Repository logo

Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100498

Browse

Browsing Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Animal welfare -- Moral and ethical aspects"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Origins of the animal husbandry ethic
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 1998) Hedleston, Jo Ann, author; Rollin, Bernard E., advisor; Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, committee member; Roberts, P. Elaine, committee member
    This thesis gives a historical account of the ethical idea of kindness to animals that is part of the animal husbandry ethic as found in British and American culture. It deals in particular with the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson as the "author", along with Adam Smith, of the American agrarian dream, with special emphasis on the influence of the Christian utilitarian ethic of Francis Hutcheson, a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment in mid-eighteenth century, whose idea of the moral sense influenced both of these men. The modern idea of kindness to animals, or refraining from cruelty to animals, as part of good husbandry, comes from the social humanitarian movement in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea is transformed from the ethic which states that we ought not be cruel to animals because it might in turn lead to cruel treatment of humans into a new ethic which claims we ought to be kind to animals because they are sensitive creatures with a value of their own beyond that of human use. That transformation of the ethic occurs in part as a result of the rise of natural science which gives us a new conception of the anatomical similarities of animals to humans. The discussion about what animals are is highlighted by Descartes' theory of the beast machine in Europe in general and I look at the controversy in detail in England and France especially as the organized church struggles to integrate the new empirical science and the old religion of Christianity. I make the claim that the humanitarian movement which produced the movement for reform in Britain was fueled by the ethical idea of the moral sense which first came to the public's attention through the popular writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury. These ethical ideas of the moral sense were refined and made palatable to ordinary Christians by the work of Francis Hutcheson and other natural theologians of the eighteenth century and written about extensively in the latter part of that century and the early part of the nineteenth in Britain. I survey some relatively unknown (in current scholarship) propagandistic literature of the animal welfare movement in Britain in order to support the claim that it was through a revival of Old Testament texts regarding the kind treatment of animals that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and others were able to bring about legislative change in England regarding the treatment of domestic animals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also survey some current theological writings on the subject of Christian duty to animals in order to compare the basic ethical assumptions of both centuries' interpretations of the Biblical texts, and suggest that modern problems in animal welfare might still be addressed by these same Biblically based ethical formulas, enlightened by scientific knowledge about animals.