ABSTRACT
The languages of environmental advocacy and of animal welfare developed cooperatively over the course of the nineteenth century, negotiating the often conflicting demands of romantic sympathy and rational science. Although conflicts would later arise between the practices of nature conservancy and resource management and the principles of animal advocacy and protection, defences of animals and their environments enjoyed a momentary alliance. In the later nineteenth century, particularly in Great Britain, criticisms of industrial pollution, deforestation, and urban sprawl drew liberally from the rhetoric and imagery developed through debates over the issue of animal experimentation. As citizens of the first industrial nation, British social critics had expressed their concerns over the country’s dwindling green spaces for the better part of a century, yet it was the vivisection debates of the 1870s and 1880s which decisively transformed these scattered criticisms of industrialisation into a coherent and concerted challenge to the ethical limitations of human dominion over the nonhuman. the British antivivisection movement developed a rhetoric and a vocabulary for challenging the anthropocentric basis of unchecked scientific and industrial development, and helped to unite disparate protest movements under the principles of interspecies sympathy and biological kinship.
