Edward Payson Evans
Edward Payson Evans (December 8, 1831 – March 6, 1917) was an American scholar, linguist and early advocate for animal rights. He is best known for his book "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals", published in 1906, which is considered to be the seminal work on the topic of animal trials. Biography. Evans was born in Remsen, New York in 1831. His father was a Welsh Presbyterian clergyman. Evans earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in 1854. He then taught at an academy in Hernando, Mississippi, for one year before becoming a  professor at Carroll University (then Carroll College) in Waukesha, Wisconsin. From 1858 to 1862, he traveled abroad, and studied at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Munich. On his return to the United States, he became professor of modern languages at the University of Michigan. In 1868, he married Elizabeth Edson Gibson. In 1870, Evans resigned his position at Michigan and went abroad again, where he gathered materials for a history of German literature, and also made a specialty of oriental languages. He became a fixture at the Royal Library in Munich, and joined the staff of the "Allgemeine Zeitung  in Munich in 1884. Evans' wife died in 1911 and when World War I broke out in 1914, he returned to the United States, where he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City. He died at his home in New York on March 6, 1917. Legacy. Roderick Nash argues that both Evans and J. Howard Moore, deserve more recognition than they have received as the first professional philosophers in the United States to look beyond anthropocentrism." In recent years, Evans' book "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" has been the subject of several critiques. Edward Payson Evans