I mention a few other instances of early animal welfare concern in this post:
The parliament of Ireland passed one of the first known animal welfare laws in 1635. Massachusetts passed one in 1641.
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) “articulate[d] the idea of animal rights”; she wrote: “As for man, who hunts all animals to death [...] is he not more cruel and wild than any bird of prey?”
Anne Finch (1631-1679) argued against the mechanistic view of animal nature, writing that animals had “knowledge, sense, and love, and divers other faculties and properties of a spirit”.
In 1751, the artist William Hogarth made four engravings that showed a boy torturing animals and gradually becoming a thief and a murderer of humans.
In 1776 Humphrey Primatt published A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals.
And then there’s Jeremy Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780).
Curiously, lots of them seem to come from the Anglo-Saxon sphere (though there’s definitely selection bias since I looked mostly through English-speaking sources; also, we have older examples of concern for animals by e.g. Jains and Buddhists).
That’s a nice example!
I mention a few other instances of early animal welfare concern in this post:
The parliament of Ireland passed one of the first known animal welfare laws in 1635. Massachusetts passed one in 1641.
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) “articulate[d] the idea of animal rights”; she wrote: “As for man, who hunts all animals to death [...] is he not more cruel and wild than any bird of prey?”
Anne Finch (1631-1679) argued against the mechanistic view of animal nature, writing that animals had “knowledge, sense, and love, and divers other faculties and properties of a spirit”.
In 1751, the artist William Hogarth made four engravings that showed a boy torturing animals and gradually becoming a thief and a murderer of humans.
In 1776 Humphrey Primatt published A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals.
And then there’s Jeremy Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780).
Curiously, lots of them seem to come from the Anglo-Saxon sphere (though there’s definitely selection bias since I looked mostly through English-speaking sources; also, we have older examples of concern for animals by e.g. Jains and Buddhists).