Subtitled History as if Animals Mattered, this scholarly book examines the role that animals have played in history. It is a project of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, bringing together academic articles from The Journal of Animal Ethics on a range of topics relating to the concept of animal history; key intellectuals who have shaped our attitudes to animals; meat eating and vivisection.
Of course, any animal history that we have access to, will be written by humans, though some postulate that perhaps some animals have their own histories, which they share in ways we can't understand (elephants being the species that strikes me as surely having their own history.) However we look at it animals are vital to our history, from the animals hunted by our long ago ancestors, to the cats that kept rats away from ancient Egyptian grain to the rats that spread the plague. It's also interesting to note that Edinburgh has more statues to animals than to women.
Jacob Brandler opens the discussion with his article "Do “Animals” Have Histor(ies)? Can/Should Humans Know Them? A Heuristic Reframing of Animal-Human Relationships". This article links the current developing interest in animal history to the increasing interest in history of minority groups within human society and suggests that a greater understanding of the place of animals in history leads to a more ethical treatment of animals today.
Violette Pouillard discusses two books about celebrity animals in Animal Biographies: Beyond Archetypal Figures, highlighting how individual animals are treated in captivity and how this contrasts with the lives of free-living animals.
In the section on historical intellectuals and their attitudes to animals, Cheryl E Abbate goes first with “Higher” and “Lower” Political Animals: A critical Analysis of Aristotle’s Account of the Political Animal which explores Aristotle's consideration of 'the political animal' and extends it to non-human animals, while Christina Hoenig looks at Augustine of Hippo on Nonhuman Animals. Both these articles examine the legacy left by these ancient influential thinkers. In “Mad Madge”: The Contribution of Margaret Cavendish to Animal Ethics, Lauren Bestwick examines Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673). Labelled "Mad" by her contemporaries for her radical views, she was an aristocrat who wrote philosophical works and poetry that defended the rational capacity of animals, while being aware that the prejudices against non-human animals were similar to those against women in the society she lived in. Alison Stone looks at Frances Power Cobbe and the Philosophy of Antivivisection. Cobbe (1822 - 1904) was primarily a campaigner who approached animal welfare as a moral philosopher.
The essays about vegetarianism are particularly interesting, offering fascinating insights into historical attitudes to those who refuse to eat meat. Historical Christian attitudes to meat eating, fasting and asceticism are examined in some detail by both Marcello Newall in Biblical Veganism: An Examination of 1 Timothy 4:1–8, and Carl Frayne in On imitating the regimen of immortality or Facing the diet of mortal reality: A Brief history of Abstinence from Flesh-Eating in Christianity. In Morality and Meat in the Middle Ages and Beyond, Christene d'Anca examines how "contemporary decisions to abstain from animal consumption mirror medieval ones" and how ancient prejudice against vegetarianism continues even today, though the nature of the prejudice nowadays is not so religious as it used to be. Carl Frayne reappears, now writing as Carl Tobias Frayne with The Anarchist Diet: Vegetarianism and Individualist Anarchism in Early 20th-Century France looks at the historic links between anarchism and veganism.
The final section of the book looks at vivisection. In Vivisection, Virtue Ethics, and the Law in 19th-century Britain, A W H Bates outlines the difference between Virtue Ethics, which "asks how a virtuous person would behave in a particular situation and emphasizes character and motives" and Utilitarian ethics, which claim that "the medical benefits of vivisection outweighed any unpleasantness or suffering". The essay then details the anti-cruelty laws that were brought in during that century and how they applied to vivisection (which those days wasn't common in Britain compared to some countries in continental Europe). Later, in " Boycotted hospital: the national Anti-vivisection hospital, London, 1903–1935" the same author looks at the history of the hospital that for three decades "treated the local poor and conscientious objectors to vivisection, who were assured that staff pledged not to experiment on animals or patients." “The New Superstition, the New Tyranny”: The Ethics and Contexts of John Cowper Powys’s Antivivisection" by Felix Taylor examines the antivivisectionist writings of the generally overlooked British novelist and philosopher John Cowper Powys (1872–1963).
"Animal Research, Safeguards, and Lessons from the Long History of Judicial Torture" by Adam Clulow and Jan Lauwereyns uses the history of the safeguards used to limit judicial torture to explore how animal research could more effectively be limited and policed, as the accepted notion of 'reduce, replace and refine' in animal testing has proven to be open to confusion and loopholes that mean that more animal testing continues.
This well researched, copiously referenced book covers a variety of aspects of our treatment of animals and will appeal to students of history and animal studies, as well as people involved in animal rights and conservation. It's a fascinating read, though the very academic approach and content will be off-putting for many general readers.
Animal History edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, published (July 2025) by Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
Disclaimer: I was sent a free pdf of this book in return for an honest review.
