Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840 under a charter granted by Queen Victoria. The goal was to enforce prosecution of violators of the animal cruelty laws and promote even tighter strictures. Since then, the animal rights movement has only waxed in power, spreading to all countries in the developed world. It sometimes took some bizarre turns: Animal rights, for example, were part of the Third Reich agenda in the years leading up to World War II. In 1934, tough hunting bans were passed in Nazi Germany, followed by laws regulating animal transport and restricting vivisection.
From the beginning, animal rights advocates generated fierce opposition. The RSPCA, in particular, has been vilified by its opponents since its earliest meetings. The rancor increased as the society made its influence felt, however nominally, in Britain’s colonies, including those in Africa. That most accomplished of satirists, Evelyn Waugh, savagely lampooned animal rights advocates in his acrid 1932 novel, Black Mischief. At one point in the book, Dame Mildred Porch, a leading light of the RSPCA, decides to investigate reports of animal cruelty in Anzania, an island nation that is a pastiche of Zanzibar, Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.
Waugh portrays Dame Mildred as an arrant snob and a feckless, irredeemable busybody who cares far more about animals than human suffering. On arriving in country, she writes a letter to her husband, noting, “I have heard very disagreeable accounts of the hunting here. Apparently the natives dig deep pits into which the poor animals fall; they are then left in these traps for several days without food or water (imagine what that means in the jungle) and are then mercilessly butchered in cold blood.” Later, she notes in her dairy: “Condition of mules and dogs appalling, also children.” And still later: “Road to station blocked [due to] broken motor lorry. Natives living in it. Also two goats. Seemed well but cannot be healthy for them so near natives.”
Dame Mildred makes her way to the Anzanian capital of Debra-Dowa, where she is feted by the country’s young emperor, Seth. Determined to demonstrate Anzania’s modernity, Seth throws a banquet for Dame Mildred. But he misapprehends the name of her sponsoring organization, interpreting it as the English Society for Cruelty to Animals—an understandable mistake, given that animal cruelty is a fact of Anzanian life. He prints gilt-edged menus for the occasion, which include such offerings as Small Roasted Suckling Porks and Hot Sheep and Onions—dishes calculated to appeal to anyone with a predilection for hurting animals. Needless to say, Dame Mildred is deeply offended, and the scene dissolves into typical Waughian farce.
Of course, the RSPCA’s attempts at influencing animal welfare policy in Africa have hardly been so ham-handed; for the most part, their efforts are focused on programs aimed at improving conditions for domestic animals. One campaign involves the promotion of humane methods for dealing with dogs infected with rabies, a perennial threat to both canids and humans in Africa. As regards cattle, the organization implies that the situation is better in some ways in Africa than in Europe and the United States, noting with approval that pastoral lifestyles provide cattle with “a good standard of welfare.” In other words, the animals get to roam around almost at will on the range, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine—in virtually all ways, an existence superior to that of cattle consigned to the feedlots and factory dairies in the developed world. Still, the RSPCA notes African cows, sheep, camels, and goats suffer greatly in other ways, specifically when it comes to their transport and slaughter. The group is now prodding African nations to enforce the World Organization for Animal Health guidelines in their livestock sectors.
An exception to this general focus on domestic animals is the RSPCA’s work in Zambia, where it is attempting to reduce conflicts between elephants and villagers in the areas surrounding national parks. Working in partnership with the French NGO Awely, the RSPCA is promoting an “animal friendly” approach that involves crushing powerful chili peppers and macerating them in motor oil. This highly irritating admixture is then slathered on fence posts bordering the reserve lands—a highly effective means for keeping elephants in the parks and out of maize patches on adjacent private lands, claims the RSPCA. As part of the program, about two hundred farmers have been contracted to grow the requisite chilies.
(As an aside, anyone who has seen elephants interacting with fences in Africa must be excused if they take such rosy reportage with a grain of salt. Even fences constructed of structural steel posts and high-tensile, highly charged electrical wire are not proof against determined elephants, which typically drop large branches or even whole trees onto electric barriers to short them out. Chili pepper concentrate could certainly irritate them and may even confound them for a period of time, but effectively exclude them from lush maize and pumpkin patches? No.)
Like all promoters of significant social causes, the animal rights movement presents a broad spectrum of doctrines as well as an evolutionary trend: the newer groups tend to espouse a more activist agenda than the older groups. If the Royal and American Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals represent the conservative roots of the movement, groups such the Animal Liberation Front in the United States and Hunt Saboteurs in Britain are the more (depending on perspective) radical or progressive, advocating direct confrontation and even the destruction of private property to save individual animals. The animal rights cause is both more established and more influential in the United States and Europe than in Africa, but it is growing robustly on the African continent, particularly in Kenya and South Africa.
As in Europe and the United States, the melding of animal rights with conservation is a hallmark of these newer African environmental groups. Earthlife Africa, based in Johannesburg, is a typical example. It casts a very large net, supporting campaigns for animal rights, biodiversity, the reduction of toxics, carbon mitigation, the treatment of acid mine drainage, and the production of sustainable energy.
The most influential groups are more focused but still hew to a doctrine that equates animal liberation with conservation. The International Fund for Animal Welfare and Born Free are certainly the best known of these organizations, but despite the complaints of their critics, they are hardly the most aggressive. That claim would properly go to Animal Rights Africa, a South African group founded in 2008. Animal Rights Africa uses a logo of a lion’s paw print superimposed on a clenched fist and espouses a “total liberation” philosophy for animals that, while familiar to activists in the developed world, is new in Africa—and distinctly disturbing to the continent’s old-school conservationists.
The keynote speaker to the Animal Rights Africa inaugural event was Steven Best, an associate professor of humanities and philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso and a leader in the animal rights movement. Best combines animal liberation, environmentalism, and social progress into a syncretic philosophy that essentially demands equal rights for all living creatures. In his keynote speech, Best declaimed,
The interests of one species (Homo sapiens) are represented as millions go unrecognized except as resources to be preserved for human use. But in the last three decades a new social movement has emerged—animal liberation. Its power and potential has yet to be recognized, but it deserves equal representation in the politics of the twenty-first century. . . . Every year alone humans butcher seventy billion land and marine animals for food; millions more die in experimental laboratories, fur farms, hunting preserves, and countless other killing zones. . . . On a strategic level, the animal liberation movement is essential for the human and earth liberation movements. In numerous key ways, the domination of humans over animals underlies the domination of human over human and propels the environmental crisis. Moreover, the animal liberation movement is the most dynamic and fastest growing social movement of the day, and other liberation movements ignore, mock, or trivialize it at their peril.
In the coda to his speech, Best urges animal liberationists to link up with—and dominate—other progressive movements and intimates that Africa is ripe for such engagement: “The kind of alliance politics one finds in South Africa remains weak and abstract so long as animal liberation and vegan interests are excluded. . . . The animal liberation movement can no longer afford to be single-issue and isolationist but must link to other social justice and environmental movements. Each movement has much to learn from the
