By Dr. Will Tuttle on August 24, 2009

Part I: The History of Animal Rights

Good Meatless Morning! Today, Dr. Will Tuttle is here to give us an in-depth look at the origins of animal rights. Part II is coming up tomorrow!

At its core, the animal rights movement is about questioning the official story of our culture at the deepest level. This is why animal rights is so threatening to the existing power structure. Essentially, the animal rights movement is about vegan living as minimizing our cruelty to animals, and when we trace it all back, we find that our movement has ancient roots in questioning the official story of this culture.

According to anthropologists, around 8 to 10 thousand years ago, in what is today Iraq, people for the first time began the practice of herding — owning and confining animals for food – first it was wild sheep and goats, and around 2,000 years later, cows, and eventually other animals. This was, I believe, the last major revolution that our culture experienced, and it changed our culture, and us who are born into this culture, in a fundamental way. For the first time, beings were reduced to mere property commodities, rather than being mysterious, autonomous, and respected cohabitants of the Earth with us. This changed the essential orientation of the culture, and a wealthy elite emerged that owned livestock as their wealth, the first large-scale wars evolved, and indeed, the first word for war that we know of is the old Sanskrit word “gavyaa,” which means “the desire for more cattle.” Capitalism (from the Latin “capita,” meaning “head” as in head of cattle and sheep) emerged with warfare as profitable for the wealthy livestock-owning elite, along with the ownership of humans as slaves—often people vanquished in war—and the systematic reduction in the status of women, who by the arrival of the historic period, roughly three thousand years ago, were bought and sold as chattel property. The reduction of wild animals to the status of pests because they could threaten the herders’ capital, and the development of science as a method of dominating animals and nature followed, as did the arising of a new and different role model for boys of the macho male herder, tough, disconnected, and capable of extreme violence and cruelty toward both animals and rival herders. This bellicose culture spread gradually and relentlessly throughout the eastern Mediterranean, eventually to Europe, and to the Americas and is still spreading, and we are born into this culture, which has the same basic attitudes, behaviors and practices to this day.

Shortly after the beginning of the historic period, roughly 2,500 years ago, we have the first cases of prominent and respected people urging compassion to animals and what we would call today veganism. In India, two contemporaries, Mahavir, a significant teacher in the Jain tradition, and Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, both preached and practiced a meatless diet, and required their students to observe strict codes of conduct that prohibited them from owning animals, harming animals, and eating animals. Both traditions, the Jain tradition in particular, claim that they go back much further than 2,500 years; that the practice of nonviolence that they enjoin is an unbroken teaching extending back centuries earlier into pre-history.

These are the first animal rights activists that we are certain of today, and the basis of their activism was the teaching and understanding of ahimsa. Ahimsa is the doctrine and consciousness of non-violence: that violence toward other sentient beings is not only unethical, and brings suffering to them, but that it also inevitably brings suffering and bondage to the perpetrator and society as well. It is very interesting that both of these traditions are essentially spiritual traditions, and they focus not so much on animal welfare, but on what we would call today animal rights and animal liberation. Ahimsa is the essence of veganism, which is the commitment to minimize cruelty and exploitation by not interfering with animals at all, or as little as possible, and allowing them sovereignty in their lives in nature.

It’s important to understand that owning animals as property to be killed and eaten is the hidden and defining core of our culture, and that all of us were, and are, routinely indoctrinated into the mentality of domination, exclusion, reductionism, elitism, and disconnectedness required by the food practices of this culture. The spiritual sages of India, with their propagation of ahimsa, rejected and boycotted the core of cruelty of our herding culture 2,500 years ago, and were the earliest vegans we know of, consciously attempting to minimize their violence to animals, and to spreading this to others. This powerful time in our cultural evolution, called the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, saw similar ethical giants emerging simultaneously or shortly thereafter: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Socrates in the Mediterranean, Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tzu & Chuang-tzu in China, Isaiah and the later prophets in the Levant. All emphasized compassion for animals, the rejection of animal sacrifices, and the fact that violence toward animals boomerangs as violence toward humans. As we sow, we will reap. These ideas spread through spiritual teachers and philosophers over the centuries, and by the beginning of the Christian era, for example, Buddhist monks had established centers as far away as England in the West, China in the East, and Africa in the South, and brought ahimsa and veganism with them. I am using the word veganism here explicitly because unlike the word vegetarian, the word vegan stipulates that the underlying motivation is to minimize violence to sentient beings.

With all the cross-pollination of ideas in the ancient world, it is not surprising that many of the ancient historians record that Jesus and his disciples were well-known abstainers from animal flesh, and it is documented that the early Christian fathers were vegetarians and most likely vegans. A few centuries later, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, the practice of compassion to animals by Christians was viciously suppressed, with Constantine’s soldiers reputedly torturing to death anyone who refused to eat meat. This attitude continued in the centuries that followed after the fall of Rome, with vegetarian Christians in Europe in the medieval period, such as the Cathars and the Bogomils, being suppressed and eventually exterminated by the church. There were other strands and individuals promoting nonviolence toward animals in the ancient world going into the medieval as well, in the neo-Platonist, hermetic, Sufi, Judaic, and Christian traditions.

With the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment in the 16th to 18th centuries, the influence of the church waned as reason and modern science began to ascend, but unfortunately, this was not good news for animals, and signaled the beginning of a much more ferocious exploitation of them for scientific experimentation, as well as for entertainment, clothing, products, and, of course, food. While there had been some modicum of respect for and protection of animals as God’s creatures under the old order, under the new materialism, they were reduced to mere resources and commodities in the clutches of a surging industrialism and population expansion of omnivorous humans that continues unabated to this day, and is threatening all animals, and indeed all of nature and even humanity itself, with destruction and perhaps complete annihilation.

Come back tomorrow for Part II: The History of Animal Rights…

 

 

   
 

7 Comments