Fellow feeling for animals, compassion, kindness, friendship, and affection
are expressed in every time and place and culture, in primordial artifacts,
Egyptian tombs, Homer’s description of the old dog Argos, as much as in
Henry Moore’s 1980 drawings of sheep. Perhaps no argument for kindness
to animals was ever made that had not already been made long before. In
England, however, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, there was a
change, a gradual, eventually enormous increase in the frequency of such
expressions. Kindness to animals was urged and represented in sermons,
treatises, pamphlets, journals, manuals of animal care, encyclopedias, scientific
writings, novels, literature for children, and poems. There were also,
of course, writings on the other side, defenses of traditional practices, such
as bullbaiting, but they were far less numerous than the literature I foreground.
To what extent all this writing registered or helped bring about a
general change of mind, and to what extent it contributed to developments
in the actual treatment of animals, are questions that cannot be answered
with much certainty. I pursue them briefly in a moment, but the literature
itself, the discourse, is my primary subject.