The Rights of Animals, and Man's Obligation to Treat Them with Humanity is an 1838 book on animal rights, animal welfare and animal theology by the Irish Unitarian minister and writer William Hamilton Drummond. It originated as an essay written for a prize competition organised by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) on "Man's Obligation as respects the Brute Creation". Drummond's entry arrived in London after the deadline and was excluded from the competition; he subsequently expanded the essay and published it in 1838.
Drummond argues that animals possess rights and describes human dominion over them as a "delegated trust" for which humans are accountable to God. He frames his argument in Christian terms, associating humane treatment of animals with mercy and benevolence. He accepts the killing of animals for food and some other human uses, but opposes avoidable suffering and the destruction of animals for amusement.
Background and publication
In 1829, while visiting London, William Hamilton Drummond was asked by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) to advocate its cause. After returning to Dublin, he delivered a sermon on the subject, published in 1830 as Humanity to Animals, the Christian's Duty. When the SPCA subsequently offered a prize for an essay on human obligations towards animals, Drummond entered the competition. In his preface to The Rights of Animals, he wrote that the completed essay was forwarded to London but, "arriving a day too late", was not admitted. He decided to publish it with additions, incorporating passages from his earlier sermon.
The book was published in London by John Mardon in 1838, with Hodges and Smith listed on the title page as Dublin booksellers. Chien-hui Li describes it as one of the works produced in connection with the SPCA's early efforts to promote a Christian case against cruelty to animals.
In 2005, Edwin Mellen Press issued a new edition edited, introduced and annotated by Rod Preece and Li.
Arguments and contents
The opening chapters discuss the moral basis of human obligations towards animals and whether Christianity requires humane treatment. Drummond argues that animals' capacity to experience pain gives humans duties towards them, and states that animals, like humans, possess rights which may be violated by cruelty. He describes human dominion over animals as a "delegated trust" for which humans are accountable to God. Li uses Drummond's work as an example of the Christian discourse of mercy found in the nineteenth-century British animal-protection movement.
Drummond devotes separate chapters to the consumption of animals, hunting and fishing, and the limits of human use of animals. He accepts eating animal flesh and killing animals for purposes he considers necessary or useful, while arguing that humans have no right to inflict avoidable pain or destroy animals without necessity. His treatment of hunting distinguishes obtaining animals for food from killing them solely for amusement.
A later section examines what Drummond identifies as causes of cruelty. Its subjects include gambling, blood sports, luxury and gluttony, ignorance, antipathy towards particular species, cruelty in scientific experimentation, and the killing of animals by naturalists collecting specimens. In his discussion of vivisection, he condemns experiments that cause preventable suffering, while stopping short of rejecting all experimental use of animals.
The concluding chapters concern humane education and the question of whether animals may have an existence after death. Drummond argues that cruelty towards animals in children is encouraged by education and example rather than being an unavoidable feature of childhood, and advocates teaching benevolence towards animals. The final chapter rejects cruelty as indefensible.
Reception and assessment
In an 1840 lecture to the Zoological Society of Ireland, the Church of Ireland clergyman Caesar Otway recommended Drummond's writings on animal rights, while stating that he did not endorse Drummond's Unitarian sermons.
In 1845, the American abolitionist Nathaniel Peabody Rogers wrote favourably of Drummond's book in an article titled "The Rights of Animals". Rogers asked what basis for human rights would not also provide a basis for animal rights, and argued that every being capable of enjoyment or suffering possessed rights that humans should recognise. Rogers's essay was later included in Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer's history of animal ethics, , alongside nineteenth-century works by Drummond, Lewis Gompertz, Arthur Schopenhauer and others.
In the bibliography to the 1922 revised edition of Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, Henry Stephens Salt described The Rights of Animals as "a guarded essay", saying that Drummond advocated restrictions on vivisection while defending flesh-eating and field sports.
Historian Helen O'Connell discusses The Rights of Animals together with Drummond's 1830 Humanity to Animals in her study of animal welfare in post-Union Ireland. She identifies Drummond as a veteran of the republican culture of the 1790s who argued that society remained insufficiently humane while rights were denied to animals, and places his earlier animal-rights discourse in the political setting following Catholic emancipation.
See also The Cry of Nature (1791), an earlier work on the moral status of animals Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), an earlier work on animal rights A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (1776), an earlier Christian work on duties towards animals
References
External links