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A remarkable early vegan dedicated her life to ending vivisection, as well as the protection and rights of animals

Emilie Augusta Louise “Lizzy” Lind af Hageby (20 September 1878 – 26 December 1963) was a Swedish-born British feminist and animal advocate who became a prominent anti-vivisectionist in England in the early twentieth century.

Born into a wealthy and noble Swedish family, Lind af Hageby was the granddaughter of the chamberlain to the King of Sweden, and the daughter of Emil Lind af Hageby, a prominent lawyer. Fortunate to have a private income, her education and financial independence enabled her to pursue her political activism.  She wrote books and tracts, and travelled the world to deliver lectures when most women of her class were expected to stay at home embroidering.

After attending Cheltenham Ladies College in England, in 1900 Lind af Hageby went to Paris, where she and a Swedish friend, Leisa Katherine Schartau, visited the celebrated Pasteur Institute.  They were distressed by the vivisection they saw there, and when they returned to Sweden joined the Nordic Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1902 the women decided to enrol at the London School of Medicine for Women to gain the medical education they needed to train themselves as anti-vivisection activists.  They infiltrated School of Medicine lectures to document the vivisection that was taking place there, and in 1903 they witnessed a procedure carried out by one Professor Starling.  Professor Starling had previously performed an operation on a brown terrier dog two months prior, depriving it of the use of its pancreas. In the intervening time the dog had been living in a cage, upsetting many with its howls and whines.

On the day they were there, the young women watched as Professor Starling opened up the dog’s abdomen to inspect the result of the first operation.  He then clamped the wound and handed the animal over to a Dr. Bayliss, who made a completely new wound in the neck for the purpose of another lecture. After another half hour, the animal, conscious and apparently suffering greatly, was given to an unlicensed research student who killed it.

That same year Lind and Schartau published a book that included the distressing incident they had witnessed, called ‘Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology’.  They wrote up the operation on the brown dog in a chapter called  ‘Fun’, describing how he had been dissected without anaesthesia in front of an audience of laughing medical students.   The book became an instant hit, sparking a nationwide discussion about vivisection and resulting in a Court case against the doctors, who, in not sufficiently anaesthetising the dog, acted illegally.  Bayliss testified that the dog had been anaesthetized and was suffering from chorea, a disease that caused involuntary spasms.  The jury accepted Bayliss’s account, and the book was withdrawn only to be re-published by Lind af Hageby without the controversial chapter,  and with a new chapter about the trial.  The protracted scandal that became known as ‘The Brown Dog Affair’ went on for years, caused riots, and divided the country.

The first statue of the brown dog by Joseph Whitehead was presumed destroyed in 1910.

A new statue by Nicola Hicks was erected in Battersea Park in 1985 to remember all the animals who have suffered and died in laboratories. 

In 1906 Lind af Hageby co-founded the Animal Defense and Anti Vivisection Society (ADAVS) with the Duchess of Hamilton. As part of the society’s work, Lind af Hageby drafted a petition in or around 1906, called ‘Anti-Vivisection Declaration’, which was distributed around the world, and translated into several languages. In July 1909 she organized the first international anti-vivisection conference in London.

‘She is a woman of marvellous power’.

Lind af Hageby became known as an extraordinary speaker, particularly after a second libel trial in 1913, when she sued Dr. Caleb Saleeby and the Pall Mall Gazette over two articles by Saleeby accusing her of ‘a systematic campaign of falsehood’.   She represented herself during the trial, and her opening statement lasted nine-and-a-half hours, her evidence nine hours, her cross-examination eight-and-a-half hours, and her closing statement three-and-a-half hours!   The trial judge, Mr Justice Bugnell later said: “Her final speech was a very fine one… She is a woman of marvellous power.”

Lind af Hageby lost the case, but it attracted publicity for her mission.  A vegetarian dinner was held in her honour after the trial.

During World War I Lind af Hageby joined the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, set up veterinary hospitals for horses hurt on the battlefield and with the co-operation of the French government created the Purple Cross Service for wounded horses.   She also opened a sanatorium in France for wounded soldiers, and wrote anti-war pamphlets.  After the war she became involved in protesting against blood sports, and opposed the sale of old horses to slaughterhouses.

She continued throughout her life to advocate social reform and economic equality living as a vegan and becoming a board member of the London Vegetarian Society. She was also active in the Humanitarian League.   An admirer of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, she saw it as essential to the cause of animals, because it

“brought about the decay of the old anthropocentric idea of man … It taught that if there is this kinship physically between all living creatures, surely a responsibility rests upon us to see that these creatures, who have nerves as we have, who are made of the same flesh and blood as we are, who have minds differing from ours not in kind but in degree, should be protected …”

In 1950, at the age of 73, she attended The Hague World Congress for the Protection of Animals.   From 1954 she ran a 237-acre animal sanctuary near Shaftesbury in Dorset, an estate left to the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society by the Duchess of Hamilton.

Lind af Hageby died at her home in London at 7 St Edmunds Terrace, St John’s Wood on 26 December 1963. The society’s assets were transferred to the Animal Defence Trust, which continues to this day to offer grants for animal-protection issues.

See also:

The Little Brown Dog

End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH reflects on our lack of connectedness with other animals, and how we can turn it around

The notion of intimacy, the feeling of closeness and connection, is linked to a sense of belonging. When we connect with others, we feel ourselves as not just a separate being but as one who has a meaningful place among others. Humans are deeply social beings, fragile and vulnerable to being cast adrift. Without each other we are like Tom Hanks on the movie Castaway, slowly going insane, creating a friend out of a volleyball just to feel a sense of connection.

Tom Hanks as The Castaway, and his friend ‘Wilson’ the Volleyball

With the exception of few hermits, who have somehow managed to completely detach from every other living being, most of us need each other. And it’s not just humans we seek to connect with. Many people gain an important sense of connection from the non-human animals that share their lives. And many non-human animals such as dogs are reciprocally connected to us, having co-evolved ‘around the campfire’.

Dogs and humans have been evolving together for 32,000 years

Animal species are similar in this regard.   They often live in herds or colonies with varying levels of complexity. They may also associate with animals of other species if it is mutually beneficial. Some species may have a predatory relationship with other species – but as Mathew Ricard (author of ‘A Plea for the Animals’)  says, the vast majority of animals will largely ignore other species. Mostly non-human animals will exist peacefully together.

Interdependence refers to the way all animals, including humans, have evolved together in a vast and intricate ecological web. I can’t pretend to be an ecologist, and I will leave the deep knowledge around the systems in the biosphere to them, but when thinking about our place on Earth one thing remains clear. We not only need humans, but also non-human animals to not only survive, but to thrive.

Yet our current relationship with nonhuman animals is deeply malevolent. We trash their homes with the ease of erasing a picture from a blackboard; cutting down rainforests, draining wetlands, burning scrub lands and damning rivers, mining the Earth and the sea beds.  At times we even reverse the course of a river’s flow for human advantage, such is our sense of entitlement. We pollute the homes of animals with plastics and other rubbish, as well as industrial waste.

A young seabird with the contents of its stomach

And then when it all gets too much, when we have had enough shopping in malls,  we go into nature to reconnect!   Intuitively we know how far we have come from ourselves, from our kinship with those around us. The sense of intimacy we need with nature is as important to us as our relationship with other humans.

A recent study has shown that humans make up 0.01% of all life, but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals… 60% of all mammals on Earth are now farmed.

It is hard to deny that we have lost our way as a species. A recent study has shown that humans make up 0.01% of all life, but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals. Conversely, domesticated farm animals kept by humans such as cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and so on abound. The same study demonstrated that 60% of all mammals on Earth are now farmed.

The relationship between the farmer and the farmed animal is one of exploitation and betrayal from the outset.

To make matters worse, farmed animals are the most abused on Earth. Kept in varying degrees of captivity they have become completely reliant on the people who farm them. However, the relationship between the farmer and the farmed animal is one of exploitation and betrayal from the outset. Despite declaring a love for the animals in their care, farmers ultimately send them to be killed at a mere fraction of their lives.

Farmers raise cattle who come to depend on them, then they send them to slaughter

Our dependence as a species on the flesh and secretions of our kin (nonhuman animals) is frankly disturbing. The integrity of the nonhuman animal kept on farms is considered at best in welfare terms. They are given no agency and limited freedom (in a narrow sense of the word). Policy speak and legal requirements for their welfare can serve to obscure the hell they live in. Despite increasing access to video footage from farms showing the exploitative and cruel conditions farm animals are subject to, many humans continue to seek justification for farming and eating animals and their products.

In general, we don’t like to identify with the side of the oppressor. Yet sometimes it is hard to see, hard to accept, that we are the oppressor simply by participating in the malevolent order that has been created. By eating meat, for example, we are saying that it is acceptable to farm a sentient being for their flesh. We are saying we are fine with being the 0.01 % of Earth that chooses to incarcerate and exploit all other nonhuman animals.

It is time to rethink our relationship with nonhuman animals and see them in terms of kinship rather than ‘the other’. Only then will we feel the true sense of intimacy with animals, one based on love and compassion. Only then will we have a life worth living.

There is no ethical way to kill an animal who doesn’t want to die, writes End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH

The slaughterhouse is something many of us would like to pretend doesn’t exist. It sits, ghastly and imposing, behind high walls. It represents the interface between life and death; a breathless and relentless killing machine.

Restaurant entrepreneur and chef Allegra McEvedy expressed this discomfort in an article she wrote for The Guardian in 2014. McEvedy wrote, “I’m fine with dead animals, but the point at which animals cross from living to lunch is one that makes me wobble a bit”.  McEvedy set up a ‘pork-focused’ or ‘pig based’ restaurant in 2013 which aimed to source pig meat sustainably, and “venerate the pig in all its manifold glory”. The restaurant closed in 2016, but not before many pigs lost their lives in a bizarre act of supposed veneration.

Veneration is a strong word. It means to worship and respect. I am not sure how McEvedy can claim that using a pig’s very flesh for food, and to profit from that, is synonymous with veneration.

We see this kind of hypocritical attitude regularly. It fits squarely in the welfarist camp where the animal unknowingly trades their life (by way of humane slaughter – an oxymoron) for being bred into existence and cared for. The animal has a good (albeit short) life while the person gets their pound of flesh.

The human gets to have the animal’s body and eat it too. It’s just – well, they would rather not see the life being taken. No one wants to do that, not really. Some people try to transcend this discomfort by deciding that if they can take an animal’s life or witness the slaughter of said animal then it justifies the act. We’ve all heard it being said before – “I won’t eat it if I cannot kill it myself.”

To return to McEvedy, she visited the pig farms where the pigs for her restaurant were sourced from. She cuddled day old piglets at Dingley Dell (I kid you not) specialized outdoor farm. She thought about her values of high animal welfare and integrity. And then she decided to tour the slaughterhouse where the pigs were to be killed. As she said, this was her first visit to a slaughterhouse despite being in the food business for 20 years.

The slaughterhouse was called Burrow’s Abattoir, a mid-sized independent outfit.  It’s the place that Dingley Dell sends pigs to be killed. It kind of sounds like a children’s book, a Disneyland version of happily ever after.

The slaughterhouse was called Burrow’s Abattoir, a mid-sized independent outfit.  It’s the place that Dingley Dell sends pigs to be killed. It kind of sounds like a children’s book, a Disneyland version of happily ever after.

Except it wasn’t. McEvedy describes how the slaughterhouse killed 4,000 – 4,500 pigs a day. They kill them by putting them in gas chambers after being ‘trotted along in single file up a ramp’. McEvedy says she can hear squeals, but she also concedes that pigs are notoriously chatty and she doesn’t really think they are distressed. The pigs enter a chamber of highly concentrated CO2 and after 90 seconds are dead.

The 90 minutes is debatable. There is evidence that pigs may suffer for several minutes in agonizing pain.

That’s it. McEvedy is now happy to move along the chute to the blood-letting area satisfied that she is still in Disneyland. The pigs however, are being hooked up, bled out and split in two and their innards (grey with a hint of mauve according to McEvedy) are released.

And of all this, McEvedy says she feels more a sense of awe than of disgust. She writes, “I can feel my eyes widening and over the next hour I am aware they’ve taken on a look somewhere between intently engaged and slightly demonic”.

Her words, not mine.

And of all this, McEvedy says she feels more a sense of awe than of disgust. She writes, “I can feel my eyes widening and over the next hour I am aware they’ve taken on a look somewhere between intently engaged and slightly demonic”.

Her words, not mine.

There is something disquieting about the sense of awe and enjoyment some people get from watching animals being killed. Not everyone cares that animals suffer, or that their lives mean nothing more than a bacon sandwich. The human mind is capable of twisting reality into shadows that obscure the truth.

Before you buy into the line of ethically sourced, sustainable meat it is important to disperse the shadows. What McEvedy did not say in her article is that pigs suffer horribly in gas chambers. There is a myth that gas chambers are humane. The pigs struggle for air and convulse before death. Undercover footage reveals the harrowing reality. When the pigs inhale their lungs, eyes and mouth become acidic and they burn from the inside out. Their squeals are harrowing, and not the kind of ‘chatter’ one would associate with pigs socializing.

Carbon dioxide gas chambers are not a happy way to end a pig’s life.

Instead of a Disneyland fairytale of happy ever after, these pigs go from Dingley Dell to Hell.

Shortly after she wrote this article the author, currently in Fiji, heard the bloodcurdling screams of a pig being slaughtered in a back yard.   It left her shaking, and unable to forget what she had heard.  (Internet photo).

Richard Ryder has a special place in the history of the Animal Rights movement.  His influence was seminal in the early development of the notion of rights for animals,  and he is also the inventor of the term ‘Speciesism’, a central idea in the movement.

Richard Ryder was born Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder in Dorset, England in 1940.  After studying psychology and working in animal research laboratories, he began to speak out about animal experimentation, organising protests against animal experiments and also blood sports.  In the late 1960s when he was working as a clinical psychologist, he joined a group of young philosophers and writers loosely centered around Oxford University called the ‘Oxford Vegetarians’ or the ‘Oxford Group’.  In 1971 a book of selected essays emerged from the group, called ‘Animals, Men and Morals’  which argued clearly in favour of animal liberation/animal rights, rather than simply for compassion in the way animals are used.  The editors wrote in the introduction: “Once the full force of moral assessment has been made explicit there can be no rational excuse left for killing animals, be they killed for food, science, or sheer personal indulgence.”  These were truly groundbreaking ideas at the time.

In 1970 Ryder had a Eureka moment when he thought of the word ‘Speciesism’ to describe the assumption of superiority that humans have over non-human animals.  This prevalent notion has led to the widespread cruelty and abuses of countless billions of sentient beings, as well as the endangerment and extinction of many species, and environmental damage.  Shortly after this a young moral philosopher who had been influenced by the Oxford Vegetarians approached Ryder about a book he was planning, and asked him to co-author it with him.   The young man was Peter Singer, and the book the seminal Animal Liberation, published in 1975.  Ryder turned down the offer, but his influence was demonstrated in Singer popularizing the term ‘speciesism’ in the book.

Ryder’s accomplishments in the field of animal rights are extensive.   In 1972 he joined the Council of the RSPCA, becoming its chairman in 1977, during which time he tried to get rid of reactionary and pro-hunting elements within the organisation.  Also in 1977 he helped to organize the first academic animal rights conference, which was held at Trinity College, Cambridge.    The conference produced a “Declaration against Speciesism”, signed by 150 people.  In the 1980s he toured Europe, America and Australia, appearing on television and lending his assistance to campaigns to protect whales, seals, elephants and farm animals.     In 2004 he became Director of the Political Animal Lobby and later became Mellon Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane University, New Orleans.

In the early 2000s, after a long and hard campaign, Ryder established the Eurogroup for animals – the major coordinating and lobbying organisation in the European community,  who “speak for animals and for the millions of European citizens who are concerned about the way animals are treated”  The group was instrumental in animals now being recognised in EU law as sentient beings.

Ryder has written ten non-fiction books on animal rights, psychology and moral philosophy, including Animal Revolution (2000), Painism (2003), and also a novel, The Black Pimpernel.   Now approaching eighty years of age, Ryder is still active writing and giving interviews, continuing his life-long work on behalf of the other animals that mankind has so unjustly exploited and caused to suffer.

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Israeli historian and Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem YUVAL NOAH HARARI has written a number of best selling books including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2018).    

In this GUARDIAN article he claims the fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue, but concerns the majority of Earth’s large creatures: ‘tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but which live and die on an industrial production line’.  

Professor Harari states that since we are on the cusp of being able to reshape the future through biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, in designing this brave new world ‘we should take into account the welfare of all sentient beings, not just of Homo sapiens.’

Industrial farming, he claims, is ‘possibly the greatest crime in the history of the world.’ 

Read the Article:

Should cows have the right not to be placed in a hamburger?  End Animal Slaughter Contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH thinks they should.

New Zealand-owned Pizza chain Hell was recently in the news when they covertly added a Beyond Meat patty to their burger pizza.   It is suggested that they were in breach of the NZ Fair Trading Act, which protects consumers from being misled.

Lawyer Ray Neild is quoted as saying: “What does a reasonable consumer expect if it says “burger”?  A reasonable consumer is going to think that means meat.”

But what is reasonable for the consumer is not necessarily so hunky dory for the bovine. In fact, if bovines were extended human rights they would well and truly be on solid ground to seek legal remedy. They would no doubt ask to make it illegal to murder bovines in order to put them in a burger patty, or on a pizza, or for any other reason.  If a bovine had the same rights that are bequeathed to humans under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it would be complete pande-moo-nium.

Let’s face it, by being made into a burger the bovine has a substantial amount of her rights breached. These include her right to life, health, liberty, self-determination. equal protection of the law, nondiscrimination and protection against torture.

The bovine’s right to life seems to be a pretty clear cut case,  seeing that she has ended up as a medium rare patty in your burger. To get there she had to be dead. You may be ok with this. but the bovine, bless her, is probably not. I think I am in pretty safe territory when I say that no bovine goes to his or her death willingly, especially for no other purpose than to fill space between two bread buns alongside the lettuce and tomato.

If a bovine were accorded the right to good health she would also not end up in a burger. Not only is eating burgers bad for the bovine’s health, but also for yours. Meat eating is linked to many cancers, specifically colon cancer. It is also bad for the heart, causing fatty deposits which contribute to heart disease. It goes without saying that eating burgers is bad for the bovine’s heart which, not to put too fine a point on it, must desist in order for her to become a burger.  Meat, as the saying goes, ‘stops a beating heart.’

And what about the bovine’s right to self-determination? The bovine currently has none. She is caught up in a system where her very existence is predicated on her demise. Her life is determined by others, who seek to profit from her death. Years of domestication have rendered her docile enough to keep captive until she is deemed ready for the slaughterhouse. She may be used to breed other calves for meat, or her body may be used for milking before it is spent and sold off as cheap hamburger fodder or pet food. There is no self-determination for bovines at any stage of their short existence.

As for equal protection of the law, the bovine has none of this either. She is not protected, as humans are, from murder, forced impregnation, denial of liberty, or incarceration. She is at the mercy of the laws of the country she was born into that determine acceptable ‘welfare standards’ for her upkeep. However, these are routinely transgressed, and in some countries completely absent.

The right of bovines to nondiscrimination is clearly flouted. Bovines, like other animals who are farmed, are discriminated against on the basis of their species. She may be born into a bovine body, but she is still able to think, feel, hope, fear, and form attachments. Just because she is a bovine, does not mean she is not an individual whose life matters to her. Despite this, she is discriminated against, simply because she is a bovine.

What about her right to protection against torture? Surely we don’t torture bovines? Sadly, we do. They have their horns burned off, with 97% of New Zealand farmers using the hot iron cautery method.. If the calf is less than nine months old it is recommended pain relief is used, but this is not a legal requirement. Young male calves often have tight rings put around their scrotum so the blood supply is cut off,  causing the testicles to drop off. Some bovines used to have their tails cut off,  but since October 2018 this is illegal.  The law grants small mercies. Bovines also often experience distress by being given inadequate shelter, braving the wind, rain and biting cold in winter and the hot sun with no shade in summer. When they are transported to the slaughterhouse bovines are put in trucks and electric prods may be used to move them along. They often travel long distances in hot conditions only to arrive at the gates to Hades Underworld, with a one-way entry ticket purchased on their behalf. They come out in dismembered pieces; even in death they are not given any dignity.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that all human rights be extended to animals. For example, the right to education and freedom of religion and participation in government would be a trifle bizarre. No one really wants a bull lining up at the polling booth, horns and balls intact, ready to express his right to vote. However, animals can be given some rights within human law that would protect them from being so badly abused. We should bequeath to animals the freedom from human use and exploitation, and that, of course, means not murdering and eating them.

So in response to Lawyer Ray Neild’s comment about the expectation of ‘reasonable consumers’ I would like to shift the goal posts. A ‘reasonable consumer’ should find murder of an animal to be entirely unreasonable.

Hell General Manager Ben Cumming is to be commended. He is quoted  as saying: “We care about the planet and want to start a conversation and raise awareness about sustainable food choices.”  I don’t think I am being unreasonable in suggesting that, perhaps, a burger that tastes like meat, but for which no animal had to suffer and die,  is the more inclusive path to take.

This generation is waking up to the reality that many individual ‘choices’ about matters such as meat consumption are having an impact on the future viability of the Earth and our future as a species. Many people are also beginning to care a whole lot more about animal sentience, and want to extend the principal of non-exploitation to them.

It is not that difficult to do. We just need to break though the species barrier and see the individuality and person-hood in all beings. The ultimate feel-good factor in food consumption is knowing that your choice is based on non-harm, compassion and life.

Step away from Hades Underworld and enter the gates of Hell.     I hear the future calling.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (November 5, 1850 – October 30, 1919) was an American author and poet. Her works include Poems of Passion, and Solitude.   She coined some memorable phrases, including  “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”.

Her poems, written in rhyming verse, were filled with insight, and though not highly critically acclaimed were widely accepted and loved by the public. Her works popularized what at the time was known as ‘New Thought’ embodying the belief that all life is connected spiritually as well as physically, and that people are spiritual beings.  As ‘Voice for the Voiceless’,  her most famous Animal Rights poem shows, she believed that animals also have souls.   Some of her most popular works were ‘Poems of Passion’, (1883) A Woman of the World’ (1904)‘Poems of Peace’, (1906), and ‘Poems of Experience’ (1910). Her autobiography,  titled ‘The Worlds and I’, was published a year before her death.

‘You may choose your words like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart’.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

THE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS

The Father of Modern India, Mahatma Gandhi, once said: ‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated’.  Decades after Gandhi pronounced these words Indian law makers in the states of Punjab and Haryana have passed groundbreaking legislation, ruling that all animals are legal ‘persons’, entitled to legal rights like human persons.

Echoing an order passed by him while sitting at the Uttarakhand High Court last year Justice Rajiv Sharma’s order stated:

“The entire animal kingdom, including avian and aquatic, are declared legal entities having a distinct persona with corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person. All citizens throughout Haryana are hereby declared persons in loco parentis (responsible for a child in parents’ absence) as the human face for the welfare/protection of animals.”

Justice Sharma also stated: “We have to show compassion towards all living creatures. Animals may be mute but we as a society have to speak on their behalf. No pain or agony should be caused to the animals. Cruelty to animals also causes psychological pain to them. In Hindu Mythology, every animal is associated with god. Animals breathe like us and have emotions. The animals require food, water, shelter, normal behaviour, medical care, self-determination.”

In most of the world, if they have a legal status at all, animals are classed as ‘property’.  Animals were recognized as property in Law at a time when the general belief was that God had given humans special rights – they had ‘dominion’ over the animals.  Animals did not possess moral standing because they lacked rationality and autonomy.  They were mere machines, acting on instinct, incapable of thinking or feeling the way humans do.  As little as fifty years ago this belief (that quite obviously lacked common sense) still had currency.  For example, scientists were cautioned not to ‘anthropomorphise’ when studying animal behaviour.  However, much has changed since then.   Back in the 19^th century Darwin made the irrefutable case that humans had evolved from animals, clearly asserting that emotions and not only physical forms had shown continuity through species.  Thousands of scientific studies conducted over the last forty years have now proven without doubt that animals feel physical pain and positive and negative emotions just like us. Consequently, assert philosophers such as Peter Singer, the interests of humans and animals should receive equal moral consideration.

Yet in the most places an animal has the same legal status as a ‘thing’ – a car, television set, or toaster for example.  What kind of law states that animals are more like a house or a pair of headphones than a human being?   It is clearly ludicrous.  Animals are not inanimate objects.  They have the capacity to suffer, and engage in intelligent thinking.   By categorising animals as property the law is treating them as non-sentient objects, making it more likely for us to treat them as if they were.

An animal is not a toaster!

The very welcome Punjab/Haryana ruling comes as there is a worldwide push towards recognising animals as ‘sentient’ under the law.  A number of countries and cities, including France, New Zealand, Brussels and Quebec now have formally recognized animal sentience.  This is the first step towards recognizing animals as ‘non-human persons’ – which should, by the way,  replace the word ‘animal’.  If pigs and chickens in factory farms were called ‘non-human persons’ and given rights more commensurate with people than with things, then it will be a lot harder to imprison, torture and slaughter them in their billions every single year.

In Justice Sharma’s ruling fish and birds will also benefit.  Plundering the ocean’s inhabitants, cramming fish so tight in tanks in polluted water where they can hardly move; keeping wild birds in tiny cages without ever being allowed out, or blasting them out of the sky to hunt them,  will also be difficult to justify when they have personhood status.

According animals ‘person’ status will make an enormous difference.   For example Justice Sharma included 24 individual welfare codes that would take immediate effect.    Animal activists in India, such as Karuna Society for Animals and Nature, Haryana-based Teachers Association For Animal Rights, and Government Minister Maneka Gandhi – a powerhouse who has done more for animal rights in India than any one person – will be rejoicing at this news.   Having recently returned from Haryana and witnessed for myself the reality of animal suffering in that state as it is all over India, I join them in their rejoicing.

The judgement still has to be ratified by India’s Supreme Court, but if all goes well a precedent will be set.  India has paved the way, and now it is up to the rest of the world to follow suit.     According personhood status should be a campaign priority for all those everywhere who work to relieve sentient beings from their sufferings.

Sandra Kyle

The worst incidences in animal slaughter occur in slaughterhouses where line speeds are increased.  Gail A Eisnitz in her book ‘Slaughterhouse’ talks of pigs surviving the stunning process and having their throats slit, then being dumped into scalding water fully conscious and wounded to drown.   High speed slaughterhouses will cause more of this kind of thing to happen, causing endless suffering to innocent and helpless animals, and putting  even more pressure on the fragile mental health of slaughterhouses workers.   The buying public could end up eating contaminated meat.   There is only one step forward for the slaughterhouse industry, in America and worldwide, and that is to wind down until full closure is achieved.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/06/ive-seen-the-hidden-horrors-of-high-speed-slaughterhouses