The historian W. E.
H. Lecky remarks, there were two kinds of cruelty: the cruelty
which comes from carelessness or indifference; and the cruelty
which comes from vindictiveness.
In the case of
animals what was normally displayed in the early modern period was
the cruelty of indifference. For most persons, the beasts were
outside the terms of moral reference. Contemporaries resembled
those 'primitive' peoples of whom a modern anthropologist writes
that they neither seek to inflict pain on animals nor to avoid
doing so: 'pain in human beings outside the social circle or in
animals tends to be a matter of minimal interest.' It was a world
in which much of what would later be regarded as 'cruelty' had not
yet been defined as such. A good example of how people were inured
to the taking of animal life is provided by the diary kept by the
schoolboy Thomas Isham, who grew up in Northamptonshire in the
early 1670s. His little journal records much killing of cocks,
slaughtering of oxen, drowning of puppies. It tells of coursing for
hares, catching martens in traps, killing sparrows with stones and
castrating bulls. None of these events evokes any special comment,
and it is clear that the child was left emotionally
unruffled.
The same
indifference is reflected at a more sophisticated level in a simile
used by the poet Edmund Waller:
As a broad bream, to please some curious
taste,
While yet alive, in boiling water cast,
Vex'd with unwonted heat, he flings about
The scorching brass, and hurls the liquor
out;
The image is purely
visual and there is no interest in the feelings of the fish. In the
same way Matthew Prior compares the versifiers of his day to a pet
squirrel making futile efforts to escape from his
captivity:
didst thou never see ('Tis but by way of
simile)
A squirrel spend his little rage,
In jumping round a rowling cage,
The cage, as either side turn'd up,
Striking a ring of bells a'top -?
Mov'd in the Orb; pleas'd with the chimes,
The foolish creature thinks he climbs:
But here or there, turn wood or wire,
He never gets two inches higher.
What is revealing
about this passage is that it is the squirrel, not Prior, who gets
into a rage.
Yet, a hundred years
later, William Blake's Robin Redbreast would evoke a very different
reaction, for by that time the feelings of animals had become a
matter of very great concern indeed. Throughout the eighteenth
century, and particularly from the 17405 onwards, there was a
growing stream of writing on the subject: philosophical essays on
the moral treatment of the lower creatures, protests about
particular forms of animal cruelty and (from the 1780s) edifying
tracts designed to excite in children 'a benevolent conduct to the
brute creation'. There were scores of books and innumerable
contributions to periodicals and newspapers. There was also a great
deal of poetry.
This was one of the
periods in English history when poets, Shelley's 'unacknowledged
legislators', had a powerful influence on educated opinion. The
poets were regularly cited by the pamphleteers and quoted by
speakers in Parliament; and it is impossible to understand the
vehemence of the movement unless one takes into account the works
of Pope, Thomson, Gay, Cowper, Smart, Dodsley, Blake, Burns,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Southey, Crabbe and Clare,
to name no more. In the early nineteenth century the agitation
culminated in the foundation in 1824 of the Society (later the
Royal Society) for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the
passing (after unsuccessful bills from 1800 onwards) of a series of
Acts of Parliament: against cruelty to horses and cattle (1822),
against cruelty to dogs (1839 and 1854) and against baiting and
cock- fighting (1835 and 1849).
