Animal rights have been in the popular imagination for a while now. In the 1980s, the moody Manchester band The Smiths put out one of their defining albums, Meat Is Murder (1985). The album’s eponymous song included the very difficult to hear cries of cows and ominous sounds of machinery, with a very emotional plea from singer Morrissey, that slaughter for meat is “death for no reason, it’s murder.” 

Morrissey’s ascension as an animal rights celebrity coincided with the more militant practices of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), whose members were known to run around throwing paint on people’s fur coats at fashion shows and other events, and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), who removed animals used for fur from the farms where they were bred for that purpose, moving them to sanctuaries.

The two above organizations are on the fringe of animal activism, with their own controversies attached. Morrissey, himself still a devout vegan and animal rights activist, is extremely problematic in other ways, to put it nicely. However, the fact that all three popularized and controversialized the conversation on the eating of meat and using animal products for our daily life, shows that the topic of animal rights, while hot button, is something that we’ve wanted to discuss for a while, as a world.

Thinking about human relationships with nonhuman world inhabitants is not something that started with the 80s or 90s. It was not something the Pope of Mope invented with The Smiths. The way that we treat animals is something that people concerned with ethics have been concerned with since at least Biblical times in the West.

I bring to you here, therefore, a brief account of modern ideas concerning animals, because I would not like you to have to scroll your finger off, and Markus will eventually take me to task for having written a book.

It All Starts with Descartes

Many people who consider animal rights and human responsibility point to our boy, philosopher and polymath René Descartes, as a source for why we consider the treatment of animals as we do. Descartes, the “I think therefore I am” guy, wrote in Discourse on Method that animals can’t at all be like people or possess really any sort of soul or mind because they can’t communicate like humans, even “stupid” ones (his word, not mine, yikes!). 

According to Descartes, animals, even though they possess many internal organs like we have, can’t reason like we do. As such, they cannot be considered as having thoughts or feelings, and cannot be seen on the same level as human beings. Animals do not have souls. They are like automata, that is, the 17th century equivalent of robots, automated and just doing what they do, but without sentience, rationality, or thought.

So for Descartes, it’s totally OK for chickens to be slaughtered for dinner, for cows to go to the abattoir to be slaughtered to become steak, and for any number of uses during the time, such as for experiments or for fashion. These things would be a positive crime if they were committed against humans, but humans are sentient and thinking, and therefore equals. Animals are not.

Many argue that this theory, as well as one attributed to Descartes during the online age, that, since animals are automata, they do not feel pain when you cut or hit them, has been, in some ways, central to the way animals during the modern age were considered in popular practice, perhaps even more prevalently with the advent of capitalism at the turn of the 19th century.

If animals do not have souls (or sentience, as we would say now), as Descartes contends, then they are no better or worse than dolls that a kid might throw around, or cut the head off, if the kid is particularly violent. There is not a moral component to their demise.

The Weird Victorians: Vegetarianism and Schopenhauer

The 19th century saw an emergence of the idea of animals having rights of their own outside of their use as property or food. In the UK, for instance, vehement Victorians started up the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, a charity to promote kindness toward animals outside of what little the law allowed. The volunteers would, for instance, visit slaughterhouses to check on animal welfare.

By the 1840s, many Victorians were practicing a diet that became known as vegetarianism, refraining from meat, but not from dairy or eggs. The diet, which often had weirder reasonings than care for animals, became popular enough for societies to exist devoted to it.

However, animal rights had one supporter that might surprise most. Philosophy’s most famous curmudgeon, Arthur Schopenhauer, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why not?” Smirking against Kant, Schopenhauer sums up his deontological ethics as “Welp, it’s basically just silly Christianity, but make it trendy.” 

More to the point, Schopenhauer, in his own biting way, has this to say about the exclusion of animals from moral consideration: 

Orpheus Charming the Animals with His Music (1610) by Roelant Savery, courtesy of Wiki Commons

Schopenhauer found the popular religion at fault for the way people consider animals. This was not entirely without merit, given the incredible influence of the Genesis verse (1:26-33) where God dusts his heavenly self off after making everything (literally

Everything) and tells humans, “By the way, you get dominion over this and all the cool animals I made. You see what I did there? I did that!”

And this “dominion over the earth” is something that we could talk about for ages, but your writer is not a Biblical scholar, and we’ve got different matters to attend to.

The Twentieth Century: Fur Coats, Veganism, and Peter Singer

What laws and changes in morality that the Victorians may have gotten on behalf of animals, the 20th century ramped up the dialogue and the desire for change. For those during the second half of the century, animal rights became more than a theoretical movement. It became, instead, an activism, a way of living and a way of being.

In 1975, some 20 years before The Smiths would put out Meat Is Murder, Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, a text that would throw the world of animal rights into a new direction, a text that would inspire generations of activists to come.

In the book, Singer argues that those who would see sexism and racism as issues, and who want to proclaim themselves against them also need to consider animals in these equations. You cannot, Singer argues, be for rights for women in the workplace and not be for rights for animals in the abattoir. The differences that people like Descartes want to rely so heavily on are not important to their attainment of rights. The fact that there are differences between species does not make them any less than us.

Singer argues about differences between sexes, races, etc., that, according to him (this is 1975, mind you) are differences but don’t make one person less than another. Many of his arguments in Animal Liberation try to explain the need for people to care by way of things that people already care about.

Singer, a still living philosopher, has come under criticism for some of his other views , but Animal Liberation was really a turning point for animal rights. Just five years later, two activists would form PETA. Morrissey would do decades of charity work in their honor. 

In the 21st century, vegetarianism falls by the wayside, in favor of veganism, a diet that eschews any animal product from meat to honey. There are reconsiderations about factory farming, which has grown exponentially in the United States, and the visceral cruelty to both animals and human employees in those processes. 

Fashion, having ditched the fur trend out of animal rights concerns, returns to fur from TikTok trends, with influencers purchasing vintage coats out of ethical concerns. Leather alternatives present other ethical problems, as they are often made of plastic. People continue to cry as the ASPCA (the American branch of the aforementioned SPCA) plays sad music to visuals of sad animals. We think about whether to have chickens in the backyard, try to keep our cats indoors, and occasionally consider an endangered species, tutting to ourselves that it is being poached.

Like human rights, animal rights are something on our minds, whether we want to talk about it or not. 

A Personal Note

There is a story of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that he once saw a horse being brutally whipped to death, and he flew forward to intervene. He ended up in a psychiatric facility, marking the start of a sharp mental decline.

It’s interesting to think about someone we don’t always see as very compassionate running toward an animal with tears in his eyes, moved out of a frenetic pity and sorrow, perhaps. 

In full disclosure, the suffering of animals has always been on the forefront of my mind. There is a letter to Santa that I wrote when I was in school. My mother had kept it for years. I picked it up a few years ago to remember. In that letter, I asked Santa for people to stop harming animals. Growing up in a working class single parent household, I was an incredibly sensitive kid who was always wearing some kind of animal-themed garb and wished fervently that unicorns existed. 

In middle school, eating beef and pork stopped sitting well with me. I remember thinking how similar pigs and cows were to me, and how that made me uncomfortable. That started my decades of a journey toward vegetarianism. I’ve been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for about ten years now, and even though I recently had to have Vitamin B12 shots because of a deficiency that doesn’t usually exist in the US (but can for vegans and vegetarians), I have no intention of changing.

At the end of the day, for me, it is a personal choice. I am under no delusion that I will save the world if I don’t eat meat. I am one person. I do know that it’s how I can sleep at night, because I’ve decided not to participate in a chain of cruelty.

There are limits to every ethical choice we make, including how we decide to treat nonhuman species. There is no way you can force someone to do something you do not want to do, unless you are the government, I suppose. You can lead your life with kindness and hope for the best.


What have I missed? What would you have added if you wanted to let people know more about animal rights ethics? I invite your comments here, and will happily answer any charitably written comment.