Chapter Sections
1. Steven Best
2. John Lawrence
3. Andrew Linzey
4. Richard Martin
5. The McLibel Two
6. Ingrid Newkirk
7. Jill Phipps
8. Henry Salt
9. Henry Spira
10. Peter Singer
11. Tom Regan
12. Richard D Ryder
How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals
Henry Stephens Salt wrote the first book on animal rights: Animals' Rights: considered in relation to social progress, published in 1892 (1). In it he sought to impress people not to kill or eat animals and that this is the distinction of a civilised society:
"...it is ourselves, our own vital instincts, that we wrong, when we trample on the rights of the fellow-beings, human or animal, over whom we chance to hold jurisdiction."Salt was a British social campaigner, writer, naturalist, prominent anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian. He was born in India and educated in England. After attending Cambridge University he taught classics at Eton preparatory school but left to adopt a vegetarian life-style growing vegetables at a remote country cottage while writing for a living.
Salt believed animals should be free to live their own lives and that humanity has a responsibility to treat them compassionately and justly. His animal rights book influenced Gandhi (1869 - 1948), political and spiritual leader of India, advocate of vegetarianism and non-violent protest.
Salt's social reform interests included schools, prisons, criminal law, flogging in the Royal Navy, vivisection and food-animal slaughter. In 1891 he founded and was general secretary of the Humanitarian League, opposed on the grounds of ethics and good social science to the infliction of avoidable suffering on any sentient being whether man or beast. Among the League's aims was abolition of corporal punishment and the death penalty, better protection for wild and domesticated animals, opposition to vivisection, and opposition to hunting for sport (such as fox hunting with hounds) and the fur and feather trade.
Among his books are A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886), The New Charter, a Discussion of the Rights of Men and the Rights of Animals (1896), The Logic of Vegetarianism (1899) and Our Vanishing Wildflowers (1928).
References
Salt, Henry Stephens. Animals' Rights: considered in relation to social progress. Macmillan: New York. 1892. Reprinted 1980.
| How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals. © Roger (Ben) Panaman, April 2008. All rights reserved. |