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Animal Skins 109 It was only in the early nineteenth century that notions of human-animal crosses, werewolves, and apemen were generally discounted and a firm line drawn between humans and animals on scientific as well as religious grounds. “How slender so ever it may sometimes appear,” confidently declared the naturalistWilliam Bingley,“the barrier which separates men from brutes is fixed and immutable” (cited in K.Thomas 1983: 35).The hand and the paw could never join. Only humans were human and only animals were bestial. It would not be long, however, before evolutionary theory would forge a new bond between the two groups by claiming that,far from being separate creations, humans had evolved from animals.The human hand, it seemed, had once been a paw, human skin had once been animal skin, and human behavior was merely an offshoot of animal behavior.This new bond between humans and animals made it harder to assert any absolute distinction between the two groups or produce any categorical justification for the domination of the latter by the former. In 1837 a young Charles Darwin wrote that animals are “our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering, and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may all be melted together” (1958: 179). The perceived connection between the enslavement of humans and the enslavement of animals led a number of individuals involved in the anti-slavery movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to also concern themselves with the welfare of animals.WilliamWilberforce,for example,both campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire and helped to found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty toAnimals. However, when institutions of human bondage were attacked by social egalitarians it was almost always at least partly on the grounds that humans should not be treated as animals (Freedman 1999: 55; see also K.Thomas 1983: 48).This argument, employed through the centuries and most particularly in the anti-slavery movement of the 1800s, took for granted that animals should be treated like beasts, that is, forcibly dominated and even deprived of their lives. And so, while the human workforce had its bonds loosened by the modern politics of egalitarianism, the animal workforce remained as enslaved as ever. Animal Souls The most significant difference between humans and animals was not held to be based on the possession of hands or paws, fur or hair, nor on any physical or social distinction.It was based on the possession of the faculty of reason.Humans were said to be rational, animals were said to be irrational.This was the ultimate dividing line between the two groups.Thus,when the question arose of whether Classen_Text.indd 109 3/15/12 2:48 PM 110 chapter five the inhabitants of theAmericas were human or not,the basic issue to be resolved (and eventually settled in their favor) was whether they were rational beings.To be deemed irrational meant that one’s existence was held to be of use only insofar as it might serve one’s rational superiors.As the possession of an immortal soul was tied to rationality, it also meant that a being deemed to be irrational was excluded from any of the benefits of religion and any chance of an afterlife according to Christian theology. Reason was customarily conceptualized as a kind of internalized speech.Consequently , the most important criteria for judging whether a being was rational was usually taken to be the use of spoken language.(It might seem that the use of language by NativeAmericans would have immediately indicated their rationality , but to European ears native speech often seemed mere gibberish.)Animals’ lack of speech hence became the key outward sign of their presumed inward irrationality (Osborne 2007: 64). For some, the fact that animals could not speak out indicated that humans should be particularly protective toward them (or,at least,toward some of them). The fourteenth-century Goodman of Paris, for example, bade housewives to “diligently take thought for your chamber animals . . . for they cannot speak, and therefore must you speak and think for them” (2006: 139). Generally, however, the opposite conclusion was reached: little thought need be given to those who could not speak or think for themselves. Furthermore, since animals could not tell of their ill treatment, there was little reason to fear retribution for any acts committed against them...

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