New Ways of Looking at Animals

Although theologians and divines were slow to consider changes to the maltreatment of animals from a religious perspective, other thinkers were arguing against it from a philosophical point of view. While adherents of Cartesian philosophy thought that animals could not reason, other philosophers thought they could. This notion was not new. Plutarch, writing on the cleverness of animals in the first century AD, discusses two fellow Greeks who had written about man’s treatment of them. Empedocles (c.494–c.434 BCE), who challenged the practice of animal sacrifice and the killing of animals for food; and Heraclitus (c.535–c.475 BCE), who believed that beasts could only be brought to pasture by blows. Plutarch thought there was another way: