'Animals that are
made use of as food,' wrote William Hazlitt in 182,6, 'should
either be so small as to be imperceptible, or else we should ...
not leave the form standing to reproach us with our gluttony and
cruelty. I hate to see a rabbit trussed, or a hare brought to the
table in the form which it occupied while living.' Killing animals
for food was now an activity about which an increasing number of
people felt furtive or uneasy. The concealment of slaughter-houses
from the public eye had become a necessary device to avoid too
blatant a clash between material facts and private
sensibilities.
The embarrassment
about meat-eating thus provides an example of the way in which, by
the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had
come to find man's ascendancy over nature increasingly abhorrent to
their moral and aesthetic sensibilities.
This was the human
dilemma: how to reconcile the physical requirements of civilization
with the new feelings and values which that same civilization had
generated. It is too often assumed that sensibilities and morals
are mere ideology: a convenient rationalization of the world as it
is.
But in the early
modern period the truth was almost the reverse, for, by an
inexorable logic, there had gradually emerged attitudes to the
natural world which were essentially incompatible with the
direction in which English society was moving. The growth of towns
had led to a new longing for the countryside. The progress of
cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued
nature. The new-found security from wild animals had generated an
increasing concern to protect birds and preserve wild creatures in
their natural state. Economic independence of animal power and
urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional
attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the
exploitation of animals by which most people lived. Henceforth an
increasingly sentimental view of animals as pets and objects of
contemplation would jostle uneasily alongside the harsh facts of a
world in which the elimination of 'pests' and the breeding of
animals for slaughter grew every day more efficient. Oliver
Goldsmith wrote of his contemporaries that 'they pity and they eat
the objects of their compassion'.
The same might be
said of the children of today who, nourished by a meat diet and
protected by a medicine developed by animal experiments,
nevertheless take toy animals to bed and lavish their affection on
lambs and ponies. For adults, nature parks and conservation areas
serve a function not unlike that which toy animals have for
children; they are fantasies which enshrine the values by which
society as a whole cannot afford to live.
By 1800 the
confident anthropocentrism of Tudor England had given way to an
altogether more confused state of mind. The world could no longer
be regarded as having been made for man alone, and the rigid
barriers between humanity and other forms of life had been much
weakened. During the religious upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s
contemporaries had been shocked to hear sectaries like the Ranter
Jacob Bauthumley asserting that 'God is in all creatures, man and
beast, fish and fowl, and every green thing.' But, in a secularized
form, this kind of pantheism was to become very general in the
eighteenth century, when it was widely urged that all parts of
creation had a right to live; and that nature itself had an
intrinsic spiritual value. Not everyone now believed that mankind
was uniquely sacred.
