How to Do Animal Rights
pay the Sum forfeited, every such Offender shall...be committed to the House of Correction or some other Prison...for any Time not exceeding Three Months." None of Martin‟s further attempts to introduce laws to protect animals succeeded, including bans on dog-fighting, cock-fighting and bull-baiting. Instead, people took to mocking his energetic prosecution of anyone ill-treating an animal. Alongside this, Martin was a sport hunter, hunting his estate of 9,000 ha (22,000 acres), a third of County Galway, that he inherited from his father. Many influential people who supported the RSPCA were also sport hunters or farmers, which is why the organisation floundered by largely excluding wild animals and farmed animals from its remit. The RSPCA did not begin to become a less ineffective humane society until over a 170 years later in the 1990‟s. When Martin was 72 he fled Britain to Boulogne because of political intrigue and inheritance debts on his estate. The town was a busy French port and a popular resort for British expatriates and he died there a few years later. However, a year after his death, Martin‟s Act was finally enlarged to ban the fighting and baiting of animals. Martin‟s grave in Boulogne was bombed during the Second World War, so his bones were re-interred in the cemetery‟s ossuary. A marble plaque was erected there from RSPCA funds and in English and French it reads:“...he piloted...the first act to protect animals.”
7.9
Henry Salt (1851 - 1939)
Henry Stephens Salt wrote the first book entirely devoted to animal rights, published in 1892: Animals' Rights: considered in relation to social progress (Macmillan: New York. 1892. Reprinted 1980). In his book he sought to impress people not to kill or eat animals and submitted that such behaviour is the distinction of a civilised society: "...it is ourselves, our own vital instincts, that we wrong, when we trample on the rights of the fellow-beings, human or animal, over whom we chance to hold jurisdiction." Salt was a British social campaigner, writer, naturalist, prominent anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian. He was born in India and educated in England. After attending Cambridge University he taught classics at Eton preparatory school but left to adopt a vegetarian life-style growing vegetables at a remote country cottage while writing for a living. Salt believed animals should be free to live their own lives and that humanity has a responsibility to treat them compassionately and justly. His animal rights book influenced Gandhi (1869 - 1948), political and spiritual leader of India and advocate of vegetarianism and of non-violent protest. Salt‟s social reform interests included schools, prisons, criminal law, flogging in the Royal Navy, vivisection and food-animal slaughter. In 1891 he founded and was general secretary of the Humanitarian League that opposed, on grounds of ethics and good social science, the infliction of avoidable suffering on any sentient being whether man or beast. Among the League‟s aims was better protection for wild and domesticated animals, abolition of corporal punishment and the death penalty, and opposition to vivisection, the fur and feather trade and hunting for sport (such as fox hunting with hounds). Among his books are A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886), The New Charter, a Discussion of the Rights of Men and the Rights of Animals (1896), The Logic of Vegetarianism (1899) and Our Vanishing Wildflowers (1928).
7.10 Steven Best (b 1955) Steven Best's critics brand him as an American militant animal rights activist on the extreme fringe and a spokesman for terrorists. More sympathetic people describe him as an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso, and a scholarly, although outspoken, voice on animal rights. 166