ABSTRACT
Singer and utilitarianism My Introduction plunged the reader, with few preliminaries, into some heady issues. It is now time to return to those preliminaries and examine the background to the contemporary flurry of concern for animals. It has a varied and enlightening history stretching back as far as one likes to think; primitive man farmed animals as well as hunting them and implicit in both activities is some concern for their welfare and interest in their habits. The earliest written sources usually cited are biblical ones with their obvious importance for the religious attitudes towards animals exemplified in Judaism and Christianity. But the history is not essential for an understanding of the crop of recent theories and will be found more apropos against a contemporary background. So it is to these theories that we turn.
