Then, again, it is too often overlooked that the rights claimed for animals, as for men, are not absolute but conditional (“this restricted freedom” is Herbert Spencer’s expression), and that a recognition of the rights of other beings is not incompatible with an equal assertion of one’s own. Self-defence is the first and most obvious right of everyone. If, for instance, we hold that a tiger has a right to be spared any unnecessary torture, are we compelled on that account to allow him to eat us if he comes out of his cage? And how would our shooting the tiger, under those untoward circumstances, prove that the tiger is not a “person,” inasmuch as murderers and _human_ tigers, are similarly treated under similar conditions? This “tiger” argument, to which Professor Ritchie was much addicted, is really very small game.
Attempts are still made, from time to time, to revive the old Cartesian doctrine that animals do not feel pain. Thus Mr. E. Kay Robinson, in a book entitled “The Religion of Nature” (1906) has sought to bring peace and comfort to the minds of his readers, and to reconcile the seeming cruelties of Nature with the existence of a merciful God, by proving that the non-human races, unlike mankind, have no consciousness of suffering, even when they exhibit all the symptoms of pain and show a dread of its recurrence. This is nothing but the ancient doctrine of Descartes in a new garb, and is itself the outcome of the old anthropocentric view of the world.
On the practical results that would follow the general acceptance of Mr. Robinson’s theories it is hardly worth while to speculate. He himself is at pains to suggest that while the Cartesian doctrine undoubtedly led to cruelty in the past, the modern Robinsonian version of it would have the opposite effect. I greatly doubt it. For to whatever extent it is true that animals are unconscious of pain, to the same extent it must be true that there is no “cruelty” (in the true sense of the term) in “paining” them. An enlightened man, no doubt, will avoid any tyrannical interference with the lives of other beings, whether they are conscious or not, but the majority of men are not enlightened, nor in any hurry to become so; we are living, in fact, in an age of very gross and palpable savagery, out of which nothing can lift us but the growing sense of kinship. Mr. Robinson’s book is one of the latest attempts--and, in some respects, the feeblest--to impair in a very important respect this sense of close kinship between the human and the non-human, and for that reason I regard it as very mischievous in its tendency. As a fair instance of Mr. Robinson’s logic, let us take his triumphant citation of the fact that even a human being, when engaged in some desperate and painful struggle, is often conscious, for the moment, of neither fear nor pain. From this Mr. Robinson quietly assumes that animals are _always_ thus unconscious, because (_a_) some of their actions and emotions are so, and (_b_) “we have no right to suppose that one action or emotion of an animal is more conscious than another.” But, on the contrary, we have every right to suppose that consciousness varies in animals, as in men, as may be gathered from the indifference which two fighting dogs will show to the blows rained upon them by their owners, though at a moment of less excitement the same blows would elicit the most obvious signs of pain.