History of Animal Welfare

[Disclaimer: The informations below are taken from an online course named Animal Behaviour and Welfare from Coursera by a team of animal behaviour and welfare researchers, educators and veterinarians from Edinburgh with some online researches by myself. For this one it was prepared by Jill MacKay from the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies and The Jeanne Marchig International Center for Animal Welfare Education]


Timeline of Animal Welfare Development

Pre-history
1) Burials of dead animals showed the importance of animals in their life.

• mummified cats in ancient Egypt
• dog buried like human in the cemetery

2) Many animals were involved in religions.

• in Buddhism animals should not be harmed
• cows are sacred animals in Hinduism

3) Animals were presented in ancient arts.

• cave paintings
• animal stone sculptures 

More informations:

James M Deem's Mummy Tombs website

News Discovery website

All about Animals website

About.com Hinduism website

The Barakat Collection website

Oddee website

(Image taken from Enhebrando website)

500 Before Common Era - The Greeks

1) Pythagoras 

• believer in animism that animals have soul like human beings
• advocated a vegetarian lifestyle

2) Aristotle

• animals are below human because animals can't reason
• animals can be used without being treated like human

3) Emperor Ashoka

• established some of the first animal laws
• the fifth pillar of Ashoka stated a series of edicts 

More informations:

Think Differently about Sheep website

How to Do Animal Rights website

Think Differently about Sheep website

0 - 1500s Common Era
1) Judeo-Christian ethics (the Bible)

• 26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.    - Genesis 1:26
• 3Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.4“But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.  - Genesis 9:3-4 

2) Rene Descartes

• animals have no soul, they are just machine
• he experimented on animals in a cruel way to prove his theory 

3) Thomas Aquinas

• there are different levels of soul

More informations:
Practising Resurrection website
Examiner.com website
Thomistic Philosophy website

(Image taken from Tracey Broome's blog)

1600s Common Era - Early Legislation
1) An act against cruelty towards horses and sheeps in Ireland, 1635

• do not plow or work horses by the tail
• do not pull the wool off living sheep

2) An act against cruelty towards animals kept for man's use in Massachusetts, 1641

• animals should not be starved or treated cruelly  

More informations:

Animal Rights History website

Animal Rights History website

1700s Common Era 

1) Immanuel Kant

• the way a man treats an animal reflects his heart
• men's duties towards animals are just indirect duties towards humanity

2) Jeremy Bentham

• father of Utilitarianism (theory: the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome) 
• the ability to suffer (not reason) should be the benchmark of how we should treat animals

More informations:
Examiner.com website

Think Differently about Sheep website

1800s Common Era

1) Charles Darwin

• all species originated from a common ancestry through natural selection
• believe animals could suffer

2) William Wilberforce

• played an important role in the establishment of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in United Kingdom in 1824 (now as Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals [RSPCA] since 1840)

More informations:

Think Differently about Sheep website
Animals Matter to God website

(Image taken from Aramark website)

1900s Common Era

1) Karl Marx

• man is described as an animal
• pet ownership was banned in many communist countries

2) Animal Liberation written by Peter Singer

• speciesism, animals are exploited because they are not the same species as human beings
• animals share equal moral status as human beings

3) Animal Machines written by Ruth Harrison

• reveal the reality faced by the farm animals due to intensive farming
• encouraged humane slaughter of animals

4) The Case for Animal Rights written by Tom Regan

• animals are subjects of a life, not mere biological beings
• introduce Kantian (Immanuel Kant) thought 

5) Welfare Frameworks

• Five freedoms (freedom from hunger and thirst; freedom from discomfort; freedom from pain, injury or disease; freedom from fear and distress; freedom to express normal behaviour)
• Life worth living concept

More informations:

Dr. David Sztybel website
Animal Liberation Front website

The Guardian website

The Vegetarian Site

Farm Animals Welfare Council
Green, T. C. & Mellor, D. J. (2011). Extending ideas about animal welfare assessment to include 'quality of life' and related concepts. New Zealand Veterinary Journal, 6, 263-271.

Silent Spring - Extracted Information (The Obligation to Endure)

[Disclaimer: The informations below are taken from the book 'Silent Spring' written by Rachel Carson with some online researches. If there is any misleading information please let me know.]

(Image taken from the International Center for Autism Research and Education website)

Chapter 2: The Obligation to Endure

Man can hardly even recognise the devils of his own creation.   - Albert Schweitzer

1) After the emergence of life on Earth, physical forms and behaviours of living things are constantly manipulated by the environment so that both hostile and supporting elements can exist at the same time.

• Although there are radiation from natural rocks, cosmic rays, ultraviolet rays from the Sun and chemical leached from various minerals which might cause harm to living things in the environment however man-induced radiations and synthetic chemicals are way more dangerous because counterparts do not appear immediately and suddenly. 
• Pesticides, for example, are non-selective chemicals which are used to destroy pests. 
• As the so called pests develop resistance towards the particular chemical over generations, a more toxic one has to be engineered to counteract the resurgence of resistant pests. 

2) Despite the presence of insects pests, over production of food became a problem in America.

• Soil Bank Acreage Reserve Programme was launched in 1958 in order to reduce surplus crop production by limiting the acreage of basic crops of farmers and paying them. 
• In 1962, more than one billion dollars were paid by American taxpayers each year as total carrying cost of surplus food programme.

More information: Weessels Living History Farm

3) Cultivation of single crops facilitates insect infestation.

• This simplification will lead to an explosion of insect populations that depend on the specific plants to survive because there are more resources available. 

More information: 

Ryerson, K. A. (1933). History and significance of the foreign plant introduction work of the United States. Agricultural History, 7, 110-128.

(Image taken from the Secret of the Fed website)

4) Invasion of non-native insects species was mainly through importation of plants.

• There was no natural enemies existed in the new habitat.
• Almost half of the 180 or so major insect pests in the United States were introduced with nearly 200, 000 species of plants by the United States Office of Plant Introduction. 
• Ecologist Charles Elton pointed out that the invasion of new species from other places occurred naturally in a slow pace, but with assistance from human, it became a menacing threat. 

More information: 

Elton, C. S. (1958). The ecology of invasions by animals and plants. United States: Kluwer Academic Publisher B. V.

5) People were ignorant towards the nature of the threat.

• The manufacturers often claim that their products contain very low dosage of harmful substances that it won't cause any side effect in human health. 
• Truths are often covered up by the dominating industries to earn a fortune through people's limited awareness towards pesticides. 
• Carson did not contend to call for the banning of chemical insecticides but she wanted to let people know what they actually were facing.

Idealises life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment... Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?            - Paul Shepard

The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.                - Jean Rostand

Silent Spring - Review

The original edition of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson published in 1962.
(image taken from The Manhattan Rare Book Company website)

The term 'Silent Spring' literally means the season spring which is quiet, without the chirping of birds. Before I read this book, all I knew about it were it was written by Rachel Carson, a female scientist (a marine biologist to be exact, I found out about this later) in the era when men were dominant and it brought about a green revolution by getting the attention of the public about pesticide pollution.  So after I heard about this book a few times from my lecturers for the last two semesters, I thought I should read it at least once because it ignited the people's green awareness towards the environment at the time when there was no such thing as green movement.

Supported with a lot of scientific evidences from various research institutes and departments, Silent Spring has pointed out the dark side of pesticide usage despite of the 'convenience' claimed by the manufacturers and sellers. Pesticides including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides exist for only one purpose, to kill off so called 'pests'. At that time people did not realise how strong the poison was that almost all living organisms regardless of species were wiped out in a short period of time. Detailed data was embedded in the book stating the damages pesticides had given rise to towards the plants, insects, birds, fish and even human beings. At the beginning of the book, various types of pesticides were introduced, followed by their effects on living organisms and finally the carcinogenic impacts on human beings. The processes that initiated the effects were described scientifically in a simplified way that normal people would understand it. For those who studied biology, they will understand instantly about the processes which involve generation of energy in cells, inhibition of nerve functioning, carcinogenic agents etc.

The author, Rachel Carson who died of breast cancer two years after the publication of Silent Spring.
(image taken from The Pop History Dig website)

This book was not written to deny the usage of pesticide or to call for banning of pesticide but to acknowledge the people about what they were actually facing and to propose better alternatives to replace the unnecessary massacre of all living things directly or indirectly as the poison travelled and accumulated in body fat down the food chains. Biological control using the natural prey-predator and host-parasites relationships has been proved effective and cheap. If immediate treatment has to be done, direct applying of chemical at the affected spots will be better than vast spraying which contributes to the non-point source pollution when the air or water carries the chemicals to the other parts of our world. It is tragic when people had to pay for what they had not done, and not even known because the bitter truth was coated with sugar so that no one would question the true colour of pesticides.

Carson used simple language in delivering her concerns and scientific facts so that general public would understand what's going on in the perspective of science instead of stuffing the whole book with hard-to-digest scientific terminologies. Informations and knowledge are difficult to reach when they are just available in journals or reports which are accessible only by people in the academic and research fields who are only a small fraction out of the whole human population. The real danger often lies in people's ignorance when we don't even know what is threatening us. The efforts Carson made was a leap towards grassroot movement when people began to realise that the whole situation was being manipulated by certain parties for the political and economical benefits where human rights were not being taken care of.  

Bashfulgrass on the field.

P/S: It is quite enjoyable to read the Silent Spring because the words used are truly beautiful as if I am reading a literature full of knowledge. I will certainly read the whole book for the second time and extract the informations chapter by chapter. Although it might take some time, do read and digest it.