Читать книгу Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress онлайн

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Something must here be said on the important subject of nomenclature. It is to be feared that the ill-treatment of animals is largely caused—or at any rate the difficulty of amending that treatment is largely aggravated—by the common use of such terms as “brute-beast,” “live-stock,” etc., which implicitly deny to the lower races that intelligent individuality which is undoubtedly possessed by them. It was long ago remarked by Bentham, in his “Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation,” that, whereas human beings are styled persons, “other animals, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things”; and Schopenhauer also has commented on the mischievous absurdity of the idiom which applies the neuter pronoun “it” to such highly-organized animals as the dog and the ape.

A word of protest is needed also against such an expression as “dumb animals,” which, though often cited as “an immense exhortation to pity,”[15] has in reality a tendency to influence ordinary people in quite the contrary direction, inasmuch as it fosters the idea of an impassable barrier between mankind and their dependents. It is convenient to us men to be deaf to the entreaties of the victims of our injustice; and, by a sort of grim irony, we therefore assume that it is they who are afflicted by some organic incapacity—they are “dumb animals,” forsooth! although a moment’s consideration must prove that they have innumerable ways, often quite human in variety and suggestiveness, of uttering their thoughts and emotions. Even the term “animals,” as applied to the lower races, is incorrect, and not wholly unobjectionable, since it ignores the fact that man is an animal no less than they. My only excuse for using it in this volume is that there is no better brief term available.