![]() According to Michel Foucault, to whom we owe this formulation, biopolitics re-inscribes biological living within the social order through the supervision of life’s processes: “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity” ( History of Sexuality 139). Indeed, the enactment of animal rights legislation in the nineteenth century makes visible a specific discursive mechanism that lies at the heart of a new form of political rationality that begins to take shape at the end of the eighteenth century when the fact of biological living-the status of the human as a living animal-becomes politicized at the level of population, of species, of race. The passage of these acts, together with the vigilant efforts and vigorous lobbying of organizations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Victoria Street Society, ensured that animal baiting, staged animal fights, unregulated animal vivisection, and other practices common to the eighteenth century were gradually outlawed or restricted over the course of the nineteenth.īut the history of Animal Acts in nineteenth-century Britain must also be understood as a gradual recalibration of human/animal relations in the course of which the figure of the animal comes to play a crucial, if less easily discernible, role in the political life of the nation. (See Ivan Kreilkamp, “The Ass Got a Verdict: Martin’s Act and the Founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1822″ and Susan Hamilton, “On the Cruelty to Animals Act, 15 August 1876.″) The political realignment of the human/animal divide was premised on the philosophical positioning of the animal as a sentient being, a formulation for moral considerability that can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, who famously argued that consideration of animal suffering, rather than their capacity to reason or speak, ought to guide our relations to non-humans. A series of Parliamentary Acts-the Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle of 1822 (also known as Martin’s Act), the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835, which was repealed and replaced in 1849, 1850, 1854, and 1876, and the Wild Animals in Captivity Act of 1900-gave legal form to the growing political demand to face humans’ ethical responsibility towards animals. Figure 1: cover of the first edition of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated by John Lockwood KiplingThe history of animal rights in nineteenth-century Britain is both a story of gradual though significant legislative gains in the fight against the mistreatment of animals by humans and a vivid reminder of the constructed character of the line that separates human from non-human animals. ![]()
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