What is that history, and what are some of the issues that it ignores or oversimplifies?
It’s important to understand that research on the history of European attitudes towards animals is very new. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that significant work on the subject began. What that work presents us with is an unexpected account of the human/animal divide in Europe, one whose implications we should attend to. It tells us that the history of animal protection belongs neither to the ideological “right” nor to the “left,” and that laws made to protect animals fall sometimes within a progressive agenda, sometimes within a repressive one. We tend to think that the history of animal protection is simply about the relationship of humans to other animals, or that it is coupled to liberalism and other movements of liberation that trace Europe’s trajectory from feudalism to modernity. But what is at stake in the history of animal protection is power, and that power is shifting, not linear, and sometimes it’s very malign. And why is the standard version of this history attracti
