History of animal rights

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The concept of moral rights for animals is believed to date as far back as Ancient India, particularly early Jainist and Hindu history. What follows is mainly the history of animal rights (or more broadly, animal protection) in the Western world. There is a rich history of animal protection in the ancient texts, lives, and stories of Eastern, African, and Indigenous peoples.

Aristotle placed human beings at the top of nature's scale of being. Because animals lack reason, he said, they are by nature instruments for human use. But there were other philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome who were more sympathetic to animals, some maintaining that animals do exercise a degree of reason and are owed gentle treatment. Also from ancient times there can be found in all the world's major religious traditions, expressed in varying ways, injunctions against cruelty to animals.

Key scholars in the history of animal ethics include René Descartes, who in the 17th century maintained that animals are automata lacking any consciousness; Immanuel Kant, who argued that we have no duties directly to animals; and Jeremy Bentham, who insisted that animals’ capacity to suffer must be included in our moral reckoning. Charles Darwin argued not only that there is an evolutionary biological continuity between humans and (other) animals, but also that humans differ from animals mentally and emotionally in degree only.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the growth of the anti-vivisection movement, which advocated against the use and exploitation of live animals in scientific research. Women within the movement played a prominent role in its growth and influence within the broader scientific community.^{[citation needed]}

Beginning in the 1970s, there was a surge of interest among philosophers and other scholars in the issue of the treatment of animals, something that continues to this day. This has been accompanied by, and has to some extent influenced, many forms of activism on behalf of animals. This activism is intended to raise public awareness and to change laws, in order to make a major, even revolutionary, practical difference in the lives of animals and in our relationships to them.