Romantic ConflictsThe Fight for Animal Rights

Romantic Conflicts

History of Concern for

Animals The suffering of animals became a matter of concern in the 18th century

Exploitation in transportation of people and goods (horses, donkeys)

Scientific experiments

Hunting and baiting

Slaughterhouse and cooking

Until 1822, when Parliament passed a bill to “Prevent the Cruel Treatment of Cattle,” there was almost no legal protection of animals, and even afterthis bill, there was uncertainty and legal controversy as to what animals were covered.

See David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, CUP, 2003)

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Descartes (1596-1650), had taught that animals were mere organic machines and did not feel pain

Enlightenment liberal and republican ideology had distinguished between ‘citizens’ and ‘other groups’ - including women and colonised nations –who were closer to nature. Animals became linked to these oppressed human groups and drawn into the debate.

Among those who addressed the “rights” of animals was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argues in his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (1754) for “the participation of animals in natural law.”

By 1775 animals could represent innocence, a spontaneous joy in life that adult human beings lacked. Romantic Conflicts

Jeremy Bentham’s 1789 comments

about animals and slaves

The French have already discovered that the blackness of

the skin is no reason why a human being should be

abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It

may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the

legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the ossacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a

sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace

the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the

faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond

comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal,

than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But

suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the

question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but,

Can they suffer?Romantic Conflicts

Origins of Ecology and Evolutionary

Theory?

Carolus Linnaeus and others in the mid-eighteenth century

discussed the’ economy’ of Nature, which in the Romantic period

came to be associated with the idea that human beings had a

special responsibility to preserve the natural world - beginnings of

the ecological movement?

Another important question was that of the biological relationship

between humans and animals, which (well before Charles Darwin) was

already being met with the suggestions that men and beasts were

descended from a common ancestor.

Romantic Conflicts

Romantic Writers and

Animals there is a strong tendency – in the Romantic period and

now, still – to conceptualise Nature as ‘good’: friendly to humankind, essentially green and somewhat holy.

‘Animals, however, inevitably complicate that paradigm – animal Nature cannot necessarily be relied on, as William Wordsworth believed of the green sort, never to ‘betray / the heart that loved her’ This sort of Nature can kick, peck, squeak, kill and bite back. It is not necessarily friendly towards humankind, or particularly ‘holy’ ‘

Romantic Conflicts

passion, she [Nature], A rapture often, and immediate joy Ever at hand; he [Man] distant, but a grace Occasional, and accidental thought,His hour being not yet come. Far less had then The inferior creatures, beast or bird, attuned My spirit to that gentleness of love,Won from me those minute obeisancesOf tenderness which I may number nowWith my first blessings. Nevertheless, on these The light of beauty did not fall in vain,Or grandeur circumfuse them to no end.

Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 8 (1805, lines 486–97)Cf Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) on the sublime and the beautiful

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The sublime= landscape;

the beautiful = animals?

Coleridge

Numerous Romantic-era poems address the idea that humans are obliged to treat animals with compassion. Among the most famous of these poems is Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

1828, debaters at the Cambridge Union addressed the question of whether the “Rime” would be “effectual in preventing Cruelty to Animals”

‘To a Young Ass’ – second verse

Poor Ass! they master should have learnt to showPity -- best taught by fellowship of Woe!For much I fear me that He lives like thee,Half famished in a land of Luxury!How askingly its footsteps hither bend!It seems to say, "And have I then one friend?"Innocent foal! thou poor despised forlorn!I hail thee Brother -- spite of the fool's scorn!And fain would take thee with me, in the DellOf Peace and mild Equality to dwell,Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride,And Laughter tickle Plenty's ribless side!How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play,And frisk about, as lamb or kitten gay!Yea! and more musically sweet to meThy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be,Than warbled melodies that soothe to restThe aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast!

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From ‘The Rhyme of the

Ancient Mariner’Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,They coiled and swam; and every trackWas a flash of golden fire.

Stanza 13.

O happy living things! no tongueTheir beauty might declare:A spring of love gushed from my heart,And I blessed them unaware:Sure my kind saint took pity on me,And I blessed them unaware.

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Robert SoutheyIn his 1790s animal poems, Robert Southey identifies animals’ plight with that of slaves and other oppressed human groups.

The social pig resigns his natural rightsWhen first with man he covenants to live;He barters them for safer stye delights,For grains and wash, which man alone can give. . . .And when, at last, the closing hour of lifeArrives (for Pigs must die as well as Man),When in your throat you feel the long sharp knife,And the blood trickles to the pudding-pan;And when, at last, the death-wound yawning wide,Fainter and fainter grows the expiring cry, Is there no grateful joy, no loyal pride,To think that for your master’s good you die?(‘Ode to a Pig while his Nose was Boring’ lines 17–20, 37–44)

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Percy Shelley

Like his verse, Shelley’s life and his prose

such as the long final note to Queen Mab,

which later became A Vindication of the

Natural Diet (1813), demonstrates his

awareness of the connection between

contemporary discourses on food and

eating and the radical politics of tyranny,

power and freedom.

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‘On the Vegetable System of Diet’

…If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery. (The attachment of animals to their young is very strong. The monstrous sophism that beasts are pure unfeeling machincs, and do not reason, scarcely requires a confutation.)

Queen Mab canto 8 (211–12) envisages a time when ‘man’ recognises his essential kinship with animals: ‘No longer now / He slays the lamb that looks him the face’, while the note glossing this passage sums up Shelley’s commitment to a vegetarian philosophy and lifestyle: ‘NEVER TAKE ANY SUBSTANCE INTO THE STOMACH THAT ONCE HAD LIFE’.

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Queen Mab (1813),

Prometheus Unbound (1820) In book eight of Queen Mab Shelly envisions a

future were humans return to a natural diet thereby encouraging "kindly passions" "pure desires" while extinguishing "hatred" "despair" and "loathing”.

Immortal upon Earth: No longer now,He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,And horribly devours his mangled flesh,Which, still avenging nature's broken law,Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,All evil passions, and all vain belief,Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. (59)

From ‘Prometheus Unbound’:

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

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Keats

‘[I]f a Sparrow comes before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel’. (letter to Benjamin Bailey)

Empathy for animals – the hare that ‘limped trembling through the frozen grass’ (‘Eve of St Agnes’), the bees who ‘think warm days will never cease / For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells’ (‘Ode to Autumn’), the minnows ‘Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Tempered with coolness.’ (‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’)

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Rural Poets – Burns

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion Hath broken nature’s social union, An’ justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion An’ fellow-mortal! . . .Still, thou art blest, compared wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear!An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,I guess an’ fear! (‘To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785’ lines 7–12, 43–48)

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John Clare

‘He runs along and bites at all he meetsThey shout and hollo down the noisey streets He turns about to face the loud uproarAnd drives the rebels to their very doorsThe frequent stone is hurled where ere they go When badgers fight and every ones a foe The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray The badger turns and drives them all away Though scarcly half as big dimute and smallHe fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.’ (‘Badger’ lines 27–36)

The cornered badger is like his own defiance of some aspects of society

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Legislation

1800 and 1802 : two unsuccessful attempts by the anti-

slavery campaigner William Wilberforce MP and his

associates to ban bull-baiting

1809 Lord Erskine’s ‘animal’ bill in the House of Lords

became the first measure to be introduced in any western

legislature to try to bring in legal penalties for cruelty to

animals in general.

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From Erskine’s bill

‘For every animal which comes in contact with man, and whose powers, qualities, and instincts are obviously constructed for his use, nature has taken the same care to provide, and as carefully and bountifully as for man himself, organs and feelings for its own enjoyment and happiness. Almost every sense bestowed upon man is equally bestowed upon them; seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking; the sense of pain and pleasure; the passions of love and anger; sensibility to kindness, and pangs from unkindness and neglect, are inseparable characteristics of their natures as much as our own.’

Romantic Conflicts

By 1824 public concern for animal welfare had led to the

founding of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty

to Animals (the forerunner of the RSPCA, which was

established in 1840).

This marked a notable shift in British attitudes toward the

non-human world, brought about partly in response to

activism from Romantic writers.

Romantic Conflicts