Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal 527

484 | Religion, History, and the Animal Protection Movement theologians of the Middle Ages, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, who taught the Aristotelian doctrine that only beings with rational souls, that is, human beings, are entitled to ethical treatment, and that we have no direct moral duties to animals From the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the fourth century, when Pythagoreanism was eradicated, until the Protestant Reformation more than a millennium later, there was no animal advocacy in Christian Europe To the extent that kindness to animals was encouraged at all, it was on the grounds that it predisposed people to kindness toward other humans The Catholic Church did not fully endorse animal welfare until a new universal catechism issued by Pope John Paul II in 1992 embraced both elements of the Biblical Compromise Judaism’s other daughter religion, Islam, took the opposite tack From the beginning, Islam incorporated animal welfare into its core ethical teachings But Islam also continued the ancient practice of animal sacrifice, which to this day takes place once a year, at the festival of Eid-al-Adha, which celebrates the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim whose circumstances permit is obligated to make at least once in his or her lifetime In Mecca and around the world, millions of animals, primarily sheep and goats less than a year old, are slaughtered as a token of the believers’ submission to the will of God The Protestant Reformation Revives Animal Welfare As the modern age arrived in Europe, Protestant theologians like John Calvin and John Wesley discovered the Biblical Compromise in the Hebrew Scriptures and taught both of its elements: that we may exploit and slaughter animals for human benefit, and that we must spare them any suffering that is not essential to their use In 1641, a Puritan clergyman named Nathaniel Ward wrote the Western world’s first animal welfare law into the legal code of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the so-called Massachusetts Body of Liberties: “No man shall exercise any cruelty or tyranny toward any brute creature which is usually kept for man’s use.” It was an Anglican priest, Rev Dr Humphrey Primatt who was largely responsible for bringing animal welfare to the attention of the general public In 1776, he published a small book which achieved a broad readership among England’s liberal social reformers, The Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals Inspired by The Duty of Mercy, another Anglican priest, Rev Arthur Broome, came to see animal welfare as his Christian ministry In 1824, Rev Broome convened a meeting in London of leading British abolitionists and social reformers, including Richard Martin, a member of Parliament who two years earlier had sponsored the second animal welfare act in the modern world following the Massachusetts Body of Liberties These liberal opinion leaders created an organization to educate the public about animal cruelty and to bring prosecutions against abusers under Martin’s Act The group did not challenge the exploitation and slaughter of animals for human benefit, but vigorously opposed cruelty that was not intrinsic to their use In 1840, it received the sponsorship of Queen Victoria and became known by its present name, The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals From this beginning,