In a strange ironic twist, it was in Paris in 1793, at the time of the birth of the great Enlightenment ideals of human liberation, that the first modern zoo opened, confining and displaying the exotic animals for the French aristocrats. Enlightenment thinkers had been busy finding solutions to human predicaments, concentrating on human ideals, opening up another giant crack in the Enlightenment: besides leaving out women, Blacks, and Native people, the Enlightenment completely ignored the natural world. The moral value of the earth and its animal and plant life was left essentially if not unaddressed but completely unattended in the Enlightenment, and the abundant existence of non-human life was taken for granted and eventually damaged at the hands of the industrialists, entrepreneurs and superficial aristocrats who cared about themselves and their wealth.

The European-American mind of that time was in general still very captive to the biblical message that human beings were ‘supreme beings’, the pinnacle of life created in God’s image, and all of nature, the resources and animals and plants, the entire earth in fact, was created simply for humans to use. For example, the hobby of hunting for the European aristocracy was so rampant to an extent that they annihilated all the carnivore predators so that it would make it safe for the rich aristocrats and royalties to enter forest for hunting deer, antelopes or birds without themselves being attacked by wolves, bears or leopards. Such an eradication of the wild predators has continued to have environmental consequences for the ecosystem equilibrium back then and even now.

As a result of the biblical belief of the time, most Enlightenment thinkers were oblivious to the interdependence between our human species and nature. There was an enormous gap between the ideals of human life and any ideals related to the natural world. The concept of applying ‘rights,’ those ideals deemed to be so essential to a free human life, to other types of life on Earth was completely unthinkable. This outlook would lead to deep misunderstandings of natural life and often resulted in awful scenarios of destruction, and we as a species are still trying to make amends to the earth for the damages done during that time.

It didn’t have to end up this way. Not all Enlightenment thinkers were disconnected, or oblivious of animal rights and nature. A handful of men wrote inspiringly and made contributions in nature philosophy. In the early 19th century, the idea and philosophy of ecology was introduced by the German Romantic Friedrich Schelling, making some impact on the Enlightenment intellectual culture. The young Schelling in his early days of professorship at Jena, Germany spoke of human and nature as being identical. He saw the bond of the mind and nature as being much deeper than perceived during his time.

He was joined in these forward-thinking ideas by passionate naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who, before the expedition of Charles Darwin to Galapagos in 1835, traveled throughout the Americas. His ground-breaking work studying the distribution of vegetation based on altitude and climate, and exploring ecosystems and evolutionary processes and influences from the climate on life, paved the way for the study of future environmentalism and awareness of the interconnection of all life forms. And the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who incorporated the Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism into his literature, also brought up the debate of human violence against animals. (See Reinhard Margreiter, Schopenhauers Tierethik im kulturellen West-Ost-Dialog.)

And at the same time, in the U.S. the young and rebellious transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau wrote his diary Walden, poignantly describing life in the woods. He insightfully described the elegant life of the plants and animals, and their participation in the higher laws that govern life.

But the works of these few insightful individuals, while powerful in their own right, held little sway over the prevailing attitude of separation and dominion. Indigenous people of the colonies of the time could have offered much in the way of a more inclusive view of the earth, but their cultures were uniformly viewed by the ‘experts’ as being primitive and, ironically, unenlightened.

Thus, despite the efforts of those few naturalists such as Humboldt and Thoreau, animal rights and the protection of nature would ultimately be at the mercy of the profiteering and aristocratic classes for many years to come.

Atrocities Against Animals Accelerated

Destruction took place in a myriad of directions. Colonialists and entrepreneurs during their time in Africa, Asia and the Americas, with their continuous deforestation and logging, caused the displacement of large and small animals, not to mention the forced migration of indigenous people from their villages. As a consequence of this greedy manipulation of nature so many animals lost their natural habitat and their chain of food was disturbed to the extent that some have gone extinct, a damage that is still being assessed to this day.

While traditional societies hunted animals for food and sustenance, money-oriented hunters went after exotic animals such as leopards, tigers, foxes, bears, elephants and other rare mammals for trade and for the decoration of living rooms. This perverse, almost exclusively male display of using guns to wield power over mighty animals was quite immature, and could have been prevented in the early stages of The Enlightenment if animal rights had been considered

On top of this kind of insensitive act, hunting animals for sport went on relentlessly, especially during the Victorian era in which it became a favorite of the upper classes. The killing of animals, apparently, was not a moral issue for the Enlightenment and those highly moral Victorian thinkers. But killing animals was not a moral issue when animals were not considered to be truly sentient, and hence they did not fall under the umbrella of morality.

Thoreau himself said that while killing animals as the source of food for humans is a necessity at times, ideally one could shift to eating vegetables and other crops rather than kill for food. When needed, the fisherman takes what is needed for food consumption. But hunting animals for sport, Thoreau declared, makes humans a killer, a murderer. ‘Grownups’, he said, meaning mature human beings, do not kill animals, because animals are our equals in our animality and by killing them we have killed fellow family members. In this way, he tried to change the mindset of the Western man who hunted animals, but even today hunting for pleasure still continues in many areas of the world.

Hunting, or, as Thoreau called it: ‘murder’ has had a scandalous history. Despite Thoreau’s insights, disaster was about to unfold. Not too long after Thoreau’s time, in 1870-71, the U.S. Army sponsored the infamous Grand Buffalo Hunt (read: massacre) as a brutal way to starve the indigenous Lakota Sioux People. The Sioux, Kiowa and Comanches and other tribes that lived also nearby depended on the buffalo herds as their source of livelihood, using the skins for tents and clothing and the meat for food. In matter of two years, more than 4,000 buffalo were killed by mercenaries. By removing the Lakota food supply, the Army forced them to give up their land in order to survive. The land was then taken for the purpose of building rail roads, telegraphs, and of course for more settlers. The new white settlers in that country relentlessly hunted buffalos in the millions, sometimes for fun. Besides the devastating effects on the Native American tribes, this slaughter took the buffalo almost to a point of extinction.  This is one of the gloomiest recorded animal tragedies in history. (Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/).

The hunting business for pleasure continued especially by the elites. One of the controversies is about Theodor Roosevelt who nationalized parks and left a progressive political heritage behind in the U.S. and yet went on to constantly hunt animals in his spare time. His lack of respect of the majestic animal life is epitomized in his 1910 Safari trip to Rwanda where he killed tens of lions, elephants, rhinos, and other rare animals for their skins, heads, and other body parts to bring back home as souvenirs. This violence against animals were not even an issue of conversation during his time even though in his progressive political life he wanted a better life for the unprivileged classes. This means, animal rights remained unattended during the peak of the Enlightenment.

But as time passed decades later the environmentalists and animal rights activists brought the atrocities against animals to the surface and warned that some species of animals are endangered and are at the brink of extinction. One of the most infamous murders (using Thoreau’s word) for pleasure among others, was nearly a century later, in 2012, when Juan Carlos, the former fugitive king of Spain, killed a beloved elephant in Botswana, global outrage making the headlines. The king had been taught from his youth to hunt all kinds of animals for his leisurely pursuit. In fact, Spain doesn’t have a good record in this regard: the Spanish and South American bull-running festivals and the bull’s gradual torturing and murdering by a matador is nothing but human cruelty and the absence of compassion. Invoking the value of “tradition and culture” can no longer be used as a justification of such inhumane treatment of an animal.

One could argue that the Enlightenment thinkers didn’t know enough about nature to be able to think more clearly and holistically about the interrelationships of life on earth and the nature of the human – animal relationship. It was not even fully established, in fact, that far from being divine yet, human beings were an evolutionary and complex animal of nature. Over time, the discoveries of science began to erase the illusory separation between humans and animals; proof of evolution began to appear and the religious story receded slightly into the background.

Awakening to Our Human Roots

It is interesting to imagine how Enlightenment thinkers may have reacted to hearing about the discovery of DNA and its implications. This scientific discovery of DNA in 1953 revealed the common currency of all living beings including humans in nature is the DNA. The discovery also showed the human pedigree and common ancestry with other primates and hominids. Would the Enlightenment thinkers have been more likely to see animals as worthy of rights and protections? What would they have thought about Svante Pääbo’s Nobel-prize-winning discovery in physiology-medicine, that modern humans carry 1-3% of Neanderthal genes? What would they think about the proven fact of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as well as Denisovans, another archaic hominid?

These discoveries of the relationships between animals and us in nature should dethrone us from considering ourselves as supreme beings, and should instead humble us and make us more empathetic toward other animals.

In fact, the closeness of social animals and humans is genetically predisposed. The study of chimpanzees by Jane Goodall demonstrated how their world and ours as primates are close to each other; after all we share 98% of the same DNA. In the time of the Enlightenment, it was largely believed that animals did not have emotions, maybe didn’t even feel pain. But now we know that the emotions of animals are perhaps closer to our emotions than we thought, with experiments showing that animals have mirror neurons, just as we do.  Schopenhauer and Thoreau would certainly have agreed that animals can benefit more and we as humans can improve our empathy by banning the confinement of social animals in cages in zoos. The selfish human wish of seeing exotic animals has caused symptoms of depression and desperation in animals in cages.

And animals have their own ways of perceiving the world, which we can respect just as much as we would another person’s perception. The elegant ways in which animals live and see themselves are currently being deeply explored. (“How Animals See Themselves” New York Times June 20, 2022).

Today, our renewed awareness of the law of interdependency compels us to understand that the presence of all animals in nature and in our lives is designed to maintain the equilibrium in the ecosystem. Everything in nature has its critical role to play. The simple fact is that if bees were to go extinct, pollination drops and food production would go into crisis. To this extent, all animals play their direct and indirect roles in our own lives. And our role is to enact animal, plant and earth protection as an evolutionary and holistic wisdom. We know by now that we should be protectors rather than destroyers.