Rob Boddice, 2009

Emerging Animals: the Category of Human as Animal and its Ethical Implications
in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Rob Boddice

I
Rod Preeces historical account of Darwinism, in which humans animal status is shown
to be neither original to Darwinism, nor particularly helpful for animals rights, is the
starting point of this paper.
1
Animality in humans had long since been acknowledged, but
it was usually to be feared and suppressed. Morality, throughout the eighteenth century,
entailed the successful suppression of animality, and the correct cultivation of godliness,
civility, refinement and culture. There are countless examples to support this, but I offer a
couple of notable ones. Humphrey Primatt has often been put forward as a kind of
prophet for animal rights, but his 1776 treatise on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of
Cruelty to Brute Animals is definitively of its time, anthropocentric, and fearful of the
beast within. Tellingly, Primatt pleaded that men should show their superiority by mercy
and compassion, or else debase their reason and become as low, if not lower than the
[oppressed] brute. If, he said, you confess that a brute is an animal without reason, and
that the infliction of unmerited pain was unreasonable, then it followed that a man
that is cruel is a brute in the shape of a man.
2
The object of concern was, chiefly, human
behaviour before God. Animals, to be sure, were good and their right to exist was to
be observed. But Primatts ordering of the universe was not forward looking.
Subordination, he pointed out, is as necessary in the natural, as in the political
world; it preserves that harmony, variety, beauty, and good order, which would be lost
in a perfect sameness and equality.
3
Man was atop the chain, a position dependent on the
suppression of animalistic tendencies.

1
Rod Preece, Darwin, Christianity and the Great Vivisection Debate, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64
(2003): 399-419; Rod Preece, Brute Souls, Happy Beasts and Evolution: the Historical Status of Animals
(Vancouver, 2005), esp. ch. 8.
2
Humphrey Primatt, The Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, ed. Richard D. Ryder
(1776; new edn., Fontwell, 1992)., p. 34.
3
Primatt, Duty of Mercy, p. 20.
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This fear of brutality was intrinsic to the thoughts of the early animal welfare
movement. The Monthly Magazine, owned by the Pythagorean Richard Phillips,
4
was
instrumental in opening a dialogue that would culminate in the formation of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The editor of the magazine sought to give
every encouragement to correspondence on this affecting subject, noting his hopes that
it will lead to the formation of a Society, whose business it will be to expose and
discourage those cruel practices which prove that many men are greater brutes than any
animal so called.
5
Where human-animal contiguity was stressed, as it was by William
Drummond in his entry for the SPCAs prize-essay competition in 1839, the ethical
consequences were limited. The life of a human being is more to be prized than that of a
brute, he said, even though he subscribed to a Utilitarian notion of humans and animals
similar capacity to feel. Dominion was undisturbed.
6
Humanity to animals was the will
of God
7
and therefore more of a duty of humanity rather than anything to do with
animals rights. And yet he entitled his work The Rights of Animals.
The SPCA itself was ideologically similar. The one significant member who
expressed a belief in human-animal kinship at the level of the soul was summarily ejected
and latterly snubbed. Lewis Gompertz, of J ewish background but with a Pythagorean
philosophy, was the Societys first Honorary Secretary, but he found himself out in the
cold as the Society stressed its strictly Christian principles of operation.
8
The SPCA was
perennially worried about the demoralization of society brought about by cruelty to
animals, over and above any concerns expressly for the animals themselves. The Earl of
Harrowby, chairing the annual meeting in 1864, thought the Society undersold itself as
merely for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, when to a large extent, he said, it also

4
Who had also published J ohn Ritsons Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty in 1802.
5
Monthly Magazine, 43 (1817), p. 506. The exact sentiment was echoed in a letter by H, Monthly
Magazine, 44 (1817), p. 7.
6
Their strength, their cunning, their fleetness, their labours, the fruits of their industry, are all for mans
service not for his food and raiment only, but for his luxury and ornament, including everything from
honey and silk, to plumage and fur. Drummond, Rights of Animals, pp. 5-6.
7
William H. Drummond, The Rights of Animals, and Mans Obligation to Treat Them with Humanity
(London, 1838), p. 3.
8
For Gompertzs Pythagoreanism, see Lewis Gompertz, Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of
Brutes (1824; Fontwell, 1992). For Gompertzs ejection from the SPCA see RSPCA (Horsham, UK)
Minute Book 1, CM/21, pp. 177-8, 189-193, 235, 238-9 (between 3 November ,1834 and 15 J une, 1835).
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protected man from the commission of acts of cruelty; for it often happened that the evil
inflicted by the perpetration of cruelty to animals was in itself far more mischievous to
the man himself than to the animal, while nothing contributed more to dignify the
character of man than kindness to the brute creation.
9

This admittedly brief sketch of the anthropocentric background of the humane
movement before Darwin suggests that we should be sceptical of any sudden change of
direction after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Since the history of
the humane movement up until that time had been based upon an anthropocentric
cosmology, in which the human moral distinction accounted for the motivation to treat
animals humanely, we should not expect to find Darwinist materialists, invoking the
human as animal, at the forefront of the animal rights movement.

II
The widespread acceptance of the notion of the human as animal was actually seen by
some as a portent of the disintegration of civilised morality. The ethical implication of the
human as animal, or Darwinism in general, was the end of ethics per se, since humans, as
much as animals, were merely subject to the material forces of nature. The reaction,
amongst those most concerned with humanity (in both senses) was to reject the human as
animal and entrench their anthropocentric view of society and animals place within it.
The anti-vivisection movement in the 1870s and 80s was organised along these lines,
and it is on this specific case that I want to focus the rest of this paper.
It is perhaps counter-intuitive to animal advocates that the anti-vivisectionists did
not have the welfare of animals chiefly in mind. If those partial to evolutionary science
could not be relied upon to rescind their status as top creature in the chain, one might,
from a contemporary point of view, expect a less anthropocentric view among the
detractors of vivisection. As such, Hilda Kean starts with two assumptions in her article
on anti-vivisection and the The Smooth, Cool Men of Science, which are not borne out
by the evidence. First, that those campaigning for the end of vivisection were
campaigning for animal rights, and second, that the cruelty which had epitomised
humanitys attitudes towards other animals was being rejected for new understandings

9
RSPCA Fortieth Annual Report (1864), p. 36, emphasis mine.
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based on ideas of commonality, arising out of the ideas of Darwin.
10
She states that the
Origin of Species gave a scientific grounding to the work of humanitarians who were
making political links between the condition of people and other animals, but this hardly
seems to be the case for those most prominently involved in anti-cruelty campaigns.
11

Kean wonders at the political contradictions of an age which gave us Darwin and
Freud (good things) at the same time as giving us heretofore the highest figure for the
destruction of animals in the interests of science and progress.
12
These factors seem
less contradictory when it is acknowledged that the principal movement against
vivisection whole-heartedly rejected Darwinism and the principle of commonality, and
that it was mainly the vivisectionists themselves who used Darwinism to justify its
ongoing use of animals. The age of Darwin and the age of vivisection were, hand in
glove, working together for that much vaunted progress of the age. The anti-vivisection
movement harboured great fears for what the new morality of science might bring forth
in the future. While the movement may not have been anti-science in toto, it was against
the kind of science being practiced at that time, to the point of putting the term in inverted
commas. It was not science that was hated, but the masquerading of callousness and
immorality as science.
At the forefront of the anti-vivisection movement was the activist triumvirate, the
Victoria Street Society (founded 1875), its founder and the most vociferous opponent of
physiology, Frances Power Cobbe, and the Zoophilist (from 1881), the journal of the
society. The Zoophilists chief aim was the rescuing of mankind from the evils broadcast
by the influence of science and its merciless and callous treatment of animals under
vivisection. Humanity to animals, in the pages of this journal, was about safeguarding
human civilisation. There are myriad proofs of this. An article on Evolution and Ethics
explained that the Societys demands for the animals were indications of the altruism of
the age and the progress of our civilization. To permit the continuance of vivisection is to
insult the altruistic ideal and impede the progress of our Western civilization in its

10
Hilda Kean, The Smooth, Cool Men of Science: The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection,
History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995): p. 17.
11
Kean, Smooth, Cool Men of Science, p. 17.
12
Kean, Smooth, Cool Men of Science, p. 17.
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innermost and truest sense.
13
The Societys first president, the Earl of Shaftesbury, had
an anti-vivisectionist letter published in the Zoophilist in 1884 which stressed the
importance of raising children with notions of kind treatment of animals and humanity
towards them, which would lead them to a high refinement. He suggested that parents
also teach the cultivation of flowers so that they might see how the very poorest may
be elevated in heart and in taste.
14
While this example seems on face value a fairly glib
response to the issue at hand, the questions of human heart, good taste, and refinement (or
civility) were the leitmotifs of the movement.
Frances Power Cobbe irrevocably connected the causing in poor brutes of
limitless agonies, with the petrifying of human hearts.
15
As far as the Victoria Street
Society was concerned, society was witnessing a critical and pivotal phase in which the
direction of civilisation was to be determined. Darwinism, seen as the cause of the evils
of physiology, was at the fulcrum of this crucial moment. The Zoophilist lamented that it
had been drawn into what it called the greatest moral controversy of the age, namely
the entire new department of scientific ethics which concerns the relation of man to the
lower animals. Shall we, so the journal asked, hold in future by the morals of
Christianity or by the morals of Darwinism; by the belief that the voice of conscience is
the voice of God in the soul; or that it is the tune played by our music-box brains, merely
as a result of the set they have acquired from the prejudices of our ancestors. Should
The Strong shall bear the burden of the Weak;, or, with Darwin, should the Strong
inherit the earth and the Weak be trampled in the dust.
16

The point of note in this remarkably transparent reading of the major forces in
play in late nineteenth-century life is that anthropocentrism is at the heart of both of them.
The difference lay only in what course of action the superiority of human beings
demanded. The anti-vivisectionists saw the plight of animals as a burden, duly accepted
as part of a general Christian morality. In its descriptions of the worst experiments on

13
Zoophilist, 15, 2 (1895), p. 90.
14
Zoophilist, 4, n.s. 2 (1884), p. 30.
15
Zoophilist, Special Supplement to the Zoophilist, 1 J uly, 1884, p. 72.
16
Zoophilist, 4, n.s. 8 (1884), p. 149.
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animals, the Zoophilist denounced the practitioners for being outrageously inhuman.
17

In other words, to be a vivisectionist was to give up the qualities of being human which
separated humans from animals, and in fact, to join the ranks of brutes (a word
commonly used in the Zoophilists pages). For this group, a humane person was
irrevocably what the adjective describes: human. This superiority of rank accorded duties
and obligations to those lower in the scale. An animal, it is tacitly acknowledged, knew
no such duties, obligations or morals, and hence, those who tortured animals were
animals themselves. There is no clearer statement of this than that given by Cobbe
herself, looking back on the movement in her memoirs. [T]he time will come, she said,
when he who would torture an animal will be looked upon as (in the truest sense)
inhuman;. And conversely, she hoped that the hearts of men will grow more tender to
their own kind by cultivating pity and tenderness to the beasts and birds.
18

Lest it be thought that this reflection was a distinctly post facto revision, it is
possible to cite Cobbe from numerous sources, saying roughly the same thing over time.
In 1887 she said that the arguments of vivisectors were drawn from utter indifference to
the suffering of beings sentient like themselves, and, according to their philosophy,
having the same origin and the same end. Should the nation accept these principles of
Darwinist vivisection, she said, then it can only be said that the future of England would
be doomed. On such a principle, no civilization can flourish. It is a dry rot which, sooner
or later, must destroy the very beams and rafters of the edifice of society.
19
In 1885, in
an article on the New Morality, she stated that if Darwins views on morals were ever
generally adopted this would sound the knell of the virtue of mankind. Vivisectors,
she thought, drew from Darwinian morality the view that Nature is extremely cruel, but
they also thought that there could be nothing more virtuous than following Nature and
the law of the Survival of the Fittest. She saw this as allowing the absolute right of
the Strong to sacrifice the Weak and Unfit ad libitum. She saw no particular virtues in
nature (i.e. things not human) to which humans should aspire, baulked at the idea of
carrying out the pitiless laws of the vulture and the tiger, and could not reconcile

17
Zoophilist, 10, n.s. 3 (1890), p. 47, 152, 180.
18
Frances Power Cobbe, Life of (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1894), ii, 633-4.
19
Zoophilist, 7, n.s. 5 (1887), p. 78.
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herself to the view that God has intended His rational creatures to imitate wild beasts
and earthquakes. As the favoured being of Creation, she said, humans should look to
otherworldly sources for their knowledge. She saw men of science go about in the
footsteps of Mr. Darwin, endeavouring to gather the grapes of Morality off the thorns of
Physics and Zoology. No such fruit grows on such trees, she said. Morality and
spirituality were not to be got at through researches into things which are not spiritual
and not moral. She mocked the Humility of Science, pointing out that the advocates of
Vivisection rejected the teachings of Plato and Kant, Moses and Christ, and make
themselves the disciples of the wasp and the polecat.
20

Earlier still, in 1871, Cobbe expressed her dismay at the potential for calamity
brought about by Utilitarian and Darwinian morals, since social and evolutionary forces
threatened to usurp the universal conscience of right and wrong instilled by God. Cobbe
explicitly discountenanced the attempt to view human nature through its animal origin,
instead advocating the study of the mind from within rather than from without, so as not
to conflate human morality with That glimmering of something resembling our moral
sense often observable in brutes, which Mr. Darwin has admirably described.
21

Even in her first piece on vivisection, entitled The Rights of Man and the Claims
of Brutes, written in 1863, Cobbe maintained a form of humanitarianism which her
biographer, Lori Williamson, identified as of eighteenth-century foundations,
structured around an anthropocentric understanding of mans relationship with animals.
Williamson says that Cobbe began to alter her views some twelve years later, with the
outbreak of the national controversy over vivisection.
22
I cannot find justification for the
remark that Cobbe changed her views. The infliction of pain was bad, principally, if it
aroused no pity, no compassion; for those inflicting the pain were the teachers of the next
generation of societal leaders. Should these young men grow up hard of heart and dulled
in spirit, oblivious to suffering and the internal conscience, divinely voiced, then

20
Zoophilist, 4, n.s. 9 (1885), pp. 167-9.
21
Frances Power Cobbe, Darwinism in Morals [reprinted from the Theological Review, 1871], in her
Darwinism in Morals, and Other Essays (London, 1872), pp. 13-4.
22
Frances Power Cobbe, The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes, Frasers Magazine, 68 (1863);
Lori Williamson, Power and Protest: Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Society (London, New York
and Sydney, 2005), p. 100.
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civilisation was doomed. Cobbe never relinquished what was not really an eighteenth-
century foundation, but an ancient principle: that the sowing of morality in mans
youthful actions towards animals would be reaped in his later moral actions to his fellow
man, for better or for worse. Williamson herself points out that Cobbe thought that
vivisection was immoral first, useless second, and that the interests of man always came
before those of animals.
23

All of this makes for a rather paradoxical situation in which the usual
historiographical account of the animal rights movement is turned on its head. Those
campaigning for animal welfare in general were actually those most likely to retain an
explicit distinction between humans and nonhumans, with its accompanying vertical
hierarchy in which humans were superior. Humanity is benevolent: this maxim was
supposed to be enough to ensure the pleasurable existence of all other creatures.
Darwinism had apparently made few inroads into the animal welfare movement. The
Dean of Manchester, speaking at the formation of a Church Anti-Vivisection League at
the Church Congress in Cardiff in 1889, was struck as he listened to discussions on the
deep theory of evolution that there was a complete absence of recognition of the link
between the closer relation with the lower animals wrought by Darwinism, and the
greater sympathy with animals that this ought to inspire.
24

On the other hand, those most likely actually to be involved in experimentation on
animals were much more likely to acknowledge a human-animal analogy, if not a
biologically provable relationship. The admission of kinship, however tacitly, was much
more commonly used to support the wilful suffering and killing of animals than it was
used to oppose it. Bernard Rollin goes so far as to say that from a logical, scientific,
methodological, philosophical, and valuational point of view, nineteenth-century attitudes
were more coherent than those of today, for the doctrine of evolutionary continuity was
applied consistently and its consequences were faced forthrightly.
25
Cobbes own
assessment of why the total abolition of vivisection was called for has been too-often
overlooked: the reasons for calling for the total prohibition of vivisection rather than for

23
Williamson, Power and Protest, p. 241n47.
24
Zoophilist, 9, n.s. 7 (1889), p. 158.
25
Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science (1989; Iowa, 1998), p. 27.
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9

its restriction, she said, became actually clearer in our eyes on the side of human moral
interests than on that of the physical interests of the poor brutes.
26


III
A brief conclusion: the human as animal, both before Darwin and after, was not the
signal for the ushering in of a new standard of ethics which bestowed upon animals an
improved moral status. On the contrary, it was this brute at the core of the human that
threatened morality and civilisation. The mythical beast within was to be avoided if
animals were to fare well at human hands, and the acknowledged physiological similarity
of animals to humans, rather than upsetting the anthropocentric chain of being, actually
only served to justify the putting of animals to the knife. Those in favour of the total
abolition of vivisection therefore took a different anthropocentric line, one which
reinforced traditional notions of dominion, civilisation and the moral qualities of humans,
which served as their distinction. Not only, with Rod Preece, can we demonstrate that the
Darwinian notion of kinship with animals was both older than Darwin, and not
predisposed to endow animals with a moral status, but, a fortiori, that kinship was
rejected by those most militantly campaigning for what would come to be known as
animal rights.

26
Cobbe, Life of, ii, 607.