Friends and animals
Thom Bonneville tells the story of a Quaker concern for animals
In the earliest days of the Society many Friends bore witness on behalf of animals. Many of those who followed them carried this concern forward through the centuries.
While the majority of early Friends no doubt reflected the prejudices of their time when it came to animals, some examples of a more encompassing spiritual or ethical regard have survived in writings of that period. For instance, George Fox – who censured the ‘vain sports’ of hunting and shooting – recollected with indignation the theft of a horse’s provender: ‘I had rather they had robbed me.’ Animals, or at least some animals, were clearly within George Fox’s moral compass, and deserving of not just our solicitude but our justice.
Witness
In the eighteenth century we find much more pronounced and explicit examples. The abolitionist Benjamin Lay refused to kill other creatures, eat their flesh and fat, or wear wool or leather clothing. He refused, too, to ‘burden any horse’. His better-known near contemporary, John Woolman, wrote that ‘where the love of God is verily perfected… a tenderness toward all creatures… will be experienced’. We might say that Benjamin Lay and John Woolman between them marked out the twin poles of justice and compassion that the animal concern has developed and by which people advocating for animals have oriented themselves.
In time, the witness would manifest itself through the law and in the arts. Quaker MP Joseph Pease introduced the first animal welfare legislation in 1835. Some forty years later, Anna Sewell, who was born a Quaker, published her novel Black Beauty, with an intention ‘to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses’. As the ‘moral disease’ of animal experimentation grew more contentious among Quakers and in society at large, the Friends’ Anti-Vivisection Association was founded, with Joseph Storrs Fry as its first president. This group eventually became Quaker Concern for Animals (QCA).
Quaker activity did not fail to keep pace with the momentous changes of the post-second world war era. Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines, published in 1964, was among the first and most influential exposés of the poultry and livestock industry. Her work inspired the first government initiatives on farm animal welfare and was instrumental in establishing it as a scientific subject. Two of the most effective proponents of modern veganism arose from the Quaker tradition: Kathleen Jannaway, founder of the Movement for Compassionate Living, and Jon Wynne-Tyson, author of Food for a Future and The Extended Circle.
Progress today
QCA continues to act as a voice for exploited and endangered creatures, as encouraging signs of progress coincide with exponential increases in animal suffering through industrialisation, mass-marketing and accelerating species’ extinction brought about by climate change and the spoliation of the natural world.
On the positive side, the environment secretary recently announced plans to make CCTV mandatory in England’s slaughterhouses. Animal sentience is a growth area in academic research. The public’s regard for the capacities of non-human animals seems to be increasing. Bear bile farming and the dog meat trade in Asia are both showing signs of decline because of international pressure and local education. But those wishing to know how and where animals continue to suffer at our hands will not be short of choice or hard-pressed to find information:
- Puppy farming and the online sale of ‘exotic pets’, including marmosets (it is still legal to keep primates as pets), meerkats and ‘teacup’ dogs, are two areas where legislative and enforcement controls are inadequate or nonexistent. Saddest, perhaps, are the internet roll calls of the ‘no longer wanted’. The extent and underlying causes of this remain widely underappreciated, even though many are aware that the country’s animal sanctuaries are full to bursting and that dog fighting is on the rise.
- Welfare of zoo animals is a major concern and a main focus of QCA’s Autumn 2017 newsletter. Between December 2013 and September 2016, 486 animals died in a Cumbrian zoo, to take but one instance. Deaths there included two baby snow leopards found partially eaten by other leopards; lemurs and birds run over by the miniature train; and a jaguar who chewed off its own paw after damaging it on broken glass. The conservation and education aims of zoos are coming under increasing scrutiny, even within the zoo industry itself, but no such claims can be made about circuses using wild animals. Despite the fact that major cities (New York City became one of the latest in July) and countries around the world are banning the practice, and that a ban enjoys ninety-four per cent popular support in England and Wales, nothing has come of the previous Tory government’s promise to have a UK ban in effect by January 2015.
- According to Home Office statistics published in July, nearly four million animals were used in ‘procedures’ in UK laboratories in 2016. No effective care can be shown to animals utilised and destroyed in such numbers.
- Around thirty-five million pheasants and red-legged partridges, neither species native to the UK, are released on shooting estates each year, purely for sport. Many of these birds begin their lives on factory farms abroad. Partridges are held in breeding pairs in metal boxes. Millions of wild animals and birds are also slaughtered annually by estate game keepers in ‘predator control’ programmes. Wire snares are indiscriminate, trapping target animals like foxes, stoats and corvids, and also protected and endangered species.
- Factory farming remains by far the greatest cause of animal misery and premature, violent death. The number of intensive animal farms in Britain has risen by a quarter since 2011, with almost 800 US-style mega farms now operating across the UK. Herefordshire alone has more than sixteen million factory-farmed animals, which are mainly poultry. Agribusiness as a polluter, greenhouse gas producer and fossil fuel consumer has arguably been the greatest of human activity contributors to the environmental collapse that has decimated wildlife and is now doing the same to human populations, especially in the global south (the meat industry’s role in world hunger adds inestimable insult to this injury). Recognition of this is now widespread, but the political will to change remains negligible.
- The needless and inhumane export of live ‘food’ animals continues, despite decades of passionate campaigning. A BBC programme this month reported that ‘livestock hauliers… routinely break EU laws for the protection of animals in transit’ and animals commonly perished of thirst, exhaustion and illness in cramped, oven-like conditions over the course of days.
Prejudice and mistreatment
Now more than ever it is time for all Friends to heed John Woolman’s plea to exercise no cruelty and look into their own lives for the seeds of the violent mistreatment of animals. The prejudice of our own era is that, as Ruth Harrison put it, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to a lot of animals it is simply accepted as the norm. Will we continue to uncritically reflect this prejudice? The buck ultimately stops with us, for the system feeds on the choices we each make daily: the foods we eat, the clothes we wear and the entertainments we partake of.
A kinder world and better deal for animals is possible, but it will not happen until we let them come back out of the shadows and take their place in our moral consideration. If they choose to, Friends, as ever, can show the way.
Thom is clerk of Quaker Concern for Animals.
World Animal Day is on 4 October.
Comments
In our concern for the wellbeing of animals, we tend understandibly to focus on those animals in our (humanity’s) care. We need to consider all animals (and other living things) that are influenced by humanity.
The number of wild animals in the world has diminished by over 50% since 1970, at the same time as human numbers have doubled. Current rates of extinction of species are between 1000 and 10,000 times the natural background rate. This is clarified by an article from the Center for Biological Diversity on http://tinyurl.com/mz2pph3
The immediate cause of this is the rocketing rate of increase of humanity, currently an extra billion of us every twelve years. This is not sustainable.
By RogerP on 28th September 2017 - 16:16
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