The Rights of an Animal

Abstract

THIS is a little book—too little to be satisfactory. Its object is to argue that “animals have the same abstract rights of life and personal liberty with man.” The ambiguity which attaches to the word “same” in this opening statement of the “principle” to be proved casts its shadow over all the remaining sixty pages of which the essay consists. That animals have not in all respects identical “rights of life and liberty with man” is too obvious a truth for even Mr. Nicholson to combat. He neither objects to the slaughtering of animals for food nor to the working of animals for purposes useful to man. Yet if the rights of animals were, strictly speaking, “the same” as those of man, the former act would be one of murder, and the latter one of unjustifiable slavery. It is clear, therefore, that for the purpose of lucid statement we ought to be supplied with some definition of the sense in which the author supposes the rights of animals to be comparable with those of man. And it is because this definition is nowhere supplied that we deem the work unsatisfactory. That animals, as sentient creatures, have some rights—i.e., that man may not kill or torture them rjeedlessly without incurring some moral blame—no one nowadays would undertake to dispute.¹ It therefore seems useless to fill, a number of pages with a number of truisms on the theme that animals have some rights in common with man. From the writer of “a new essay in ethics” we expected to find a statement of the principles by which the rights of animals ought to be defined—in what they resemble and in what they differ from the rights of man, and why. But instead of this we find only the statement of a fact which it does not require “a new essay in ethics” to reveal, viz., that the immorality of subjecting animals to needless death or torture cannot be justified on the ground of any such irrelevant or untrue arguments as that animals are irrational, not immortal, or non-sentient. Such being the whole scope of the work, it seems to us to be about a century too late in appearing.

The Rights of an Animal; a New Essay in Ethics.

By Edward Byron Nicholson, Principal Librarian and Superintendent of the London Institution. (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1879.)