before his time, Lord Erskine

Yesterday's post had to do with Andrew Linzey's comprehensive case for why the well-being and suffering of animals warrants our concern in today's world.  You might be interested to know about a man who, well before his time, helped pave the way for that discussion, and the improvements in animal welfare which Western society has made in the last two centuries.

Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote last Spring on Lord Thomas Erskine and an absolutely landmark speech he gave to the British House of Lords in 1809, introducing a bill "for Preventing Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals."  While the bill passed the House of Lords, it was sadly shot down in the House of Commons, largely by the "mistaken arguments and ridicule" of one member (David Mushet, 1839). 

But despite the bill's failure, I couldn't agree more with Pacelle, who graciously gave us permission to share his post.  Lord Erskine's speech is a remarkable call for mercy and compassion on behalf of animals used throughout British society, who had hardly any other voice at the time.  Erskine spoke with deep sincerity and moral fortitude, and his descriptions of the rampant abuse of carriage and work horses is especially poignant.

The style and language of the speech may sound outdated to our ears, but it is one of the more exceptional pieces of animal advocacy I've taken in recently, all the more so for its context.  I hope you can read it more fully yourself.  Erskine's allusions to a Christian grounding for his bill are also definitely worth noting for our community: "I am to ask your Lordships, in the name of that God who gave to man his dominion over the lower world, to acknowledge and recognise that dominion to be a moral trust.  It is a proposition which no man living can deny, without denying the whole foundation of our duties."

From Wayne Pacelle, "Before His Time: Lord Erskine in 1809," posted May 13, 2009:

On Friday of this week, we’ll mark the 200th anniversary of Lord Thomas Erskine’s speech on cruelty to animals in the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.  Although his specific goal failed — to pass an “Act to Prevent Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals” — you can draw a straight line from his speech to the passage of the first nationwide anti-cruelty law in the U.K. more than a decade later.  It is a stirring piece of rhetoric, and a remarkable speechmaking artifact.  I’m delighted to say that it’s available online, and to be able to share a new profile of Erskine on The HSUS website.

For me, it’s simply extraordinary to contemplate the lines of reasoning Erskine advanced, both for his prescience, and also because I know all too well how this debate is still not settled, though the weight of popular opinion has moved decidedly in favor of these principles in all industrialized western nations.  Our political opponents quarrel with the application of anti-cruelty principles, but typically not with the basic tenets of the value system.

An intellectual pioneer of the animal protection movement, Erskine was trying to address the abuse of animals at a time in history when not a single organization had been formed to advocate for animals.  He understood that the status of animals as “property” would be a significant impediment to securing legal protection.  Nevertheless, he assured his colleagues, he thought it feasible to provide basic safeguards for animals without infringement upon the rights of property.  The property right, he asserted, is limited to use, not abuse.  On the foundation of such thinking, great progress has been made in the years since Erskine’s speech and there is a robust debate about whether animals should be treated as mere property.

He also addressed the question of how the law might be enforced by courts and magistrates, “without investing them with a new and arbitrary discretion.”  Reasoning from analogy with cases of cruelty to servants, Erskine pointed out that judges and juries alike had rarely had trouble distinguishing between appropriate treatment and abject cruelty.  Any viable indictment before a magistrate, he predicted, “must charge the offense to be committed maliciously and with wanton cruelty, and the proof must correspond with the charge.”

Erskine was greatly concerned that owners could elude responsibility for the cruelty by instructing hirelings to carry it out.  This dilemma confounds us today in cases of institutional cruelty, like those involving factory farms or slaughter plants.  Just as Erskine foresaw, the owner or manager of a facility can shift the blame for cruelties onto lower-level employees, as we saw with our investigation of the Hallmark/Westland slaughter facility in Chino, Calif.

Most of the specific cruelties Erskine mentioned are no longer around, but he built the case for his bill upon concepts familiar and in currency today: the responsibilities of human dominion, the demoralizing effect of cruelty upon the perpetrator, and the offense of animal mistreatment on the larger community, and the strong self-interest of humans in establishing high standards of animal care and welfare.  Today, two centuries later, it’s common to find legislators at every level of government speaking up for animals, and pressing the case for their legal protection.  But someone had to be first, and it’s a blessing to the cause that it turned out to be an individual capable of delivering a speech for the ages.

(thank you to Wayne Pacelle for allowing us to repost "Before His Time: Lord Erskine in 1809," originally posted on his blog A Humane Nation, which is well worth following; Erskine photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons and the London National Portrait Gallery, horse photo copyright Bidouze Stéphane/123rf.com)