ABSTRACT
Introduction In Animal Liberation (1983) Singer has a chapter entitled ‘Man’s dominion’. His aim is to persuade us that western culture, as opposed to much eastern thought, is in the grip of an ideology hostile to animals which is so much second nature to us that it ‘resists refutation’ (231). Its original twin supports are the Old Testament and the views of the Ancient Greeks, typified by Aristotle. Both provide for man’s privilege, being, in the words of Genesis, ‘in the image of God’ and his having ‘dominion’ over fish, fowl, cattle and ‘over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’ (Gen. 1: vv. 26-7). In Aristotle’s case the dominion extends to other human beings such as women and slaves. Particularly significant in the development of this ideology was its being channelled through the war-oriented culture of Rome where the grotesque appetite of an otherwise upright and civilised people for the centuries-long institution of the ‘games’, at which literally thousands of animals, military prisoners and criminals could slaughter each other in a single day, demonstrates the almost limitless possibilities of moral polar-vision; the social decencies existing alongside a craving to witness the improvised agony and death of creatures, human and non-human, totally without status. Christianity’s eventual supremacy reasserted the sanctity of human life, Singer argues, but did little to ameliorate the standing of animals, upon which the New Testament and the ministry of Jesus is almost totally silent.
