Our dignity arises within nature, not against it. People in general have perhaps thought of animal welfare as they have thought of drains - as a worthy but not particularly interesting subject. In the last few decades, however, their imagination has been struck, somewhat suddenly, by a flood of new and fascinating information about animals. Some dim conception of splendours and miseries hitherto undreamt of, of the vast range of sentient life, of the richness and complexity found in even the simplest creatures, has started to penetrate even to the least imaginative. For the first time in civilized history, people who were interested in animals because they wanted to understand them, rather than just to eat or yoke or shoot or stuff them, have been able to advance that understanding by scientific means, and to convey some of it to the inquisitive public.
Animals have to some extent come off the page.
With the bizarre assistance of TV, Darwin is at last getting through. Town-dwellers are beginning to notice the biosphere. To their minds, human dignity justified and depended on a total separation of man from all the rest of creation. That's why they got such a shock when the Origin of Species came out. Someone who has buttressed his sense of his own dignity by allowing no dignity at all to anybody else, naturally feels any suggestion of a relationship with those others as intolerably degrading.