I See My Light Come Shining

The documentary film Unlocking the Cage (reviewed in this blog for 13 February 2017) follows the lawyer Steven Wise as he tries to persuade American judges to free four chimpanzees from varieties of miserable captivity. At the end, we see him thoughtfully watching an elephant forced to provide fun for American families. Elephants would indeed come next in his campaign (called the Nonhuman Rights Project or NhRP). Not that the chimpanzees had been freed; nor were the three elephants who came next, in court cases from 2017 to 2020. Some of this company of prisoners died during the endeavour. Tommy the chimpanzee simply ‘disappeared’. The others languished where they were, or went on to different forms of captivity and exploitation.

Even so, it’s not a story of failure. Steven Wise would be a hard man to defeat, and the NhRP is always making progress, as this post will show. On Thursday last, it came before the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. It’s the first time this court has dealt with the rights of an animal, and also, as Wise says, “the first time in history that the highest court of an English-speaking jurisdiction will hear a case that demands a legal right for a nonhuman being”. The subject of the case is an Asian elephant, 51 years old, presently being kept for public interest and entertainment at the Bronx Zoo. The court’s judgement will be published at some time in the coming weeks.

The elephant in question is called Happy, an insultingly inappropriate name for this animal so patently deprived of her natural pleasures. It expresses, besides, the frivolity of attitude in the humans who imported her, with six other elephant calves, into the United States from Thailand in 1971. The abducted animals were named after Snow White’s seven dwarfs (elephants called after dwarfs, you see: chuckles all round!). The same facetiousness has pursued her ever since. In the monorail car that takes visitors above her enclosure, so a report in National Geographic tells us, “a chirpy guide cracks jokes and rattles off facts.” In media likewise, of course: one report on the case is headed “Happy the elephant hopes to pack her trunk after court case”. What fun animals are!

Intentionally or not, all this drollery is a proportioning device, and it works. As counsel and judges discuss the situation in the Court of Appeals (a video of the proceedings is available on the NhRP web-site), that name continuingly damages the seriousness of the case, sentimentalizing and diminishing the animal, making her seem incongruous as the subject of attention in that grand setting.

That, of course, is exactly the case being made by the respondents to the case (the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Bronx Zoo which it manages): i.e. that neither Happy, nor any other animal, is important enough to feature in a writ of habeas corpus of the sort which the NhRP is bringing to the court on her behalf: “It puts them in the same category as people, which we oppose” says their counsel. The text of the habeas corpus writ does indeed refer to “persons”. It’s a device in common law (that is, law as developed by judges in the courts, rather than fixed in statutes), which requires those who detain such “persons” to justify the detention before a court or else to release them. And this is the legal instrument with which Steven Wise has been trying to liberate those chimpanzees and elephants. In order to make it work, he has had to show that these animals can properly be considered ‘persons’.

The argument is not, then, about welfare, which is covered in statutory law. The Zoo’s counsel may well be right in insisting that Happy’s treatment satisfies such law, miserable as she obviously is, but it’s beside the point. The key word in the NhRP’s case is ‘autonomy’. Happy is entitled to be called a ‘person’ and so enjoy the protections of habeas corpus because she has all the cognitive and emotional faculties of an autonomous being, fit to make her own choices and direct her own life. She should therefore be freed to practise and enjoy her autonomy, if not in the absolute wild (it’s far too late for that), at least in a sanctuary that closely imitates it.

Of course no animal has yet been freed in such a way, and this fact inhibits judges who, in common law, generally look to former cases (i.e. precedents) for their guidance. But at least they are not confined by statutory laws, and in practice judges have often enough decided according to their own sense of natural justice or of the changing social attitudes and requirements of their times. Specialists in the use of habeas corpus have spoken of its efficacy in past cases to establish human rights, for instance the rights of wives and children, which “were well in front of statutorily mandated protections”. Steven Wise has written a book about one particular instance: the judgement of Lord Mansfield in 1772, freeing the slave James Somerset, even though there was no existing law to say that slavery was illegal, nor any common law precedent for such a decision. Lord Mansfield’s decision was essentially a moral one: slavery was, he said, “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.” Britain of course had no such positive law to support slavery, so James Somerset was freed.

It had been put to Lord Mansfield that freeing Somerset would have a catastrophic effect: learning that Britain had outlawed slavery, Somerset’s fellow-slaves in the Americas would “flock over in vast numbers, over-run this country, and desolate the plantations”. Lord Mansfield acknowledged that such concern for the larger consequences, good or bad, of a court’s decision, were legitimate (lawyers call this factor in judicial decision-making ‘policy’). But he rejected it in this case, using the Latin dictum ‘fiat justitia ruat coelum’ (roughly, ‘let right be done regardless of consequences’). And now this same argument as to ‘policy’ is being put to the judges in Happy’s case. Counsel for the Zoo warns of “the dramatic impact” that a victory for Happy “would have on our society.” Not just farmers would feel their livelihoods threatened. The Zoo’s case has the backing of the National Association for Biomedical Research, which fears that extending habeas corpus to animals “would impede important medical breakthroughs”. One judge asked counsel for the NhRP whether the aim was to make any human use of an animal illegitimate; another wondered if dogs might in future be habeas corpused from their owners. In fact the Bronx Zoo, which intends to discontinue its elephant ‘exhibits’ in the near future anyway, seems to be fighting the case precisely in order to prevent this dangerous precedent.

It’s a difficult point to defeat in court, and counsel for the NhRP (not Steven Wise this time, but Monica Miller) admitted that it would be “disingenuous” to say that Happy, if freed, would bring an end to the story. Of course she would not. For after all – which Ms Miller did not say – autonomy is nature’s promise to every life born, except perhaps in the case of swarm animals. (I note a placard at one NhRP event that reads “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings”.) Accordingly, counsel for the Zoo complained at an earlier hearing, “this is not really about elephants. It’s about elephants, it’s about giraffes . . .” “It’s about animals,” the judge agreed – perhaps nervously, perhaps with Mansfield-like willingness to let in the uncertain future (for this was Judge Alison Tuitt, of whom more below). And that indeed is the answer to the ‘floodgates’ objection: Fiat justitia, let right be done, and after that let us adjust ourselves to whatever world it turns out to imply.

It doesn’t take long to watch the recent hearing in the New York court, because the whole thing took no more than half an hour. It may even seem somewhat disappointing: shapeless, imprecise. (I missed Steven Wise’s good-humoured forensic authority.) But there have been three earlier hearings in lower courts, with much longer attention spans. And besides, the case in this New York court has the backing of a great volume of argument submitted by its amici curiae (‘friends of the court’, effectively expert witnesses): there are eighteen of these textual ‘briefs’ – involving 146 organisations and individuals, including lawyers, philosophers, zoologists, and theologians – together constituting an education in animal rights. And it’s evident from those earlier decisions, adverse though they’ve been, that the judges do read and ponder these amicus briefs, as well as the arguments put in court. At any rate, the aforementioned Judge Tuitt, for instance, when ruling (“regrettably”, as she said) against the NhRP’s claim in the Bronx County Supreme Court in 2019, said this:

Happy is more than just a legal thing, or property. She is an intelligent, autonomous being who should be treated with respect and dignity, and who may be entitled to liberty.

And she quoted Judge Eugene Fahey’s opinion in the case of the chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko the year before:

The issue whether a nonhuman has a fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus is profound and far-reaching. It speaks to our relationship with all the life around us. Ultimately we will not be able to ignore it.

Writing in the year 2000, Steven Wise recalled having to speak for animal rights before judges who belonged to “an intellectual world that Galileo and Darwin” had “not yet penetrated.” Since then, however,

judges who matured alongside the newer animal rights movement have begun to take their places. They will be better equipped to examine the objective data and hear – not just listen to – the supporting arguments. They will begin to rattle the cage.

That’s just what Justices Tuitt and Fahey were doing to the cage. In time, for certain, they or other judges will actually open it. May it be this time, and this elephant’s cage which they open!

Notes and references:

There is a petition backing the case for Happy’s release to a sanctuary here: https://www.change.org/p/end-happy-the-elephant-s-10-years-of-solitary-confinement

The film Unlocking the Cage (2016) as reviewed in this blog: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/unlocking-the-cage/

The court hearing on 18 May can be viewed in this video, which actually starts at Ihr 04 minutes in, with some introductory comments from Steven Wise: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/Highlight_Page/the-fight-to-freehappy/. This page also has links to various reports in the media, including the piece in National Geographic quoted above. The heading ‘Happy the elephant hopes to pack her trunk’ comes from The Times newspaper, 13 May 2022.

The amicus briefs submitted for the NhRP to the New York court are listed, with links to the texts, here: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/?p=17232?date=1652869015349.  The quotation about habeas corpus comes from brief no.7, which provides an excellent account of the writ and its potential.

Steven Wise’s book about the James Somerset case is Though the Heavens May Fall: the Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery (Da Capo Press, 2005: note the word ‘human’ in the title: not all slavery yet.] He also writes about the Somerset case in Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals (Profile Books, 2000), from which the quotations from Lord Mansfield and counsel in the case are taken (pp. 50 and 103-4), and also the concluding quotations about judges old and new (p.77). The words about slaves flocking to Britain were actually those of counsel for Somerset himself, caricaturing the argument as used by the opposition.

The National Association for Biomedical Research is quoted from the amicus brief which it submitted on behalf of the Bronx Zoo and the Wildlife Conservation Society, itself quoted in a very thorough article in the New Yorker (7 March 2022) about the case. The quotation “it’s about giraffes . . etc.” comes from this same source.

Judge Alison Tuitt’s ruling, in 2019, can be read here: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/content/uploads/HappyFeb182020.pdf  Judge Fahey’s words are quoted from his opinion in the 2018 hearing of the case for the chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/Highlight_Page/the-fight-to-freehappy/ What he says very clearly implies an expected transition from law as an exclusively human amenity, to law that provides justice to all that can benefit from it.

The title is a line from Bob Dylan’s song I Shall Be Released, played during the final credits for the film Unlocking the Cage.

Anti-Vivisection Forty Years On: a Conversation with Mel Broughton

Last Thursday there was a demonstration with banners and leaflets outside Oxford University’s animal research laboratory in South Parks Road, as there is every Thursday and has been for many years. Of course Mel Broughton was there, the man who led the campaign against the building of the Oxford lab, and (successfully) against the primate research centre earlier proposed at Cambridge. Mel’s experience of arrest and imprisonment for arson during the Oxford campaign was described in this blog four years ago, shortly after the conclusion of his ten-year sentence. When he was free of his sentence, and had returned to South Parks Road (“I promised myself that as soon as I got off licence I’d come straight back here, and I did.”) and to the animal rights movement in general, it was a scene very much changed from the one he had known. On Thursday, he spoke about the changes and about the present and future of the animal rights movement.

Mel’s own prison sentence, and similarly severe ones passed against a number of other activists, were part of an increasingly resolute intervention on the part of government and police authorities to support animal-research institutions. Almost certainly both Huntingdon Life Sciences and Oxford University’s new laboratory would have been defeated without this intervention. It involved both financial backing and stricter legal and policing controls. Demonstrations and marches, and even those Thursday afternoon vigils, were so conspicuously policed that they had a quasi-criminal appearance. All this had, as Mel says, “a chilling effect” on the movement, as it was intended to do: not just making direct action a much more hazardous option, but also alienating many who would otherwise have given active support at events.

Two developments which should have been beneficial – the rise of social media and the increasing popularity of veganism – have in fact, so Mel believes, rather compounded the problem. In the case of social media, the will to support a cause can too easily be satisfied by online ‘action’:

They go on their smart-phone and they look at a post about a demonstration, and they go ‘O.K.’ and click on it, and that’s it, they think it’s done. The responsibility for everyone to do something themselves, for everyone to act, has been largely taken away. It’s almost like ‘follow us on Twitter, or ‘like’ us, and we’ll do the work for you.

Veganism has, of course, been an excellent thing in itself, in so far as it lessens animal suffering. Mel himself has been vegan for forty years:

I’m all for it. But veganism doesn’t guarantee animal rights. ‘Go vegan!’ they say, but for many animals it makes no difference. Their status remains exactly the same.

Unless veganism is taken on as a necessary implication of the belief that animals have rights to life and freedom, then it’s likely to be a life-style choice, more about the person than about the animals, and therefore to lead nowhere.

That was indeed the view of it taken by Stephen Clark in his remarkable book The Moral Status of Animals (1984). Throughout that book, he insists that veganism, or vegetarianism at the least, is a minimum commitment, a starting-point. He says, “All those who believe that animals are not utterly beyond moral consideration, that they should be spared all avoidable pain, are duty-bound to abstain from meat, and to campaign against vivisection.” You’ll notice the connection of the diet to the campaigning – specifically, campaigning against vivisection. It’s the point Mel Broughton was making, and Mel recalled that vivisection was indeed a crucial interest in the early days of modern animal rights in the 1970s: “Vivisection was the issue which gave birth to the animal rights movement, that and hunt sabbing.” He himself came into the movement in the early 80s, involved in the campaign of that time against animal research at Oxford University. The policy then was “direct action to save lives”, notably the lives of laboratory animals.

These are still Mel’s priorities. During a hunt event three years ago, Mel was ridden down by a huntsman, and very seriously injured; after a long delay, the man is now facing a charge of ‘wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm’. But animals in laboratories remain Mel’s priority: “I do think that vivisection is the darkest crime of all . . . I don’t think anything comes close to the laboratory in terms of complete violation of rights.”

In those earlier days, the research institutions themselves largely relied for their freedom of action on the ignorance of the public. They would close ranks and increase their security after each public scandal. Since then they have learnt to be more sophisticated. In particular they have created the ‘Concordat on Openness’ to advertise, at one and the same time, pride and confidence in their animal research and commitment to doing less of it. Has all the publicity arising from this Concordat – the countless web-pages about animal research, the ‘virtual tours’ of laboratories, the open days and other such initiatives often recounted in this blog – helped to baffle the anti-vivisection movement? Mel Broughton concedes that it “placates people who want to think the animals don’t suffer.” It enables them to think so, by judiciously selecting what’s shown (even the Concordat organizers admit this): “It’s a snapshot, that’s all it is; it’s dishonest.”

More positively, all this publicity, in common with the now elaborate bureaucracy that regulates animal research, is evidence of the effectiveness of all the years of opposition: “You could argue that they were forced to do it because we were exposing them; they had little choice but to do it.” But of course the essential character of vivisection has not changed, and it has come clearly into light again at MBR Acres, the establishment at Wyton near Cambridge that breeds beagle dogs, at the rate of about two thousand a year, for research-use in the UK and beyond. When the American company Marshall Bio-Resources first took over this breeding enterprise from Harlan Interfauna, all the dogs then being kept there were destroyed. This sort of ruthlessness, says Mel, is “the reality of vivisection”.

Mel Broughton and others started to make MBR Acres the target of attention two years ago. Making visits at night, they placed cameras at the perimeter fence. These cameras recorded the boxing and transporting of the beagles, ugly and sinister images which gained national coverage in the Daily Mirror and other places in April and May of 2021. The small group of activists that had been making regular visits there now swelled in number, some began to stay overnight, and today there’s a permanent Camp Beagle at the gates of the establishment. Mel says that it’s “one of those campaigns that theoretically we could win; they could be closed down.”

So MBR Acres has become the focus for activist anti-vivisection, as Oxford once was. And the ordeal of radical dissent – the confrontations, the policing, the arrests – is renewed there. The company hopes to secure an injunction limiting the scope of the protest, just as Oxford University did. And Mel Broughton is once more the principal name in the injunction: “I find myself in the High Court, going through the whole process again.”

Many individuals have taken their part in the anti-vivisection protests over the forty years since those 1980s protests in Oxford; most have passed through and gone, replaced by others with their own periods of commitment. A very few have been there throughout, and Mel is one of them. He has paid very heavily for his purposefulness and leadership, but he is wholly steadfast:

I’m not defeated, and there’s a lot still to be done. I’m not going to stop. 

Notes and references:

Mel Broughton was speaking on Thursday, 5 May, during one of the weekly demonstrations in Oxford organised by SPEAK campaigns. His account of arrest and life in prison can be read in this blog here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/an-animal-rights-activist-in-prison/

The Moral Status of Animals, by Stephen R. L. Clark, was published by Oxford University Press in 1984; the quotation is from pp.169-70. This is the most impassioned and uncompromising of the academic accounts of the subject that I have encountered.

The photographs show Mel Broughton in South Parks Road and speaking at an event in London.

Last Gift to the Animals from a Friend in Parliament

The winner of the Westminster Dog of the Year show, as judged on College Green last week, was a French Bulldog called Vivienne. She had been entered into the competition by Sir David Amess (pronounced ‘amis’), the MP who was killed at a constituency surgery on 18 October. Vivienne was a popular – indeed a prejudiced – choice, but then the show is a way of drawing attention to the pleasures and responsibilities of dog-companionship, rather than a serious assessment of canine points, in the scientific Crufts manner. To some extent it’s even a parody of Crufts, or I hope it is. Being light-hearted, then, it brings out that curious facetiousness which seems to infect the subject, with talk of “our furry friends” and “pawlitics”, and so on. Still, the result was a very proper and moving recognition of Sir David’s devotion to animal interests during his long parliamentary career.

The tributes paid to him in the House of Commons spoke of his “love of animals”. As far as I have noticed, Amess himself did not use that phrase, either about himself or (as so commonly heard in Parliament) about the nation. He spoke rather about their qualities – “absolutely wonderful animals” (of elephants), “sensitive and intelligent animals” (of pigs), “a generous, giving nature” (of the dog Vivienne). His concern was impartially for all suffering animals, loved or not. During a debate about wildlife crime in 2019, he spoke of his collaborations with the former MP Ann Widdecombe: “we led campaigns against live-animal exports, the badger cull, animal experimentation, dog meat, the fur trade, and the netting and killing of songbirds throughout the Mediterranean.”

That homely concept ‘love of animals’ also misrepresents the strength and range of attention which David Amess brought to these problems. In that same debate, occurring at a time when there was still some inclination in his own party (Conservative) to revisit and even repeal the Hunting Act, he said this:

It beggars believe that anyone would set dogs on foxes and think that it is acceptable to have them physically torn apart. I think that most civilized people, and I hope most Members of Parliament, would find that repugnant.

Not affection, or not just affection, but a humane society was what he wanted (and you note the joke implied in putting himself and other MPs in a separate category to “civilized people”: he was a humorous man). So of course animals were part of a corpus of public problems, interests, and concerns he wished to deal with. But they were also much more than that to him, for they were part of his spiritual convictions as a Roman Catholic. During a debate promoted by Amess himself on 7 December 2011 about the use of animals in research (a practice which he considered “ethically and morally wrong”), he reminded the House that the Holy Family in the Bethlehem stable was “surrounded by animals”. He therefore invited the government to make animal-free medical research “the final gift, after gold, frankincense and myrrh, to both kingdoms represented by the nativity.”

“both kingdoms”, because human-centred research would be a boon as valuable to humans as to the other animals. And that image of co-existence in the stable is also a reminder that although David Amess commonly spoke about ‘animal welfare’, he was aiming at something much more elementary. On 19 January of this year, he led an ‘adjournment debate’ (an opportunity for backbench MPs to direct government attention to a matter of concern) on the difficulties which animal charities have been experiencing as a result of Covid-19. “This pandemic,” he told the House, “may be all about our relationship with animals.” It should therefore “prompt a much-needed reconsideration of our relationship with animals . . . a new vision.” It was this vision which he hoped might be discussed in the general debate which, just before the autumn recess on 23 September, he urged the government to schedule in acknowledgement of World Animal Day this year. That was his last appearance in the proceedings of the House.

But certainly David Amess was there in spirit on Monday afternoon last week (25 October) when there were two separate but concurrent debates on animal themes. One of them was the second reading of the government’s Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill, the legislation that should at last put an end, among other abuses, to the live exporting of farm animals. The other (held in Westminster Hall) was titled ‘Animal Testing’, and had been occasioned by a parliamentary e-petition calling for the abolition of animals in laboratory research – a petition whose 236,000 signatures had far exceeded the number required to trigger such a debate. In both these debates, at the start and finish and indeed throughout, Amess was spoken of with more than ordinary ceremony. It’s clear that MPs really did like and admire “our late dearly loved colleague from Southend West”.

In the case of the Westminster Hall debate, the theme was one whose importance he had especially urged upon the government over many years (he had entered parliament in 1983) and in many different ways: on committees, in speeches, in early day motions, at parliamentary receptions on the subject (like the one he’s pictured introducing for Cruelty Free International). The debate itself had been postponed for a week, because the original timing had been taken up with tributes to David Amess in the Commons and then a service of remembrance in St Margaret’s Church across the road. MPs had therefore had time to re-compose their speeches. Not only the many reiterated tributes but, I would say, a more than usually passionate statement of the case against animal research was the consequence of that.

Notably, the concept of animal rights, which has tended in the past to startle and even enrage MPs, had made its way into the thought and language. The debate was opened by Martyn Day (MP for Linlithgow and East Falkirk), who said that “animals, as sentient beings, deserve the same consideration as humans, and have the right not to suffer at our hands.” Can the case be put more absolutely than that? Fleur Anderson (Putney), described herself, perhaps with more passion than exactitude, as a “very committed animal rights activist”. A different but also very important principle was asserted by Ruth Jones (Newport), who said that MPs had duties not just to their human constituents: “we also have a responsibility to our natural world, wildlife and animals.” Not that the two duties are separate, for as another speaker had observed, many and perhaps all MPs receive more mail about animal concerns than about any other topic. This debate, said Ruth Jones, should help them to decide “what we can do to keep our animals safe”. She wasn’t talking about pet animals, but about all the animals an MP might represent, including those favoured for research.

Perhaps most significantly of all, there was the suggestion that the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, with all its various accretions of statutory instruments and Home Office guidance, the whole bundle so often eulogized by ministers and research scientists, should cease to be regarded as the last progressive word on this subject. Fleur Anderson argued that animal research should have been part of the debate on the Kept Animals Bill in the main chamber of the House. In fact the same point was being made there, that the Bill should be revised to bring laboratory animals too into the special protections being prepared for those others (livestock, puppies, primates as pets, and zoo animals). The implication was that the essential principle of British law on animals in research since 1876 – that such animals were to be excepted from other legislation against cruelty (as they are, for instance, from the Animal Welfare Act of 2006) – should at last be discarded.

In accordance with the habit of eulogy mentioned in the previous paragraph, the government’s original response to the e-petition had referred to the “robust regulations” which protected animals from unnecessary or unethical experimentation. Martyn Day now commented on this phrase: “I can think of many words to describe regulation that allows factory-farmed puppies [he was evidently thinking of the beagle puppies bred at MBR Acres] to be daily force-fed chemicals directly into their stomachs for up to 90 days with no pain relief or anaesthetic, but ‘robust’ certainly is not one of them.” He then took the 1986 Act’s efforts to promote so-called ‘alternatives’ to animals and turned it more than inside out: the Act should be amended to “remove animal experimentation as an ‘alternative’ in scientific procedures”. In short, the 1986 Act should scrap itself.

The two debates on Monday of last week occupied together about four and a half hours. It’s true that neither of the two debates was well-attended (Westminster Hall debates rarely are). And ‘debate’ is rather a misnomer for these formal events anyway. Mostly, the contributions consist in the reading aloud of prepared speeches, with therefore a great deal of wearisome overlap. Interventions there are, but brief and usually not able nor even intended to divert the flow of a prepared speech. This is the ordinary House style, very unlike the pugilism of the more celebrated Prime Minister’s Questions: so much the better, no doubt, but then, however powerful individual contributions may be, the net impression is of business completed. This was indeed a frequent complaint of Sir David’s, that good and agreed intentions were producing no practical results.

Still, Parliament is that narrow strait through which animal ethics has to pass on its way from ideology to the desired condition of national fixture. David Amess made the best of it, and in his long political career, always as a backbencher, he achieved a great deal for animals. And in the wretched circumstances of his death, he seems to have made a last gift to them of his popularity in the House. For not just were those many vehement speeches delivered with him in mind; there was more generally a strong feeling that the House owed it to him to accomplish something definite, much as another of his long-pursued ambitions, city status for Southend, was granted post-mortem, or indeed as Vivienne was elected Dog of the Year. Winding up the second reading of the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill, the Minister of State at Defra, Victoria Prentis, quoted some words spoken by David Amess about live exports, and lastly said “I commend the Bill, in his name, to the House.” I hope that his name and example may have likewise persuaded the House to act upon the public wish, expressed in that e-petition, to see an end to vivisection.

Notes and references

The Westminster Dog of the Year event is reported by the BBC here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-59076946

Quotations from speeches come from Hansard’s records for the relevant days and occasions, accessible from its home page: https://hansard.parliament.uk/.

Thus transcripts of the two debates of 25 October can be found here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-10-25/debates/486708F3-E5DE-4121-B9E0-F146AFF73031/AnimalTesting  and https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-10-25/debates/58F30AB3-1785-491F-B9ED-0DDD739F64D8/AnimalWelfare(KeptAnimals)Bill The debate on wildlife crime took place on 20 March 2019. Other debates are dated in the text, I hope.

The e-petition debated on 25 October can be read here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/581641. The debate also incorporated a separate e-petition on the same subject: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/590216

One of the current Early Day Motions tabled (i.e. put forward for others to sign) by David Amess is no.256, ‘Accelerating human relevant life sciences in the UK’, which can be read here: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/56714 Another important EDM to which he is a signatory is no.175, ‘Public scientific hearing on animal experiments’, here: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/58611/public-scientific-hearing-on-animal-experiments . A good way of drawing your MP’s attention to the subject is to invite him or her to sign these EDMs or, if they already have signed, to thank them for doing so.

In his book Ayes and Ears: a Survivor’s Guide to Westminster (2020), David Amess describes the workings and failings of the place, his own experience of becoming an MP, and his efforts to get things done in the House of Commons. The book is published by Luath Press, but seems to be out of print at present.

The photograph of sir David Amess shows him speaking at a parliamentary reception which he hosted for Cruelty Free International in 2015 (image used courtesy of CFI).

The Librarian Who Caused a Scandalous Riot

There have been several references in this blog to the man who became, in 1882, Oxford University’s first Waynflete Professor of Physiology, John Scott Burdon Sanderson, but little mention has been made of the man regarded as his chief opponent during the ensuing controversy over vivisection at the university. This man, Edward Nicholson, was appointed, in that same year, chief librarian to the university (Bodley’s Librarian). It was a portentous year, for then also John Ruskin was elected to a second and hectic stint as Slade Professor of Fine Art, a stint brought to an abrupt end by the same controversy.

Nicholson’s long period in office was one of the most crucial modernizing phases in the Bodleian’s history. He turned the Bodleian from a gentleman-scholars’ club into a busy and efficient university-wide institution. But his reforms, and of course his leadership of the anti-vivisection campaign in the 1880s, made him many enemies in the university. Accordingly there was afterwards something like a conspiracy to deny him the memorials to which he was surely entitled: a commissioned portrait, for instance, such as was accorded to both his predecessor and his successor, or his name attached to the collection of papers which he bequeathed to the library (they were jumbled into other collections, such as ‘Eng. Misc.’, and remain so). But he needs and deserves remembering – here in particular for the heroic stand he made against vivisection at Oxford University in the 1880s.

Burdon Sanderson came to Oxford with an established reputation as “the arch-priest of vivisection”. Nicholson too had made himself known on the subject, in a pioneering book titled The Rights of an Animal: a new Essay in Ethics, published in 1879. And it surely was new; Nicholson himself called it “so far as I know, the first systematic attempt in our language – may be in any language – to treat the question of man’s social relations to animals as a branch of moral philosophy.” But it was not the merely intellectual treatment of the subject which its sub‐title suggests. It was purposeful and practical, as indeed that telling formulation in the title – an animal –  implies: not a generality of animals, but every particular animal was claiming its rights of us. So at the end of the book Nicholson gives advice on how to turn ethics into useful effort. And that was what Nicholson was now finding himself required to do at Oxford.  

It was not Burdon Sanderson himself, nor even the laboratory being planned for his use, that Nicholson opposed, though the controversy came to simplify itself in that way, as the cartoon illustration indicates (more about that in the notes). What he wanted was that the university should impose two conditions upon the work done by Burdon Sanderson and by all his successors at Oxford: first, that anaesthetics would be used in all experiments which would otherwise cause pain, and second, that there would be no experiments at all using domesticated animals. You’ll notice that these are conditions which UK law has yet to catch up with even now, but to Nicholson well over a century ago they seemed “morally indispensable”.

That phrase comes from the petition which Nicholson organized and presented to the university’s governing Hebdomadal Council in 1883, requesting that a distinct motion on these conditions should be put to Convocation (at that time the university’s legislature). The petition had 143 signatures to it, for Nicholson had enlisted the support of many heads of colleges, many professors (including John Ruskin) and fellows (including Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll), and the Bishop of Oxford, John Mackarness, to say nothing of all the Oxford graduates whose MAs entitled them to vote in Convocation. But the Council rejected the petition – “an intolerable wrong”, Nicholson thought, with typical passion. He believed that his party would have won the vote; probably the Council had thought so too.

Still, to obtain the necessary land and funds for the laboratory, the Council had to get the approval of Convocation. There had already been two sessions for this purpose, but a third and fourth would yet be needed. Nicholson therefore announced that the coming sessions would be turned into that debate on vivisection which the Council had refused, and he at once began preparing for them.

Evening after evening, after his strenuous days in the Bodleian Library, Nicholson put his talents as an organiser and publicist into the push against the laboratory. Printed letters and cards, circulars and other documents went out from his house at number 2 Canterbury Road, telling academics and graduates of the university, in Oxford and far beyond, what they needed to know about the rejected petition, about Burdon Sanderson’s record as a physiologist and as a witness at the 1875 Royal Commission on vivisection, about the coming votes in Convocation, and about what the University’s Council was doing. As to this last, the Council itself had finally felt obliged to campaign for its own policy, rather than move ahead with patrician self-sufficiency (its preferred method then as now). So by the time of the second vote in 1885, as one contemporary recalled, Oxford MAs “had been inundated with leaflets from both sides, with the names of prominent men attached, for weeks before the day of debate.”

Before taking a view of the debates themselves, which were two of the most crowded and disorderly ever to have taken place in Convocation, we should pause to notice Nicholson’s courage in thus discomposing the university. He was a new and untested presence there, by no means a unanimous choice among the library’s curators (one of them thought him “vain, egotistical, and vulgar”: not a gentleman-scholar, then). The Times newspaper, with its many Oxford connections, reported the matter with some acidity: “It would be mere affectation to deny that this appointment will be viewed by many with considerable surprise.” More immediately, Vice-Chancellor Benjamin Jowett gave Nicholson warning that his activities in the campaign might be considered damaging to the library, and by implication to Nicholson’s own career with it. As to that, there survives among Nicholson’s papers a draft letter from 1884 in which sets out his response. Here are some sentences from it:

Dear Mr Vice‐Chancellor, It will be a satisfaction to me if you will allow me to make quite clear to you my feelings and intentions in regard to the matter which you spoke of this morning . . . On the matter of principle I feel as strongly as it is possible to feel, and so I consider it a duty from which I cannot deviate for one moment to do all I can to avert the practice [of vivisection] in Oxford. If the majority on February 5th [that was the third of the four Convocations] had been able and willing to compel me to resign my office on account of my action in this matter, I should have taken that action just the same . . . if Council were to propose any further grant without allowing a vote on the principle [as we know the Council in fact did] it would be our duty to oppose the grant.

I can’t find whether Nicholson actually sent, to the man who had originally been his main ally among the Curators, this bold and uncompromising letter, but he certainly acted on it.

The Convocations, then. That debate on 5 February was rowdy enough, or became so. Jowett himself presided, and the proceedings were opened by Dean Henry Liddell of Christ Church (father of Lewis Carroll’s Alice). The professor of medicine, Henry Acland, then spoke in praise of Burdon Sanderson’s high moral character (that familiar argument: ‘trust the professionals’). Speakers against the laboratory included Dr Pope – “who, we are credibly informed,” reported the students’ Oxford Magazine, of course relishing the commotion, “spoke with a loaded revolver in his pocket” – and Nicholson himself, characteristically “bristling with little books and papers”. Unfortunately the debate got entangled in one particular animal procedure which Burdon Sanderson had spoken of in his evidence to the Royal Commission. He had called it “a beautiful experiment” and one which he had enjoyed “great pleasure in repeating” a number of times (he’s quoted thus in the cartoon). This naturally caused some vocal indignation. But now the Waynflete Professor himself, who had hitherto “leaned against the side of the arena, gaunt, grim, notable”, came forward (“received with a storm of applause and hisses”), and explained that the animal had been a brain-dead frog. The debate proper did not recover from this anti-climax (if it really was one), and the vote went against Nicholson’s party.

But a fourth Convocation was needed, and it took place on 10 March the next year. This time the university’s Sheldonian Theatre was even more crowded and the debate even more unruly. The Times on that day had printed statements from the opposing parties, making clear that it would be a major Oxford University event. One of those present recalled years later that “hundreds of non-resident graduates had come up to vote from London and the shires . . . the Sheldonian Theatre was crammed, the upper undergraduate gallery no less than the lower.” There was “row on row of ladies interested in the scene”. Those Sheldonian galleries climb steeply up into the dome; it’s a room which can look and sound precariously crowded – or excitingly so, as seems to have been the case on that occasion.

Again, Vice-Chancellor Jowett presided and Dean Liddell opened the proceedings. That imposing and celebrated Oxford figure was given a respectful hearing, but he seems to have been the last of the speakers to enjoy the privilege. Canon Liddon, a celebrated orator, came after the Dean, spoke against vivisection, and was booed. When Bishop Mackarness started to describe some of the revolting experiments being done in France and Germany, someone (so the historian Charles Oman recalls in Memories of Victorian Oxford)

got upon a chair, and led, waving his arms, a regular chorus of the word ‘name’ or ‘shame’ – I could not quite make out which. The Bishop kept his feet and tried to proceed, but the rhythmical din continued.

Another speaker against the motion, the new Professor of Modern History, Edward Freeman, well-known for his publications against animal cruelty, “was absolutely howled down.” Those who spoke in favour of the motion were no better treated, and when a clergyman sprang up and “got in enough sentences to demonstrate that he was about to defend vivisection by the example of Christ”, this absurdity so aggravated the disorder that Benjamin Jowett brought a premature end to the debate and the matter was put to a decision. The university got its way by 412 votes to 244. (The total of votes did not represent the numbers present, of course: only graduates and fellows of colleges were entitled to vote.) Charles Oman calls the event “a scandalous riot”.

A defeat then, but also a very great achievement, as Oman’s disapproval itself suggests. For Nicholson turned a project whose first two supply votes had passed through Convocation hardly noticed into a controversy which in 1884 and 1885 generated some of the fiercest passions ever witnessed in the Sheldonian. (The much more famous debate about evolution, held in the University Museum in 1860, was really a very mild affair in comparison.) He forced the whole university to take the rights of animals seriously, and to suffer a convulsion commensurate with the importance of the decision it was taking. In doing so, he gave that Oxford generation a lesson in ethics which very few of them can altogether have missed or forgotten.

One of Nicholson’s supporters in the campaign against vivisection at Oxford, writing to console him on the evening of the 1885 defeat, said “the protest will remain a valuable one, and one which we may hope will not be forgotten in the future history of the Laboratory.” Yes, a most valuable protest, and a courageous and visionary man: there are good reasons – indeed, moral obligations – to remember both.    

Notes and references:

This post has been adapted from a longer article first published in the Oxford Magazine. The full text can be read here, including a more detailed set of footnotes: http://www.vero.org.uk/bodley.pdf

John Ruskin’s time as Slade Professor, and its abrupt end, are recounted in this blog here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/remembering-john-ruskin-rightly/

Burdon Sanderson was called “the arch-priest” in The Oxford University Herald on 27 October 1883, about the time he took up his duties as Waynflete Professor. Nicholson’s description of The Rights of an Animal comes from contemporary publicity material for the book.

The Times’s comments on Nicholson’s appointment were published on 6 February, 1882

Quotations about the Convocation debates come from Charles Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford, London, 1941, and from two university journals of the time: the Oxford Magazine, then primarily a student paper, for 13 February 1884 and 11 March 1885, and the Oxford Review for 7 February 1884

The hostile curator was Mark Pattison, writing in his journal, as quoted in an unpublished thesis in the Bodleian Library about Nicholson’s professional career, written by K.A.Manley, 1977).

The consolatory letter was written to Nicholson by the Regius Professor of Hebrew, Samuel Driver.

The contemporary cartoon shows Burdon Sanderson ‘experimenting’ upon Edward Nicholson. The ‘Blue Book’ of the caption, on a copy of which Nicholson’s hand is resting, is the Royal Commission Report on vivisection, published in 1876. As the frog indicates, the reference there and in the speech-bubble is to the “beautiful experiment” that became a theme of the 1884 Convocation debate (though the date given for this vivisection of Nicholson at the “Sheldonian Laboratories” seems to be miswritten “5^th Jan”). Unfortunately I have mislaid the source for this illustration, but I thank the archive concerned and hope that the unattributed use will be forgiven.

Marching, Speaking, and Doing

The National Animal Rights March for 2021 was organized by members of the group Animal Rebellion, and took place in London last Saturday afternoon. The starting-place was Smithfield, the UK’s largest wholesale and retail meat market. With its long history of cruelty and violence, and its setting in London’s centre of finance, the City, representing the rule of the money-interest, this was a very well-chosen venue. In fact it was here, in October last year, that Animal Rebellion set up their plant-based market alternative, beautifully picturing the one viable food-future open to us. And even the more general Extinction Rebellion campaign, radical and eloquent as that is, evidently needs this persuasion. Its current leaflet, as distributed at Smithfield, puts second-to-last, in its ‘What can I do?’ list, ”cutting down on meat”. A placard at Saturday’s march stated the case more accurately and urgently: “Go Vegan, or Go Extinct”.

The route for the march took in three stopping-points at noted counter-vegan institutions. There was Cargill, for instance, whose holdings and own operations make it the largest (in the sense most profitable) food business in the world. Despite its plant-leaf logo, tastefully topping the ‘i’ in its name, this company controls the impoverished lives and violent deaths of billions of animals every year. Animal Rebellion calls Cargill the “silent giant”, and certainly it keeps itself anonymous at its London headquarters, 77 Queen Victoria Street. Like so many companies, it prefers to boast about its work (“committed to helping the world thrive”) in the nowhere-land of the internet. By the way, the italics for ‘thrive’ are Cargill’s own, so you can see how earnestly sincere it is about this aim.

Then there was the Marine Stewardship Council, round the corner at Snow Hill (the police running ahead of the march to guard the doors at each next stop). This is an organization whose “vision . . . is of the world’s oceans teeming with life”. Plunderable life, that is, for the MSC’s hope is that, by not over-fishing, we can make “seafood supplies” (sometimes known as fishes) lastingly available “for this and future generations”. Our speaker outside Cargill’s offices, Tim Bailey, had told us that the pain of slaughter, however small the animal, was “exactly the same”. This assertion was quoted in news reports, perhaps because it feels like an over-statement or at least tendentious. But we don’t have to know whether it’s true or not, for the right to live is certainly nothing to do with large or small. And therefore the speaker outside the MSC’s headquarters, Laila Kassam, quite properly re-defined ‘over-fishing’ as “any fishing”.

One of the founding organizations for the MSC was Unilever, whose offices were the march’s first stop. This is another giant enterprise, which hoovers up successful brands, mainly cosmetics and foods, and makes their profits its own. Most of the conventional ice-creams one’s heard of, for instance, seem to belong to Unilever, for of course it’s not a vegan-friendly enterprise. It is, however, publicly committed to animal-free research (“we do not agree that animal testing is necessary to assure the safety of our products.”), and it posts an interesting video on Youtube about modern alternatives (linked in the notes below). It’s even been commended for its research policy by PETA.

However, as Animal Rebellion says, Unilever sells its products in countries whose governments require animal tests even for cosmetics – notably China – and the enormous volume of Unilever’s international trade therefore ensures that it’s still implicated in animal testing on a large scale. Unilever claims that “Doing good sits at the heart of everything we do”, but it’s the shareholders whom it aims to do good to first of all, something which a march round the City’s money-shuffling institutions makes more than usually obvious. And I doubt that those ice-creams, beverages, shampoos, soaps, and detergents, in so many varieties of packaging but otherwise insignificantly differing within their categories, do anything like as much good for their consumers. Certainly they aren’t worth the life of a single animal.

There are two other reasons for being wary of Unilever’s claims. One is that its newer animal-friendly values come after a very unpleasant history of vivisection. Work being done in the 1970s at Unilever’s own laboratories in Bedford was instanced by Richard Ryder in his pioneering book Victims of Science (the testing of shampoos and soaps in the eyes of rabbits). The same establishment was the scene of a mass raid and exposé by activists in 1984. In the trials which followed that event, one judge called the defendants “enemies of society”, and 25 of them were sentenced to a total of 41 years of imprisonment. More recently, in 2013, Unilever was one of a number of large food businesses said to be testing foods and drinks on animals, in order to justify health-claims.

The second reason for wariness is the bumptious jargon in which the company speaks to its public. “Our philosophy is quite simple,” we’re told: “Live from the Heart!” This is the explanation of “our heart-shaped logo . . . a sign that says ‘here there’s joy!’” How could one possibly trust this sort of sickening hyperbole, or suppose that anyone actually working at Unilever takes it seriously? The similarity of style with Cargill’s gush about “helping the world thrive”, or the Marine Stewardlship Council’s vision of “teeming” oceans, reminds us that addressing the public on any aspect of Unilever’s business is a specialism within the company, a profession in itself; this is not the company’s collective voice, not even the voice of the company board. The heart-on-sleeve sentiment is just the fashion of the moment in public relations. It says nothing informative about the reality behind it, and certainly doesn’t underwrite that. Therefore the ethic which first persuaded Unilever and other such businesses away from animal-testing needs to be kept clearly in their sight, and they need to be kept in ours. That was the purpose of the mass visit on Saturday.

Nobody could put the case, or represent it in person, more authentically than the speaker at that point, Mel Broughton. As he told us, he has been putting and living the case for forty years and more: “I’ve seen some terrible things in my time.” In fact he was there at the 1984 raid on Unilever’s laboratories. Not that Mel was making a personal claim for attention. It’s the mark of his commitment to non-human animals that he’s simply purged of vanity and self-interest: a remarkable lesson in personality. And anyway, Mel’s immediate theme was not the past, or even Unilever’s reformed present, but today’s front line in anti-vivisection: the beagle-breeding establishment in Cambridgeshire called MBR Acres (the initials stand for the American owner, Marshal Bio-Resources).

MBR Acres looks like a factory farm, and that’s indeed what it is, holding about 2000 animals at any one time in sheds with no outdoor runs. The dogs – beagles, because they are small and biddable, indeed trusting – are kept in a germ-free environment, and trained to accept inhalation-masks and injections. Then at 16 weeks or so, they are put into crates and transported to laboratories near and far for use in research. MBR beagles must have constituted a majority of the 4340 dogs used in British research last year, mostly for ‘repeated dose toxicity’ tests. These testing regimes may last for periods of less than 28 days, or up to and beyond 90 days. Such periods represent the likely remaining life-span of the MBR dogs, though some of them survive for re-use. The ordinary life-span of a beagle is twelve years or more. Yes, this is factory farming all right; it’s just that the dogs are being force-bred to be poisoned rather than eaten.

There’s a ‘Camp Beagle’ outside MBR Acres, protesting against, and as far as possible obstructing, the operations. Mel Broughton described the scene, with police crowding at the site entrance, and police vans escorting the MBA vehicles as they carry the dogs away: “We could hear those dogs crying in the back.” There are several videos online showing all this, in one of which can be heard a human crying too, a terrible addition to the distress. Film-clips also show the animals inside the facility, being crated and stacked in the vans. It was film of MBR Acres which is said to have shocked the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. She has demanded a re-examination of the use of animals in research, with a view to their eventual replacement. Very probably this project will fade into oblivion, as most progressive political schemes do. And anyway, as Mel said, “We’ve waited long enough, for 40 or 50 years . . . This has to end now, and we have to be the ones to do it . . . What all these animals want is liberation, and you are the people who will deliver that liberation. Don’t give in. Believe in what you’re doing.”

Mel Broughton is a most forceful public speaker, using no notes, prompted only by conviction and purposefulness. But as another notable speaker, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, said, “the finest eloquence is that which gets things done.” Can speaking, or even marching, get things done? Well, they do get things noticed, get things minded, and get things intended. Without those preliminaries, nothing collective gets done; with them, liberations have indeed been achieved in the past, and this of the animals surely can be too. But as Animal Rebellion says, “We must act now, before it is too late. It’s time to rebel for all life.”

Notes and references:

Animal Rebellion describes its 2020 occupation of Smithfield Market, and its thinking generally, in an excellent post here: https://animalrebellion.org/love-and-fruit-in-the-time-of-catastrophe-animal-rebellion-converts-smithfield-meat-market-into-smithfield-beet-market/

Animal Rebellion has published an open letter to Cargill here: https://animalrebellion.org/cargill-family-a-historic-choice-is-upon-you-planetary-destruction-or-climate-animal-and-human-justice/

The Marine Stewardship Council’s policies are described on its web-site here: https://www.msc.org/about-the-msc/what-is-the-msc

Unilever’s policy on safety-testing is presented here: https://assets.unilever.com/files/92ui5egz/production/5f08c41a40e03128d79e5a6161da28b5adb2c507.pdf/alternative-approaches-to-animal-testing.pdf  and the video showing the modern alternatives is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJWG3YCXT0Y  Its earlier work is mentioned in Richard Ryder, Victims of Science, Davis-Poynter, 1975, pp.48-9, and a description of the 1984 raid and subsequent trials is given in Keith Mann’s From Dusk ‘til Dawn, Puppy Pincher Press, 2007, pp.87-91. The BUAV’s exposé of Unilever and others in 2013 was published in the Daily Mail, as archived here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2345276/Food-giants-Nestle-Unilever-caught-animal-testing-scandal.html

MBR Acres is shown at work in a video made by Free the MBR Beagles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K08pAr_NvQ  Other material about it, and about Camp Beagle and the campaign, can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/campbeagle199/

Lloyd George is quoted from a speech given at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and reported in the Times for 20 January. The quotation has been used before in this blog on 26 August 2019 for the post ‘March of a Nation’.

The final quotation from Animal Rebellion comes from a general account of its 2021 actions here: https://animalrebellion.org/rebellion/

The photographs show the march setting out from Smithfield Market, the stop outside the Marine Stewardship Council (with police and pink octopus at the entrance), and Mel Broughton speaking outside Unilever’s headquarters.

No Duty More Imperative upon the House

Finally a bill has come before the UK Parliament which expressly recognizes animals as “sentient beings”. The concept – or rather, fact – had been established in European Union law by the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, and therefore was a part of what was lost with Brexit. Now it’s been re-introduced in the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, published earlier this month and due to be debated first in the House of Lords on 16 June.

Of course the acknowledgement of sentience in other animals has been implicit in animal welfare law from the beginning and yet apparently thought compatible with such glaring maltreatment over the years as vivisection and factory farming. Nor did putting the idea into the open in the Lisbon Treaty seem to do animals themselves much good. Still, the new proposal does (or may) take the matter a good deal further. Its long title is ‘A Bill to make provision for an Animal Sentience Committee with functions relating to the effect of government policy on the welfare of animals as sentient beings’. This committee is to be a permanent institution, watching for, and publishing reports on, any government policy, planned or being put into effect, which the Committee considers “might have an adverse effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings.” To any such report, the government is required to respond within three months, and then to pay “all due regard” to its recommendations “in any further formulation or implementation of the policy”.

Section 5 of the Bill, titled ‘Interpretation’, defines the word animal (“any vertebrate other than homo sapiens”, though invertebrate species may subsequently be added) and also vertebrate itself, but not the word due (so we won’t know how much regard is required), nor the key word sentience. But this last word is anyway being continually enriched with meaning, and the Bill will presumably have to grow with it. For instance, since 2016 there’s been an excellent peer-reviewed journal devoted to the subject and titled Animal Sentience, and the London School of Economics recently announced a five-year project of research on ‘the Foundations of Animal Sentience’. Even the trendy habit of using the short form ‘ASent’ is probably a promising sign of growth. As the LSE says, “In recent years, an interdisciplinary community of animal sentience researchers . . . has begun to emerge.”

Although there’s something dismal about the phrase “interdisciplinary community”, the thing itself must be good in this case; I’ve yet to come across research which shows any species of animal less sentient than previously thought. And the really significant advance represented by the Bill is that the interests of these sentient animals will have to be taken into account across all government activity, whether existing law covers them or not. In conservation matters, for instance, not just net gains and losses of various animals will have to be considered, but the felt harms or benefits involved for them. There’s a genuine moral advance here, supposing it’s properly applied.

The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill is part of the UK government’s larger Action Plan for Animal Welfare (note the cute initials: can it have been intentional?). The Plan includes various other promises, including an end to exporting of live farm animals, better labelling of animal-derived products, better protection for “sporting animals” (a curious expression), an end to the keeping of primates as pets, and many other improvements. Some of these are already in hand: higher sentences for cruelty to animals will come into effect on 29 June. Other promises are noticeably tentative. As to a ban on the importation of all and any animal furs, for instance: “we will explore potential action in this area” (I count three put-offs in that sentence). Animals in research get a bit of both, the promise essentially being to stand still, or “continue to commit to maintaining high standards of protection”.

The Secretary of State responsible for the Action Plan is George Eustice, who made the Plan public on 12 May during a visit to the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. He began his speech there with the inevitable words “We are a nation of animal lovers.” The familiar boast (critiqued elsewhere in this blog) is not well-evidenced by that chosen setting, a poignant asylum in South London for abandoned pets, but at least there’s more to it than patriotism on this occasion. The Action Plan expresses several times the intention to “take the rest of the world with us” in setting higher standards of animal welfare, and to make that intention felt in trade and other international dealings. I’d say that the phrase “animal lovers”, especially without a hyphen, is more likely to raise a foreign smirk than do much persuading. In a parliamentary speech which George Eustice made in 2018 during a debate on the testing of cosmetics, he spoke in similarly sentimental terms: “Animal welfare is dear to my heart, and dear to all our hearts.” Let’s hope that the UK’s “international advocacy on animal welfare” will be put across with more ethical force.

In George Eustice’s introduction to the Action Plan, the ‘nation of animal-lovers’ claim is supported with a reference to the world’s first law for the protection of animals, the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act of 1822. That law was certainly a momentous achievement: as one MP said at the time, it “consecrated the principle, that animals ought to be protected by legislative interference.” But it can’t be seen as a typical product of the national character. It followed a series of thwarted attempts to persuade Parliament to do something for animals, and was itself followed by similarly defeated bills aimed at extending its protections to other domesticated animals. The Act’s sponsor, Richard Martin (incidentally an Irishman, MP for Galway), was a stubborn and pugnacious personality; he really did have ethical force. His face shows as much (see below) – the stubbornness and force at least. Without them he surely wouldn’t have been able to bring his 1822 Bill through to success.

The primary means of opposition in the House of Commons was that most destructive of its weapons, ridicule. Reports of the debates on the Bill, and on the various amendments to widen and enforce its measures which Martin tried to introduce in the following years, are punctuated with “laughter”, “loud laughter”, “noise and laughter”. MPs would ask him why he didn’t include other species, whose mere mention they thought would tend to bring his project into contempt and ridicule: asses, hares, cats, rats, lobsters. Something of the attitude is suggested in a contemporary painting which imagines a donkey giving evidence in court of offences against the 1822 Act committed by his master (the young man to his left, cocking a snook). The title was The Trial of Bill Burn, under Martin’s Act, and it illustrated a comic song of the period on that theme: “If I had a donkey wot wouldn’t go / D’ye think I’d wollop him? No, no, no!” I read those repeated no’s as sarcastic, but at any rate the picture (shown here reproduced in a print) has everyone except the principals enjoying a good laugh.

Sometimes Martin spoke angrily about this hilarity and the “invidious sarcasms” thrown at his proposals: “The learned gentleman may laugh,” a parliamentary report has him saying to the Attorney General, “and no doubt he considered him and his case as a fit subject for ridicule, but he could tell him it was not a matter of ridicule elsewhere.” But he was never punctured. He was witty himself, and could turn the jokes his own way. When Martin was trying to have bull-baiting and cock-fighting prohibited, the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, argued that upper class field sports were just as ‘cruel’ (implying that nobody would think of putting them down); good, replied Martin, then they too should be banned, and “he did, therefore, call on the Home Secretary to do so, and to begin the salutary reformation by recommending to the King, whose adviser he was, to put down the royal hunt, and dismiss the royal stag-hounds.”

At other times, Martin would check the frivolity of MPs by giving them instances of the cruelty and barbarity which he had seen or been told of. One of these concerned the physiological lectures then being given in London by the French professor Francois Magendie, involving “most horrid and most wanton” experiments on dogs. This attack on a distinguished visitor caused some indignation, and Martin was told anyway that he’d got the facts wrong. His answer was reported thus: “he knew that what was spoken in that House was privileged from the action of libel; but he desired, in order to decide the real merits of the question, that such an action might be brought, and with the view of enabling professor Magendie to commence the action, and to obtain evidence to support it, he had gone down that day to St Bartholomew’s hospital, and had there repeated the statement, as nearly as possible in the terms in which he had before made it in that House.”

It was a characteristic performance. In 1824, Martin wanted to amend the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act so as to authorize members of the public actively to apprehend a person seen ill-treating an animal, rather than just reporting them. It was Martin’s own habit to do so, and that same Attorney-General spoke in the House against the proposal thus: “He knew from the zeal which the hon. Member had heretofore displayed in the cause of humanity, that not a week would elapse before he would be forced into some desperate conflict in attempting to enforce the law.”

Martin was nick-named ‘Humanity Dick’, and it needs adding that his ‘humanity’ was not solely directed towards the welfare of non-human animals. Human distresses, including slavery and the sufferings of debtors, engaged his energies too. It seems that he sometimes paid the fines of those whom he had brought into the courts under his Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act. After all, the punishment of individuals was incidental; what he aimed at was a change of attitude and practice. And in fact that change, so a fellow-MP could say already in 1825, “might be seen in every market in London.”

In 1826, Martin’s own debts obliged him to take refuge in France, where he remained for the last years of his life. He wasn’t a saint-like man. I can find no talk from him about loving animals or any other such touching rhetoric. But there was blatant abuse of animals in the streets and the cattle markets of Britain, and he persuaded the state that it should take notice and action. He wasn’t able to build on that success himself, but the principle was established. He encountered all those improvised objections, in their earliest vigour, that we still hear in their antiquity (being now employed, for instance, against legislating for sentience): it’s impossible to administer such laws; there are other more important laws to deal with first; they’ll hurt the poor; where will it stop (with cats, oysters, insects?); a different set of animals is more deserving (i.e. put it off); and of course ridicule. Martin faced all these down, and after those few years of harassing Parliament on this subject, his achievement is reflected in this momentous statement reported in the speech of another MP, John Maxwell: “There was no duty, he [Maxwell] conceived, more imperative upon the House than that of affording protection to animals.”

Astonishing to see that being said nearly 200 years ago! And correspondingly puzzling and dismaying that there is still so much to do. At any rate, now is a good moment (George Eustice was right in this) to recall and feel gratitude towards the man who forced a reluctant nation to make a start – not on loving animals, fine and proper as that may well be, but on treating their feelings and interests with the respect due to those of all sentient beings.

Notes and references:

The text of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill (it’s very short) can be found here: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2867  The Action Plan for Animal Welfare is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/action-plan-for-animal-welfare/action-plan-for-animal-welfare

The LSE’s sentience research project is announced here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/research/ASENT

The 2018 cosmetics debate is reported in Hansard’s parliamentary records here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2018-05-01/debates/7F5EB22D-EA66-4F29-8A8E-339DDF7093BE/CosmeticsTestingOnAnimals The quotations from speeches made in debates in which Richard Martin was involved between 1821 and 1826 are reported in Hansard and linked here: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/people/mr-richard-martin-1/index.html

The post in this blog which discusses the phrase and notion ‘animal-lover’ is here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/love-talk/

Apart from online material, there are good accounts of the life and character of Richard Martin in E.S.Turner’s excellent All Heaven in a Rage (Michael Joseph, 1964) and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP, 2004, also online), whose entry on Martin is written by Richard Ryder.

The portrait of Richard Martin is a print from a painting in the collection of the RSPCA, of which (as the SPCA) Martin himself was one of the founding members in 1824. The aquatint from a painting, Trial of Bill Burn, was apparently made in the late 1830s. More details about it, including a version of the song from which the quotation above is taken, can be found online here: https://www.georgeglazer.com/wpmain/product/history-law-animal-rights-trial-antique-print-london-mid-19th-century/

An Oxford Story

Fifty years ago Oxford, like many other universities, was going through a phase of political restlessness and dissent, at least among its students and younger dons. National and local controversies made themselves felt on Oxford’s walls in graffiti of an anti-establishment kind. ‘F– Franks’ was painted in giant letters on the wall of Keble College, in reference to the recent Franks Report on the University’s governance. Balliol’s west wall was used as a lively social medium for opinions and protests. World peace, socialism, anarchism, and other noble futures were declared imminent with priggish self-confidence in countless rooms and halls: “the revolution’s here”, as the hit song said in the summer of 1969.

In all this, of course, the animal theme had almost no part. There was a University Vegetarian Society, but then there was a society for almost every strange interest. College kitchens would provide an omelette as the all-purpose meat-alternative for the very few who wanted it. As for veganism: the 1969 Oxford Dictionary addenda of new words was recognizing hippy, fuzz, and drop-out, but still not including vegan, though that word had been in use since 1944. Academically too, the theme was invisible. The study of philosophy at Oxford was mainly devoted to linguistic analysis, ‘talk about talk’. Moral Philosophy involved discussion of key concepts such as ‘good’, and ‘duty’ in the abstract, or there was ‘meta-ethics’, which questioned whether our moral judgements had any communicable validity or were merely expressions of personal feeling, the consensus being in favour of the latter interpretation. Of applied ethics, a staple of philosophy departments nowadays, there was no official teaching at all.

As to the life-sciences, this was almost certainly the most profligate period so far in the University’s hundred-year history of vivisection (but no numbers were published, or even perhaps kept). The back parts of the physiology building smelled of distressed animals, and experiments using cats and monkeys in careless quantities were routine. After all, Oxford was a centre of vivisection in a nation which was at this time using about five million animals a year in its laboratories. To supervise all this, the Home Office was providing eleven inspectors.

Then in the Hilary Term of 1970 those same numbers were advertised in a remarkable leaflet composed by Richard Ryder and distributed by him round Oxford’s churches, schools, shops, and colleges. The witty and prodding text introduced the concept and word ‘speciesism’ (Ryder’s invention). Readers were told something about the practice and ethics of vivisection, and urged to contact “MPs, professors, editors about this increasingly important moral issue.” It was a heroic individual effort by someone who, as a psychiatrist working at Oxford’s Warneford Hospital, was taking a professional risk with it. And the University, in the person of Professor of Pharmacology William Paton, did indeed complain to the Warneford authorities about Ryder’s campaigning.

But there was by now a small band of people at Oxford, mostly post-graduate students, who shared Ryder’s concerns. Their thinking and their discussions were genuinely counter-cultural, as opposed to the ubiquitous bolshevism of student fashion, and together with Ryder they would soon produce an even more notable publication, the collection of essays titled Animals, Men and Morals (1971). This daring and momentous book would revive animal rights as a serious public controversy after a long period of disuse, and show also, by example, that the claims of animals deserved the attention of academic philosophers.

This ‘Oxford Group’ (again, Ryder’s coinage) numbered ten people – three married couples and four others – though for their book they had help and contributions from several other people from outside Oxford who were already involved in animal protection. How these ten met, and how they collectively created in that inhospitable Oxford environment (even today it’s not an animal-friendly scene) a corpus of thought which still reads with subversive power, is now the subject of a full-length book, The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights: an Intellectual History, by Robert Garner and Yewande Okuleye. This book records, mainly through interviews with former members of the Group, the key relationships and influences, the discussions and the shared meals, through which their moral convictions took considered form. It’s oral history, then, and there is vivid and extensive quotation, with many telling moments recorded: the ethical ‘epiphanies’; the dietary adventures (“Peter and Renata for dinner. Protoveg stroganoff, noodles, peas, olives, white wine. Nice visit.” says a diary entry); the slightly bashful demonstrations outside St Michael’s Church in central Oxford (Richard Ryder was the only natural activist among them at that time); the intellectual walks, including the one that took two of them past the body of a bird, killed by traffic (“If that were a dead person . . . they wouldn’t just leave the body beside the road”).

That last quotation is from the recollections of Peter Singer, but the speaker and acting moral tutor at the time was Stanley Godlovitch, who had been already a convinced vegetarian when he came to Oxford from Canada in 1968, and was accordingly a key persuader. But yes, Singer naturally has a leading part in the book. He arrived slightly later than the others. Animals, Men and Morals was already in the making, and he did not contribute, but his review of it later on for the New York Review of Books led to his own Animal Liberation (1975), a more compelling title and in time a much more successful book. Accordingly Singer rose professionally with the subject more than any of the others, going their own various ways as they did.

However, it’s one of the merits of The Oxford Group that it shows the collectivity of the ideas at that time and re-distributes their ownership (as Singer himself, least arrogant of celebrated thinkers, very willingly does in his interviews for the book). In particular it highlights the importance of Richard Ryder, less famous now than Singer but in fact a hero of the animal rights movement, who in any other sphere of the UK’s public life would surely have been honoured in some way by the state for his services.

Then there was Roslind Godlovitch. Like her husband Stanley, Roslind was a strong persuasive influence on Singer and the others. She had already published a pioneering article in the journal Philosophy, which she adapted for her chapter in Animals, Men and Morals. This is a witty and polemical piece, still illuminating and authoritative now. She contemplates the contemporary ethical notion that, although animals should be protected from suffering when possible, their lives in themselves have no moral value, and she subjects it to a contemptuous reductio ad absurdum, showing that our logical course should therefore be “to exterminate all animal life.” She then suggests, much as Jonathan Swift might have done, how governments and charities could collaborate to achieve this end. But in fact, as she says with moving absoluteness, “there is nothing to indicate that an animal values its life any less than a human being values his” (the ‘his’ is perhaps of its period; the statement itself is surely for all time). Roslind Godlovitch, who discontinued her post-graduate research and wrote nothing further about animal ethics, is one of the five members of the Oxford Group to whom Singer dedicated Animal Liberation.

Richard Garner, the lead author of The Oxford Group, is a notable and well-published proponent of animal rights. In particular he has argued, as a political scientist, for the incorporation of animal interests in the political system. But for this study of ideas he has expressly chosen to be impartial as to the quality of the arguments involved: “agnostic” is the term he uses. That seems wise for a historian and interviewer, and the arguments speak adequately and indeed passionately for themselves, or rather for the personalities who are recorded as proposing them. But Garner has gone further and cast the whole story as a sociological study, illustrating “the social construction of knowledge”, or how humans collaborate to create ideas and give them currency.

It makes for a clear organizing principle, certainly, but I would say also an unfortunate one. It’s not just that the dead hand of sociological jargonizing lies heavily upon some parts of the text, but I shall take that first. It especially affects the opening chapter, which lays out the theoretical machinery and will surely tend to alienate the common reader and doom the book to the shelves of university libraries (though the price may do that anyway). For instance this, by way of providing some theory for the interviews: “The dynamics of an oral history interview is usually centred around the intersubjectivity between the interviewer and interviewee.” I choose this sentence partly as a sample of sociology’s habit of disguising the patently obvious in nebulous abstracts, and partly to illustrate the baleful influence which this habit of abstract diction has on ordinary nearby English: “dynamics is”? “”centred around”?

But perhaps more unfortunate is the incongruity between this study-bound theory and the energy, urgency, and sense of revelation which (as the book clearly shows us) animated the members of the Oxford Group. That encounter with the dead bird, for instance, so immediate and also so emblematic (Albert Schweitzer saw a dead insect as both a lesson and a real presence in just the same way), is part of a section intended to illustrate “the Role of the Gatekeepers”. That’s “in Farrell’s terminology”, Professor Michael Farrell being the chief supplier of sociological theory to the book – and the reader comes to dread his name, academically distinguished as it no doubt is.

I would finally add that, as David Wood argues in his chapter of Animals, Men and Morals, jargon is a notorious enemy of clear moral awareness. He titles the chapter ‘Strategies’ (i.e. strategies to conceal what’s really happening to animals) and shows how “a huge pattern of jargon” has been deployed with great success to obscure the realities of meat and dairy production. Again, therefore, the use of this sort of abstract and distancing language in The Oxford Group is painfully incongruous.

Still, the story easily escapes this theoretical cage, and it’s a fascinating, exciting, and moving story, whose importance is growing all the time. In his ‘Postscript’ to Animals, Men and Morals, Patrick Corbett (of Balliol, but by 1970 a professor at Sussex) says “we want to change the world.” How many of the restless spirits at Oxford in the late 1960s were thinking and saying that! So many of their projects came to nothing, and often enough it’s just as well they did. But here was one that most fortunately did not. Sadness we must feel that it continues to be relevant and urgent fifty years on, but profound gratitude too for the originality and fervour of that band of ten – and of course gratitude also, despite my carping, towards the authors who have now given the Oxford Group its proper history.

Notes and references:

The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights: an Intellectual History, by Robert Garner and Yewande Okuleye, is published by Oxford University Press, price £47.99. Please note that the date of publication was 17 December 2020, and this review of it uses a proof copy only. There will have been changes, and accordingly I don’t give page references.

The song quoted is Thunderclap Newman’s ‘Something in the Air’, which was top of the hit parade for a while in July 1969, but Bob Dylan’s ‘Times They Are a-Changin’, with its stern advice to “mothers and fathers . . . don’t criticize what you don’t understand”, would summarize the outlook just as well.

The new words are listed in the ‘Addenda’ to the 4^th edition of the Little Oxford Dictionary, OUP, 1969.

The text of Richard Ryder’s 1970 leaflet is provided at pp. 44-5. Professor Paton later wrote a defence of animal research, Man and Mouse: Animals in Medical Research, OUP, 1984.

Animals, Men and Morals, edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, was published by Victor Gollancz. Quotations are from pp. 168 and 164 (Godlovitch chapter), 199 (David Wood), and 232 (Patrick Corbett). Contributors from outside the Oxford Group included Ruth Harrison, Brigid Brophy (who partly organised the project), Muriel Lady Dowding, and Maureen Duffy.

An Impulse to Break Open Cages: the Life and Works of Brigid Brophy

Hackenfeller’s Ape, Brigid Brophy’s first novel, was published in 1953 when she was in her mid-twenties. The setting is London Zoo, where humans and the world’s other animals come artificially face to face, and the book is all about that encounter, in particular the wrongs of it, not just of zoos, but of that whole power relationship which zoos make visible, also audible and smellable (“an odour shabby, seedy, somehow disgraceful: the smell of the caged animals.”). Wrongs, because humans, so far from having any special claim to the world, are themselves just another species participating in the great zoo of life. And the book presents them zoologically from the first, dispassionately noting their “characteristic calls”, “high degree of social organisation” and “courting rites”, none of it especially pleasing.

The hero of the novel – a professor of zoology and therefore well-placed to appreciate all this – is there to study the “courting rites” of the two Hackenfeller’s Apes. But when he learns that Percy (some “facetious spirit” having given the male ape this name) has been marked down as test passenger in a forthcoming space-shot, he rebels. Finding no support from his university, or from the press, or even at an anti-vivisection charity (these efforts are referred to as “field work in the habitat of Mankind”), he devises “an act of liberation” for Percy. It’s also an emblematic action, a model, in the professor’s imagination, for a comprehensive “exodus of the animals” from their confinements. That would cause havoc, certainly, “but he doubted if they would destroy as much as Man did.” Then his dream enlarges; he imagines breaking open prisons, even leading the damned out of Dante’s inferno, “up from their sunless circles to carry the gates by storm”. He pictures with exhilaration “the liberated march of elephant, petty thief and damned soul.”

Of course things don’t turn out quite as he plans. I’ll say a little more about that later.

Hackenfeller’s Ape won the Cheltenham Literary Prize in 1954 (Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net came second). Brigid Brophy went on to write several more novels, two plays, book-length studies of Mozart, of the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and of the novelist Ronald Firbank, a huge Freudian analysis of the human will to destroy (Black Ship to Hell, 1962), and countless essays and reviews. Something of that vision of general liberation is there in all that she wrote. In fact, in her writings and in her public life she was one of the makers of the 1960s and of the liberationist thinking which was the period’s ideological legacy.

She called herself “an impartial Lefty”, meaning impartial as to species, and it was especially in the case of the animals that Brigid Brophy was a maker of that era. Her Sunday Times article of October 1965, titled ‘The Rights of Animals’, effectively founded the modern animal rights movement (the article’s 50^th anniversary was celebrated in this blog: see notes below). From it can be traced the revolutionary book Animals, Men and Morals (“we want to change the world”, said Patrick Corbett in its ‘Postscript’). To that book Brophy contributed a chapter mainly about vivisection, arguing – and she was a ferociously rational arguer – for a “Declaration of Independence on Behalf of the other Animals”, on the model of the human-centred one of 1776. The book was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Peter Singer, who then wrote his own book, the text that came to define the movement (more of that in a minute): Animal Liberation was published in 1975, and has been in print ever since.

And now at last there is a book about Brigid Brophy herself, giving proper attention to all the various contributions she made to the intellectual culture of her times. Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist is a collection of essays by academics, fellow-writers, and fellow-campaigners, with lastly a moving account by her daughter, Kate Levey, of the awful ordeal of Brophy’s last years with multiple sclerosis. Kate Levey believes that her mother has been not so much neglected since her death, as judged unpalatable and alien to our present “huge retreat from progress”.

That’s a view which Gary Francione confirms in his contribution, titled ‘”Il faut que je vive”: Brigid Brophy and Animal Rights’. The quotation from Voltaire is one that Brophy herself used in Animal, Men and Morals, to summarise her claim for the primacy of the “right to stay alive.” In Voltaire’s story, the famously sardonic come-back is “Je n’en vois pas la necessité” (‘I don’t see the necessity of it’). But to make that reply, as our own species does to the life-wishes of all the others, is to speak as a “tyrant”. That’s a characteristically political key word in Brophy’s animal rights lexicon. It summarizes here the way we arrogate to ourselves the right to put a value, or very often no value, on lives which can only properly be evaluated from the inside, by the animals living them. And we know that these animals do indeed value their lives, that to live means (except sometimes for humans) to wish and try to go on living. The motivations of pleasure and pain are in fact there to help this primary urge succeed. Life, then, is the essential and “self-evident” right, as that 1776 Declaration acknowledged.

Francione shows that the great Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarian ethics, did likewise deplore the tyranny (he used that word) of men over animals, on account of the suffering that it entailed. But because his ethical system was a matter of counting pleasures and pains only, Bentham saw no essential wrong in killing animals, provided the pain of it was minimized, since the humans “are so much the better for it” (here one can’t help picturing this overweight man at his dinner table).

So humans do effectively own the other animals and can dispose of their lives, provided always that the animals’ “interests” in happiness, while alive, are properly recognized. This is the line of thinking that Peter Singer used in Animal Liberation and has held to ever since. It is, says Francione (with some over-statement, I think), only “a more progressive version of the welfarist position”. He calls it “neo-welfarist” or “happy exploitation”. The epithet “father of the animal rights movement”, sometimes used for Peter Singer, is therefore inapt (as Singer himself would happily acknowledge), because he does not argue in terms of rights at all. Brigid Brophy did, and Francione ends wistfully by saying that “animals would have been so much better off with a movement that had one parent – a mother – Brigid Brophy.”

The book has one other essay about Brigid Brophy as animal advocate. It’s written by the long-time activist Kim Stallwood, and its main theme is angling, that most unapproachable of animal abuses. Brophy gave the inaugural address as patron of the newly-founded Council for the Prevention of Cruelty by Angling (CPCA) in 1981. I’m glad that Stallwood quotes plentifully from this address, for it shows not just the argument but the wit and combative force of this remarkable personality. And two points in particular she insists on in this speech, as she always did. The first is that we should waste no time comparing and contrasting varieties of maltreatment. Fishing was not a special case as a ‘sport’ or tradition; it was simply one part of the “feudal, indeed fascist, fantasy” of human entitlement in the world, which had to be confronted by a “pro-animals-in-general movement”.

The second point is that we ourselves will be the better for it, as we certainly aren’t, pace Bentham, for eating animals (Brophy herself had been a vegetarian since 1954, and went vegan in 1980). Note that Brigid Brophy never spoke of animals with the sort of facetious condescension which the professor of zoology detects in that name ‘Percy’. She therefore meant it when she envisioned “a civilized country for humans and fish to live in on terms of reciprocal non-aggression”: if there’s a witty incongruity somewhere in that, it’s exactly a reminder that we are abusing lives which were never a threat to ourselves. As later published in CPCA’s newsletter, Brophy’s speech at its inauguration was given the title ‘A Felicitous Day for Fish’ (which Stallwood uses for his chapter title too). But at the end, Brophy adds that the day “is also a felicitous day for humans”. In Hackenfeller’s Ape, the liberating of Percy goes disastrously wrong, and may mean ruin for the professor, but he’s – unsentimentally, unemphatically – a better man, on better terms with himself, at the end of the story. If his “act of liberation” were indeed made general, then we too would be saved.

As Kim Stallwood shows, the CPCA and its successors have had little success, so that his chapter, like Francione’s, involves some sense of disappointment. But that’s not the effect of the two chapters as a whole, still less of the whole book, which puts together a portrait of a brilliant creative force and intellectual warrior (she tells daughter Kate that she has “fought all my life for one thing or another”), a woman undefeated except finally by the cruel disease. And although her animal advocacy is here timetabled into the two chapters, it was never merely one topic among others to her. It was as much part of her awareness as animals are part of the world.

By way of illustration, one especially diverting chapter of the book gives an account of the art form that she and the poet Maureen Duffy invented (a distinctly 60s thing to do): they called it Prop Art, they wrote a ‘[Woman]ifesto’ for it, and in 1969 they held an exhibition of 55 works which they had created to demonstrate it. Prop Art used ready-made objects to form novel and persuasive images. One of the exhibits (it’s pictured in the book) consisted of a polystyrene head, from Peter Jones’s department store, set on a dinner plate with an onion in its mouth, a carrot on its crown, and other vegetable trimmings, all on a plate with carving knife and other utensils at the ready. The title was ‘Tête d’Homme Garnie’. As the exhibition’s press release noted, it may be a “horrific” image, but then “if you think liking the taste of meat justifies killing and eating animals, why not humans too?”

Or finally there’s the essay (not actually discussed in the book) which Brophy was invited to write for a volume published in 1988 by the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. It was one of the latest things which she wrote, an account of the painting by Carel Fabritius of a goldfinch. The painting was not then quite as celebrated as it has since become; the gallery’s own website now rather absurdly calls it “the most famous little bird in the history of art”. The suggestion is that the picture was done as a trompe l’oeil, so that, hung high on a wall, “it must have looked like a real little bird.” And indeed such birds, says the gallery, “were often kept as pets in the seventeenth century” (the painting is dated 1654). Brigid Brophy provides her own scholarly reconstruction of the setting and purpose of this “deeply enigmatic” painting. She does not use, for the bird, that pet-minded word ‘little’; she says “small”, or “about the size of a goldfinch in real life”. And she argues that there was indeed a real-life goldfinch being imaged. Therefore the painting ought to be called a ‘portrait’, just as Titian’s painting of an unknown man in a similar or equivalent pose, part of the collection in London’s National Gallery (to whose director, Michael Levey, Brigid Brophy was married), is called a portrait. This is, then, a portrait of an unknown bird. It makes a difference to call it that. And then Brophy writes,

About the status of the bird that Fabritius depicted there is no puzzle. He is a captive and a slave. Probably some human claims to own him.

Thereafter, as she makes her art-historical study of the picture, she keeps this essential truth before us: she speaks of the “slave bird”, the “solitary captive goldfinch”, the “abused bird”. Finally the art-object itself seems to be conspiring in the careless cruelty which has been the theme of her essay, and we are left pondering “the existence, once, of a captive bird and the existence, now, of the image of the bird looking out from the picture that imprisons it.”

This was a woman who detested and fought arbitrary captivities of all kinds all her life, but especially those that have characterized human relations with the other animals. It’s time indeed to recall what we owe to her, and to enjoy and celebrate her creative intelligence and pioneering courage.

Notes and references:

Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist is edited by Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber, and was published in May 2020 by Edinburgh University Press (264 pp., £80). The book arises from a conference held at the University of Northampton on that anniversary date October 2015.

Quotations from Hackenfeller’s Ape, first published in 1953, are taken from the 1979 edition published by Alison and Busby, including the title of this post, which comes from p.81. There is also a Virago edition, 1991.

‘The Rights of Animals’ was first published in the Sunday Times in October 1965; the 50^th anniversary of its publication is observed in this blog here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/brigid-brophy/  The essay was re-printed, with some additional observations, in Reads (Sphere Books, 1989). Reads also includes the piece ‘Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius’. There are other collections of the essays and reviews, and they’re well worth finding. Brophy’s reviews were highlights in the arts journals of her time.

Brigid Brophy’s chapter in Animals, Men and Morals (Gollancz, 1971) was titled ‘In Pursuit of a Fantasy’.

Jeremy Bentham is quoted from his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Justice, 1780, footnote to p.309 (but I’m not positive that this is accurate; it may be the 1789 edition).

What is this Folk that here thus Loudly Singeth?

Some years ago there was an evening vigil for laboratory animals outside the Home Office, the UK government department responsible (among many other things) for ‘animals in science’, which at that time occupied a suitably grim concrete edifice at Queen Anne’s Gate. For the handful of demonstrators, inconspicuous in the cold semi-dark of that building’s portals, it was a dreary enough experience. But there was one tonic episode when three or four people sang a verse of the familiar ‘Red Flag’ anthem, with lyrics re-composed for the purpose and including some ribald advice to the “white coats”. I’ve not heard the song again since then, though there was a series of such vigils, and the song must surely have been written down somewhere.

From time to time songs are more formally composed and recorded as ‘animal rights anthems’, or at least are received as such. A recording by the rapper Gaia’s Eye is actually titled ‘Anthem for Animals’ (“eat from the garden / And not from the graveyard!”), or there’s Prince’s ‘Animal Kingdom’ (“Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea!”). In fact a whole “play-list for the animal rights revolution” is made available by the organisation PETA on its Spotify channel, with about twenty-five tracks of varying age and relevance. PETA invites supporters to submit their own “favourite animal rights anthems” to swell the number.

The more of these the better, and some are written with obviously earnest commitment. But they can only be called ‘anthems’ in the restricted sense that they set to popular music the values of a cause or party, not in the sense that they can be put to popular use – or, as the Oxford Dictionary uninvitingly expresses it, “adopted by a nation, school, or other body, and performed at ceremonies and other official occasions”. The conventions of ordinary pop music – syncopated rhythms, strongly personal vocal sound, electrically mediated instrumentals – make it hopelessly unsuited to informal collective singing. It has even to some degree made that sort of singing seem awkward and antiquated.

A “new vegan anthem” is offered on the web-site Jane Unchained which does at least have a catchy chorus – “Go vegan, go vegan, go!” – to which we’re invited to “sing along”, and perhaps we really could. The video shows plenty of people doing that (including the former Meghan Markle), and the phrase was used as a chant during last year’s Official Animal Rights March in London. But it’s a hard-driving song, well-packed with words, and just for that reason would surely come to pieces if a large crowd attempted to sing it.

Well, does animal rights need an anthem in that dictionary sense? In order to suit an unrehearsed collective voice, such pieces have to be musically and lyrically unadventurous. They’re generally either hearty or dirge-like. The typical instances mentioned in the dictionary – national anthems and school songs – are mostly stuffy and embarrassing, and tend to discredit the whole idea. But perhaps that’s mainly because those collectives aren’t the ones that really need asserting or even ought to be asserted.

And there have been anthems that evidently worked as anthems should. The suffragette ‘March of the Women’ was one such. It was used with strong effect not only at those “ceremonies and other official occasions”, but whenever the collective spirit needed a boost. The conductor Thomas Beecham claimed to have seen Ethel Smyth, composer of the music, using a toothbrush to conduct “in almost Bacchic frenzy” a performance of the song by fellow-suffragettes in the quadrangle of Holloway Prison. The lyrics to it, by the suffragette Cicely Hamilton, aren’t very impressive. In fact they have a good deal of the school song about them (“Life, strife – these two are one, / Naught can ye win but by faith and daring./ On, on . . . etc.”), and oddly enough they don’t mention women at all after the title itself. The point is that the singers meant them, or at least meant the collective event which they were part of. That’s where the frenzy came from.

The same is true but in a converse sense of ‘The Red Flag’. This socialist anthem borrowed its stirring tune – with less uplift but more heart than Ethel Smyth’s – from an old German song, ‘O Tannenbaum’. It was traditionally sung at the end of Labour Party conferences, as well as other party occasions. The lyrics no doubt seem more melodramatic now than they did at the time of writing (1889): “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer . . . Come dungeons dark or gallows grim, / This song shall be our parting hymn.” Partly for this reason perhaps, but mainly because it was impossible for New Labour assemblies to mean the song, the tradition became an embarrassment to be avoided, until revived with some conviction more recently. Again, the success of the anthem depends on the health of the cause rather than the quality of the composition. That surely makes things relatively easy for an animal rights anthem.

Still, there do have to be words and music. The music, we’ve seen, can be borrowed: better so, since it won’t need learning. What about, for instance, one of the great hymns to liberation, Giussepe Verdi’s ‘Va, pensiero’, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves in his opera Nabucco (1841)? The words are a somewhat weak and sentimentalized version of the tragic and ferocious Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon . . .”). However, the power of Verdi’s music, scored for unison voices, and its theme, the longing for freedom, fixed the chorus at once as an anthem for the Italian liberation movement of the time, the Risorgimento. Given the very modest standard of lyric required for a successful anthem, it shouldn’t be hard to provide a text which enlarged the liberationist appeal of ‘Va, pensiero’ to include all sentient beings. It shouldn’t be, but I admit that I have tried without success. Something that is neither real poetry (choral singing would trample on its art) nor obvious doggerel (uninspiring and even a bit discreditable) is required, but I couldn’t hit it.

The words, then. There is, of course, a complete text already in existence for an animal rights anthem, composed by one of the great writers in English of the last century: the song ‘Beasts of England’ in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The story being an allegory, this song, taught to the other farm animals by the boar Old Major, stands in for the socialist ‘Internationale’ of 1871. (The ‘Internationale‘ is itself a fine example of the anthem genre, showing that lyrics at their best can constitute a complete manifesto). But the book wouldn’t work as brilliantly as it does if Orwell hadn’t given the animals all he had of sympathy and imagination. And ‘Beasts of England’, which might have been done as a burlesque, is in fact composed with simplicity and conviction. The only comic touch, perhaps, is the mention of mangel-wurzels:

Riches more than mind can picture 
Wheat and barley, oats and hay,
Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels,
Shall be ours upon that day.

But really there oughtn’t to be anything comical about what is, after all, a staple food of some farmyard animals. And in general the words are perfectly judged for an anthem – not fine poetry, but plain, metrically regular, heart-felt, and true to their situation, just waiting for the music to give them emotional force (Orwell suggests ‘O My Darling Clementine’):

Soon or late the day is coming,
Tyrant man shall be o’erthrown,
And the fruitful fields of England
Shall be trod by beasts alone . . .

For that day we all must labour,
Though we die before it break;
Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,
All must toil for freedom’s sake.

But it’s a fairy story of course (that’s the book’s sub-title). In the ‘Internationale’ it made sense to say “Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes!” [Workers, let us save ourselves!]. Animals might well say so too if they could, and Orwell’s fictional beasts do, but it might feel absurd to sing, on their behalf, what we know is impossible. We need an anthem which says “sauvons-les nous-mêmes”: it’s for us to save them.

Just singing anthems won’t get that done, I know, but music stores and makes at once available the collective purpose and those emotions that give it momentum. It’s therefore a valuable campaigning property. It’s also a public benefit, so that the determination and anger which must at least partly characterize any demonstration are made attractive or at least compelling rather than alienating to the people who happen to witness it.

Perhaps whoever wrote that verse for the Home Office vigil could try something more substantial and permanent? And yes, let it include not just the already ascendant and even fashionable vegan theme, but also zoos, circuses, hunting, and vivisection. Gaia’s Eye says “Don’t get me started / On experimentation”, but that’s all he does say, and other songs don’t seem to mention it. But it’s surely not dying out. An experimenter on monkeys at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics has recently announced his intention to escape EU regulations by moving his project to Shanghai, where a new International Center for Primate Brain Research will soon be making available up to 6000 non-human primates without irksome restrictions. A fellow neuroscientist remarks upon this “incredible progress” on China’s part, calling it “the positive side of a political system that is able to move very quickly”. Well, there always has been something totalitarian about vivisection, even in the West; it’s a one-species state for the animals, even where there are checks on its severity. “Tyrant man” in fact, and if he can’t, as a tyrant, be “o’erthrown” simply by singing, that’s at least one conspicuous way to remind ourselves and persuade others that “soon or late . . . he shall be”.

 

Notes and references:

The title is roughly modernized from the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Blickling Homilies, published by the Early English Texts Society, 1967.

PETA’s list can be found here: https://www.peta.org/blog/peta-spotify-channel/

The Jane Unchained song is performed here: https://janeunchained.com/2019/03/15/sing-along-to-the-new-vegan-anthem/

The text of ‘March of the Women’ is published at http://www.sandscapepublications.com/intouch/marchwords.html. A description of its performance in Holloway Prison is provided by Thomas Beecham in an article about Ethel Smyth for the Musical Times, no.1385, July 1958, p.364, but he is quoted here from an article in the Daily Telegraph, 31 July 2008.

The chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco, as movingly performed at the New York Met in 2002, can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS6L_9xUT5E (with sub-titles in Spanish).

A report of the move from Max Planck to Shanghai’s new primate research centre appears in the journal Science, 31 January 2020, pp.496-7.

The Animal Farm illustrations are from the cartoon version commissioned by the Foreign Office in 1950 from the artist Norman Pett and writer Donald Freeman (National Archives).

Free as a Bird

In the European Ceramics gallery of Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum there is at present a “contemporary art installation” entitled A Nice Cup of Tea? The title is a pun of sorts, and the implied answer to the more serious sense of the question – has a cup of tea always been a nice, a fastidious, thing? – is ‘no’. In fact the aim of the show is to remind viewers who enjoy this refreshment ritual that “every sip connects us to the legacy of the British Empire, global trade and transatlantic slavery”, and in particular with “the brutal exploitation of enslaved people producing sugar in the West Indies”. The art-work itself is in the suspended-bits style pioneered and made famous by the artist Cornelia Parker: a tea set has been broken into pieces (analysed, in fact; it’s a sort of visual pun) and hung on strings above a pile of crockery fragments and dust.

A notebook to one side is made available to visitors: “Please tell us what you think”, says the label. The pages were still blank when I was there: nothing to add, it seems. Or too much for the time and space, perhaps. After all, that dazzling gallery of eating and drinking equipment “connects us” to much more than the prizes and vices of Empire: it’s an index to human life and history. And if the Ashmolean’s curators have rightly spotted the shameful connections to slavery, they have yet to remark on the much more obvious and continuing reference to the non-human objects of our compulsive imperialism. It’s not just that most of this china was designed and used for eating animal parts and products from. Much of the charm, and sometimes beauty, of its designs derives from representations of animal life. (To only a slightly lesser extent, this is true of the whole Ashmolean Museum, and indeed of any art gallery.) The animal presence simply stares at you from all sides. And although the images are often made with affectionate attention, there’s no doubt who’s serving whom. Not only the real presence of animals in flesh and work provides for us, then; their mere forms minister, as ornaments, to our pleasure.

For instance: just to one side of the exploded tea-set installation, a showcase contains the figure of a man reaching up to release a bird (the piece was made in the eighteenth-century at the Bow factory in London). The man’s gesture has a sort of drunken licence about it: might it represent the traditional subversive fantasy of a world turned upside down – in this case, letting the animals go at last? No: the figure is indeed intended to represent liberty, but it’s the man’s liberty; the bird is only a symbol for the human experience. At the man’s feet is a ram, also there as a symbol (of virility), and a dog (of philandering?). The whole piece is in fact called ‘Liberty’, and was designed as a pair with its complement or opposite (not represented in the gallery) called ‘Matrimony’. The wretched bird, all too aptly stuck to the man’s up-reached hand, is just there to image the husband’s day-dream of sexual licence.

One can find this ‘free as a bird’ motif throughout art and literature (yes, and pop music), part of the larger habit of making non-human animals tell us our own story back again: a use for them, in fact. Often these images are very fine. The well-known poem by Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’ (which is generally read as a response to the contemporary 1918 armistice, though Sassoon himself denied it was written as such), thoroughly deserves its place in national memory:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

That word “must” at least shows that he allowed the birds their own mystery; he did not pretend to know them. But then of course the poem is not about them. The birds are there to illustrate a human feeling.

The release of poor Miss Flyte’s caged birds at the crisis of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House is likewise very moving, but that too is essentially symbolic – in her case, of liberation from the false hopes and ruinous toils of Chancery law.

In short, these thought-up birds all mean what we mean them to. Meanwhile real birds, birds as themselves, are “everywhere in chains” – in cages, at least – in order to please humans or (as instanced in some previous posts of this blog) to make some possible or merely notional contribution to our understanding of human physiology. It’s surely strange that, feeling this almost visceral communion with the flight of birds as humans commonly do, we should nevertheless deny flight to so many of them. A brief and informal study was recently made by Animals Australia of this phenomenon. Showing, in a series of impromptu interviews, that randomly selected people did have this sympathy, they juxtaposed it with the wretched statistic of 8.1 million caged ‘pet’ birds in that country. The short film ends with a definition of the phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’: “simultaneously holding two or more conflicting ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions”. It’s a human capacity or perversity which has made possible our present tragic relations not just with birds but with all the other animals.

So of course that famous opening statement of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) was about humans only: “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” And how many high-minded invocations of freedom have made it special to humans in just that way! Thus President Kennedy in his fine inauguration address, a locus classicus for the theme of liberty, was talking with all his ambitious expansiveness strictly about “the freedom of man”. And when the politician and diplomat Wendell Willkie wrote grandly, in his best-selling book One World (1943), that “Freedom is an indivisible word”, he meant, of course, within reason: indivisible as between us humans. And that’s the premise also, casual and undeliberate as it may be, of the Ashmolean Museum exhibition. Freedom – the valuation of it and the right to it – is really what divides humans from the rest of nature.

There’s a scene in Axel Munthe’s memoir The Story of San Michele (a book featured in this blog last month) where both these human habits – denying animals their freedom, and yet making them symbols of our own – are satisfyingly busted. During Easter week, it was the tradition in the village of Anacapri (and elsewhere, no doubt) to capture small birds in preparation for a special ritual on the Sunday: “For days, hundreds of small birds, a string tied round their wing, had been dragged about the streets by all the boys of the village.” At the Easter service, they were to be released as images of the resurrection. But not in practice given their freedom, because when let go “they fluttered about for a while helpless and bewildered, breaking their wings against the windows, before they fell down to die on the church floor.” So one Easter at daybreak Munthe puts a ladder up against the church and smashes the windows to let the birds fly out.

Like most direct actions, this was an imperfect victory: “only a very few of the doomed birds found their way to freedom” [309]. But for those birds at least it was real freedom, not a picture of it, or an idea about it. Just so when Mr Virtue, the parson in Flora Thomson’s memoir Still Glides the Stream, attends the village show: he knows that many wild birds are cruelly kept in cages by the villagers, but at least they are no longer proudly exhibited, as are the various rabbits, cats, and canaries, “because one year Mr Virtue, who judged the pet entries, had carried outside and released a skylark, and when its owner had complained had thrown the empty cage at him, swearing with many oaths unfitting for a Flower Show, that a man who was capable of robbing a little singing bird of its liberty should be sent to gaol for six months’ hard.”

Yes, an incomplete victory, but a real freedom, so that the visceral communion I mentioned earlier itself becomes real, an authentic sympathy rather than a romantic whim. When 1500 foxes were set free from a Scottish fur farm in 1976, one of the cage-breakers recalls as much: “It was like being liberated at the same time as the foxes.” [61] It’s a beautiful saying, and here we’re beginning to see that freedom is indeed morally indivisible, or as William Hazlitt said, love of liberty is love of others (love of the others, he might have said). And in fact that quotation about the foxes comes from a book which is a great testament to that indivisibility: Keith Mann’s 600-page history of the Animal Liberation Front titled From Dusk till Dawn (2007).

This most remarkable book chronicles the efforts of groups and individuals, from the 1970s to the early years of this century, to practise that love of others by actually liberating them, and implicating their own freedom in the endeavour. The book itself was begun in a prison, and as papers or discs it followed Keith Mann from prison to prison. So it’s not just a story of captivity and freedom, but a material product of this largely invisible but altogether real strain in modern society. It relates to the Ashmolean’s artistic meditation on slavery much as an escape bid relates to wringing your hands in the comfort of home (or for that matter, I’m afraid, writing prose like this about freedom). In one vivid and exemplary scene, “the prisoner Mann” (as the police report of the incident calls him) does indeed make his own escape bid, slipping from a police escort, jumping onto and over a twelve-foot gate, cycling off on a ‘borrowed’ bicycle, and then hiding up under a railway viaduct, all the while “chuckling intermittently to myself . . . I’d liberated myself and it felt great.” He stayed free for nearly a year, which he spent (of course) at an animal sanctuary.

That impertinent glee, the chuckling, is characteristic of this folk-heroic personality, pictured grinning undefeatably on the back of the book. For Mann belongs to a kind that has been embarrassing authority, mocking its dignity and disrespecting its institutions, ever since the first official uniform was put on, but also paying for it, often far over the odds. And From Dusk till Dawn, full as it is of subversive wit and dauntlessness, is necessarily a tragi-comedy. At every story of liberation that Mann tells (and as Benjamin Zephania rightly says in his foreword, “Mann is a natural storyteller, with a hell of a story to tell”), some or most of the animals have to be left behind. Even those that are freed can have no firm property in their freedom: getting them back into confinement is at least as much part of the official response as punishing their liberators is. Keith Mann recounts the effortful rounding-up in this way of some beagles briefly rescued from Oxford University’s notorious Park Farm (at that time “a complex of windowless buildings imprisoning various species of animals awaiting the vivisector’s carving knife”), and he wonders “What is this obsession with taking these animals back to these places?”   

One consequence of the direct actions which Mann recounts has been stricter law and increased security, so that his chronicles now have a period feel about them; such low-tech raids on the prison camps of speciesism are no longer feasible. Compare, for instance, the disorderly and half-supervised Park Farm with its “comparatively minimal” security, as Mann describes it, with Oxford University’s present-day animal storage and research facility, the Biomedical Sciences Building, likewise windowless, but also fenced, front-doorless, and protected by CCTV. But of course that ‘love of others’ never goes away, so that, as Keith Mann says with his characteristically selfless buoyancy, the story of ALF “will continue to be re-written and be added to by many others over the coming years until animal liberation is finally achieved.”

The hazardous actualities of From Dusk till Dawn, even the simple but wholly practical proto-ALF interventions of Axel Munthe and Parson Virtue, seem to belong to a different dimension from the fashionably aesthetic meditation on historical slavery which the Ashmolean’s “contemporary art installation” provides, but in fact it’s all one unhappy and continuingly urgent subject. The placard pictured here on the right, which was being carried during August’s Official Animal Rights March in London (reported in this blog), succinctly states the case which the Ashmolean Museum might bear in mind if it wants its art to be not just modish but actually modern.

 

 

 

Notes and references:

The free exhibition A Nice Cup of Tea? is on show at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, until 22 March 2020.

The Animals Australia video can be viewed here: https://www.animalsaustralia.org/issues/caged_birds.php

Research using birds is a particular topic in this blog on 21 May 2019 (‘What are Sixty Warblers Worth?’) and 24 October 2016 (‘How to Learn about Magpies’).

The post in this blog about Axel Munthe’s book The Story of San Michele can be read here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/franciscan-medicine/

Still Glides the Stream was first published in 1948, its contents looking back to the late nineteenth century. The quotation is from p.103 of the Oxford University Press edition, 1966.

The critic and essayist William Hazlitt contrasted love of liberty with love of power (which, he said, is “love of ourselves”) in the article ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’ published in Political Essays (1819).

From Dusk till Dawn was published by Puppy Pincher Press in 2007. The book is available to buy online at http://www.fromdusktildawn.org.uk/shop/

This year’s Official Animal Rights March was reported in this blog here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/march-of-a-nation/

See also, on this subject of direct action, the post ‘In Prison, and You Visited Me’: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/in-prison-and-you-visited-me/