her with clubs, stabbing her with pikes and feeding her lit cigarettes.
Tospy was ordered to be hanged, but then Thomas Edison showed up and offered to electrocute Topsy. She was shackled, fed carrots laced with potassium cyanide and jolted with 6,600 volts of alternating current. Before a crowd of 1,500 onlookers, Topsy shivered, toppled and died in a cloud of dust. Edison filmed the entire event. He titled his documentary short, “Electrocuting the Elephant.”
Topsy received no trial. It was not even imagined that she had grievances, a justification for her violent actions. Topsy was killed because she’d become a liability. Her death was a business decision, pure and simple.
So what happened? How did animals come to be viewed as mindless commodities? One explanation is that modernity rudely intruded in the rather frail form of René Descartes. The great Cartesian disconnect not only cleaved mind from body, but also severed humans from the natural world. Descartes postulated that animals were mere physical automatons. They were biological machines whose actions were driven solely by bio-physical instincts. Animals lacked the power of cognition, the ability to think and reason. They had a brain but no mind. At Port-Royal the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervor, and in the words of one of Descartes’s biographers, “kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.” Across the Channel Francis Bacon declared in the Novum Organum that the proper aim of science was to restore the divinely ordained dominance of man over nature, “to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man and so to endow him with “infinite commodities.” Bacon’s doctor, William Harvey, was a diligent vivisector of living animals.
Thus did the great sages of the Enlightenment assert humanity’s ruthless primacy over the Animal Kingdom. The materialistic view of history, and the fearsome economic and technological pistons driving it, left no room for either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow beings. They had been rendered philosophically and literally in resources for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor, entertainment and food.
Conveniently for humans, the philosophers of the Industrial Age declared that animal had no sense of their miserable condition. They could not understand abuse, they had no conception of suffering, they could not feel pain. When captive animals bit, trampled or killed their human captors, it wasn’t an act of rebellion against abusive treatment but merely a reflex. There was no need, therefore, to investigate the motivations behind these violent encounters because there could be no premeditation at all on the animal’s part. The confrontations could not be crimes. They were mere accidents, nothing more.
One wonders what Descartes would have made of the group of orangutans, who stole crowbars and screwdrivers from zookeepers in San Diego to repeatedly break out of their enclosures? How’s that for cognition, cooperation and tool use, Monsieur Descartes?
In 1668, Jean Racine, a playwright not known for his facility with farce, wrote a comedy satirizing the trials of animals. Written eighteen years after the death of Descartes, Les Plaideurs (The Litigants) tells the story of a senile old man obsessed with judging, who eventually places the family dog on trial for stealing a capon from the kitchen table. The mutt is convicted and sentenced to death. Then the condemned canine’s lawyer makes a last minute plea for mercy and reveals a litter of puppies before the judge. The old man is moved and the harsh hand of justice is stayed.
Racine’s comedy, loosely based on Aristophanes’s The Wasps, bombed, playing only two nights before closing, perhaps because the public had not yet been convinced by the solons of Europe to fully renounce their kinship with natural creatures. Revealingly, the play was resurrected a century later by the Comedie-Française to packed houses. By then public attitudes toward animals had shifted decisively in favor of human exceptionalism. According some accounts, the play has now become the most frequently performed French comedy, having been presented in more than 1,400 different productions.
Contrast Descartes’s sterile, homocentric view with that of a much greater intellect, Michel de Montaigne. Writing a mere fifty years before Descartes, Montaigne, the most gifted French prose stylist, declared: “We understand them no more than they us. By the same token they may as well esteem us beasts as we them.” Famously, he wrote in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” Montaigne was distressed by the barbarous treatment of animals: “If I see but a chicken’s neck pulled off or a pig sticked, I cannot choose but grieve; and I cannot well endure a silly dew-bedabbled hare to groan when she is seized upon by the hounds.”
But the materialists held sway. Descartes was backed up the grim John Calvin, who proclaimed that the natural world was a merely a material resource to be exploited for the benefit of humanity, “True it is that God hath given us the birds for our food,” Calvin declared. “We know he hath made the whole world for us.”
John Locke, the father of modern liberal thinking, described animals as “perfect machines” available for unregulated use by man. The animals could be sent to the slaughterhouse with no right of appeal. In Locke’s coldly utilitarian view, cows, goats, chickens and sheep were simply meat on feet.
Thus was the Great Chain of Being ruthlessly transmuted into an iron chain with a manacle clasped round the legs and throats of animals, hauling them off to zoos, circuses, bull rings and abattoirs.
Karl Marx, that supreme materialist, ridiculed the Romantic poets for their “deification of Nature” and chastised Darwin for his “natural, zoological way of thinking.” Unfortunately, Marx’s great intellect was not empathetic enough to extend his concepts of division of labor, alienation and worker revolt to the animals harnessed into grim service by the lords of capital. By the 1930s, so Matt Cartmill writes in his excellent history of hunting, A View to a Death in the Morning, “some Marxist thinkers… urged that it was time to put an end to nature and that animals and plants that serve no human purpose ought to be exterminated.”
Marx liked to disparage his enemies by calling them baboons. But what would Marx have made of the baboons of northern Africa, hunted down by animal traders, who slaughtered nursing mother baboons and stole their babies for American zoos and medical research labs. The baboon communities violently resisted this risible enterprise, chasing the captors through the wilderness all the way to the train station. Some of the baboons even followed the train for more than a hundred miles and at distant stations launched raids on the cars in an attempt to free the captives. How’s that for fearless solidarity?
Fidel Castro, one of Marx’s most ardent political practitioners, reinvented himself in his 80s as a kind of eco-guerilla, decrying the threat of global warming and advocating green revolutions. Yet Castro likes nothing more than to take visiting journalists to the Acuario Nacional de la Habana to watch captive dolphins perform tricks. The cetaceans are kept in wretched conditions, often trapped in waters so saturated with chlorine that it burns ulcers in the skin and peels the corneas off the eyeballs. Cuba captures and breeds dolphins for touring exhibitions and for sale to notoriously noxious aquatic parks throughout South America. The captive dolphins in Havana are trained by Celia Guevara, daughter of Che. There, as in other dolphin parks, food is used as a weapon in the pitiless reconditioning of the brainy sea mammals. Do the trick right or you don’t get fed. Is it any wonder then that many captive dolphins have chosen to bite the hand that starves them?
In this respect, at least, Adam Smith comes out a little more humane than the Marxists. Although he viewed animals as property, Smith recoiled at the sight of the abattoir: “The trade of a butcher is a brutal and odious business.”
Through the ages, it’s been the poets who have largely held firm in their affinity with the natural world. Consider the Metamorphoses composed by the Roman poet and political dissident Ovid around the time of Christ’s birth. In the final book of this
