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Please Print Attach Label 
Beastly Rights 
by Joseph Kastner 
Reckoning with the Beast, by 
James Turner. The Johns Hopkins 
University Press, $14.00; 190 pp., 
illus. 
A few months ago, a vociferous 
group of animal welfare organizations 
cornered a big American corporation 
and made history for their cause. Rev- 
lon Inc., besieged by protests that it 
was cruel to use laboratory rabbits 
to find out if its eye makeup might 
irritate customers’ eyes, gave three- 
quarters of a million dollars to Rocke- 
feller University to develop tests that 
would not use — or maybe misuse — 
live animals. 
The company’s humane action 
came, not from the heart, but from 
the bottom line, the threat to its good 
name and profits. In surrendering, 
Revlon may have felt that it had been 
sandbagged by a band of zealots. But, 
as it could discover by reading Reck- 
oning with the Beast, the company 
was really being pushed by one of 
the most pervasive forces in our so- 
ciety: the animal protectors, who ac- 
cording to author James Turner rep- 
resent “a new and distinctly modern 
sensibility.” 
Unlike so many recent books on our 
inhumanity to animals, which veer be- 
tween emotionalism and pragmatism, 
Reckoning with the Beast is cool- 
headed history, ironic rather than 
indignant in tone, wide-angled rather 
than tunnel in its vision. Awesomely 
researched but admirably brief, it 
gives a lucid background for the cur- 
rent arguments over animal rights, a 
term that has joined civil and women’s 
in the contemporary litany of rights. 
The term itself is not new. Jeremy 
Bentham in 1780 matched the rights 
of animals to the revolutionary doc- 
trine of the rights of man. For cen- 
turies before that, however, the idea 
that animals had any rights went 
against the grain of Western thought, 
which denied them a reasoning soul. 
Ergo, neither the concept of cruelty 
nor of pity could be applied to animals. 
A mischievous thinker like Montaigne 
might, in the sixteenth century, re- 
mark that it was only man’s vanity 
that set him apart from his “fellow 
members and companions” of the ani- 
mal kingdom. But not until the eight- 
eenth century was the companionship 
generally recognized. 
The concept was expressed in two 
quite different works. In 1776, a Brit- 
ish cleric named Humphrey Primatt 
published A Dissertation on the Duty 
of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute 
Animals. He put forward the radical 
idea that “pain is pain whether it is 
inflicted on man or beast.” Inflicting 
it on either was equally evil. The same 
message went out from the first Eng- 
lish book of children’s fiction, Goody 
Two-Shoes, whose heroine, Marjorie 
Meanwell, set an example for all chil- 
dren by tirelessly rescuing suffering 
cows and horses. 
The dread of pain, Turner holds, 
is “uniquely characteristic of the mod- 
ern era.” The concept that animals 
feel pain as people do was the basis 
for the animal protection movement 
that sprang up so rapidly in England 
and America in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The first of many cruelty to ani- 
mals bills was introduced into Par- 
liament in 1809 by a former Lord 
Chancellor who had, among his many 
pets, a goose and two leeches. And 
even earlier, a jury in Boston, which 
actually had no law to go by, had 
indicted a man for the “depraved” 
beating of his horse. 
The original Society for the Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Animals was 
formed in London in 1824. It drifted 
along until an inventor named Lewis 
Gompertz took over. Although very 
effective, Gompertz was somewhat ec- 
centric — he refused to eat meat or 
milk or ride in a horse-drawn car- 
riage — and he was a Jew. It was only 
after he was eased out of office that 
the peerage became the society’s gov- 
erning body and Queen Victoria gra- 
ciously permitted appending “royal” 
to the title. The RSPCA thrived. 
This was noted by Henry Bergh, 
a rich young American who, though 
88 
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