Origins of the animal-rights movement

When I first became interested in animal rights in the mid-2000s, activists and scholars frequently said the movement began in the 1970s, referencing Peter Singer, the Oxford Group and other things. However, as I did even a small amount of historical reading, this didn’t seem like a supportable belief.

You have to begin with a very restrictive understanding of animal rights for this perspective to make any sense. Even then, there were advocates of what would today be called veganism and vegan philosophy in the distant past. I’d say the claim was Eurocentric, but I don’t think it’s true in the European context either.

Beyond the facts themselves, I don’t understand the desire to believe the animal-rights movement began so recently, when it’s so often dismissed as a passing fad. I’d much rather see myself as part of a broad, shared tradition that stretches back through a significant portion of recorded human history.

That said, I don’t want to dismiss what made the animal-rights movement of the 1970s unique. Activists and scholars of the era pushed parts of the tradition forward dramatically in a host of ways, as every succeeding generation should. I just don’t see their work as fundamentally breaking with what had come before.

I’ve written a couple of books of animal-rights history, that, whatever their flaws, deal with the period. Still, I continue to see it described as an origin point, frequently enough I wonder if I’m missing something. So I put the question to a number of people with relevant knowledge, who were kind enough to share their time with me.

John Sanbonmatsu is associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He is editor of the book Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, and author of the upcoming book The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves.

Sanbonmatsu agreed tracing the origins of the nonhuman movement to merely the 1970s was incorrect. “As you know, the history of critique of human violence against animals, and the case for ethical vegetarianism, goes back at least 2,500 years, to Jainism, Buddhism, and the Pythagorans,” he said.

Chien-hui Li is a historian and the author of Mobilizing Traditions in the First Wave of the British Animal Defense Movement, which explored how the nineteenth-century British animal protection movement drew upon a wide range of intellectual and cultural traditions to advance the animal cause.

“The animal protection movement in Britain actually started well before the 1970s,” Li said. “The tendency to date the start of the animal protection movement to the 1970s is likely due to historical ignorance, as I see no difference ‘either in degree or in kind’ between the nineteenth-century movement and the one that emerged in the 1970s.”

Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co., the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, a five-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast. He also viewed the 1970s as part of a long tradition.

Shapiro recognized many argue Peter Singer’s 1975 book, Animal Liberation, launched the animal-rights movement. However, as he pointed out, there were people opposed to animal exploitation well before that. Shapiro highlighted the publication of animal-rights books by Henry Salt and Lewis Gompertz in the 1890s.

“Going further back, Mahavira 2,500 years ago founded Jainism with an emphasis on not harming animals at all, and Jains have been largely vegetarian ever since,” Shapiro said. “Is that part of the animal rights movement? I'd say yes.” Obviously, I sympathized with his more inclusive perspective.

Helen Cowie is professor of history at the University of York, where she researches and teaches the history of animals. She is author of Llama, Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain, and the forthcoming Animals in World History. Cowie emphasized the unique nature of the 1970s.

“I would argue that this decade witnessed a step change in human-animal relations,” she said. “Before the 1970s, the primary focus of animal protection organisations like the RSPCA was on improving animal welfare and mitigating animal suffering, whether in the zoo, the street or the laboratory.”

In Cowie’s view, this changed with the publication of philosophical texts by Richard Ryder, John Harris, Rosalind Godlovitches, Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Later activists would increasingly call for the complete abolition of all forms of animal exploitation and a wholesale reimagining of our relationship with other species.   

“It is, of course, possible, to find some of these more radical views expressed in earlier decades,” the history professor said. “While individuals and a few organisations expressed these ideas, however, they did not enjoy widespread support from contemporaries and had a comparatively limited impact.”

To a certain extent, it’s a question of emphasis. One can recognize the animal-rights movement predated the 1970s, while acknowledging it progressed significantly in certain ways during that era. I just believe the current discussion overemphasizes the latter. I want to learn more about the former.