page_title: Animal rights
section_title: American SPCA, Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford
hierarchical_section_title: Animal rights / Historical development in the West / 19th century: Emergence of jus animalium / American SPCA, Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford
caption_attribution_description: English: Anna Kingsford (1846–1888), one of the first women in Europe at the time to obtain a medical degree. Well known anti-vivisectionist, vegetarian, and women's rights campaigner.
context_page_description: Animal rights is the idea in which some, or all, animals are entitled to the possession of their own existence and that their most basic interests—such as the need to avoid suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. That is, some species of animals have the right to be treated as the individuals they are, with their own desires and needs, rather than as an unfeeling property.
  Its advocates oppose the assignment of moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone—an idea known since 1970 as speciesism, when the term was coined by Richard D. Ryder—arguing that it is a prejudice as irrational as any other. They maintain that animals should no longer be viewed as property or used as food, clothing, research subjects, entertainment, or beasts of burden. Multiple cultural traditions around the world such as Jainism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Animism also espouse some forms of animal rights.
  In parallel to the debate about moral rights, animal law is now widely taught in law schools in North America, and several legal scholars, such as Steven M. Wise and Gary L.
context_section_description: An early proposal for legal rights for animals came from a group of citizens in Ashtabula County, Ohio. Around 1844, the group proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution stating that if slaves from slave states were receiving representation as 3/5 of a person on the basis that they were animal property, all the animal property of the free states should receive representation also.
  The first animal protection group in the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), was founded by Henry Bergh in April 1866. Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to a diplomatic post in Russia, and had been disturbed by the mistreatment of animals he witnessed there. He consulted with the president of the RSPCA in London, and returned to the United States to speak out against bullfights, cockfights, and the beating of horses. He created a "Declaration of the Rights of Animals", and in 1866 persuaded the New York state legislature to pass anti-cruelty legislation and to grant the ASPCA the authority to enforce it.
  In 1875, the Irish social reformer Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, the world's first organization opposed to animal research, which became the National Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1880, the English feminist Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) became one of the first English women to graduate in medicine, after studying for her degree in Paris, and the only student at the time to do so without having experimented on animals. She published The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), advocating vegetarianism, and in the same year founded the Food Reform Society. She was also vocal in her opposition to experimentation on animals. In 1898, Cobbe set up the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, with which she campaigned against the use of dogs in research, coming close to success with the 1919 Dogs (Protection) Bill, which almost became law.
  Ryder writes that, as the interest in animal protection grew in the late 1890s, attitudes toward animals among scientists began to harden. They embraced the idea that what they saw as anthropomorphism—the attribution of human qualities to nonhumans—was unscientific. Animals had to be approached as physiological entities only, as Ivan Pavlov wrote in 1927, "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states." It was a position that hearkened back to Descartes in the 17th century, that nonhumans were purely mechanical, with no rationality and perhaps even no consciousness.
caption: Anna Kingsford, one of the first English women to graduate in medicine, published The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), advocating vegetarianism.
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