on it, but still regarded the human as a being on an entirely different plane from other animals.
- 8.
Quoted in Sharpe (1989), p. 89.
- 9.
Albert Leffingwell, “Does Vivisection Pay?”, Scribner’s Monthly, July 1880, 1.
- 10.
The Manifesto of the Humanitarian League, excerpted in G. Hendrick and W. Hendrick (1989), p. 43.
- 11.
Quoted from Seventy Years Among Savages in G. Hendrick and W. Hendrick (1989), p. 113.
- 12.
Quoted in Hendrick (1977), p. 193.
- 13.
Quoted from Salt (1905), p. ix.
- 14.
J. Howard Moore, The Universal Kinship, xxxv.
- 15.
Quoted from Seventy Years Among Savages in The Savour of Salt, ed. Hendrick and Hendrick, 55.
- 16.
Quoted from “The Complaints of the Birds and Fowls of Heaven to their Creator for the Oppressions and Violences Most Nations on Earth do Offer Them” in The Country-man’s Companion (1683) in Preece and Chamberlain (1993), p. 73.
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Preece, R. (2011). The History of Animal Ethics in Western Culture. In: Blazina, C., Boyraz, G., Shen-Miller, D. (eds) The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9761-6_3
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