Opposing Scientific Cruelty: The Emotions and Sensitivities of Protestors against Experiments on Animals

Abstract

After a marked decline, protests against cruelty to animals in scientific experiments acquired fresh momentum from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. This article sets out to show that the analysis of emotions and sensitivities is best able to account for the similarities and differences between historically distant mobilisations. While late twentieth-century activists have revived an emotional register invented by their precursors of the previous century, the meaning they attribute to their revolt has been profoundly transformed by sensitivities that derive from a very different social status and a different range of affective experiences.

Het activisme van dierenbeschermer Jules Ruhl en zijn Maatschappij tegen de wreedheid jegens de dieren tijdens het fin de siècle (1897-1914)

“…Antivivisectie was namelijk een knelpunt voor veel dierenbeschermers en zorgde voor veel discussies. 57 Hoewel de grenzen tussen dierenbescherming en antivivisectie tegen het einde van de 19e eeuw Pagina met een oproep tot bescherming van de vogels. (In: Jules RUHL, Manuel des sociétés contre la cruauté envers les animaux, 1903, p. 9.…”

‘In the name of justice and compassion’: animal protection in Italy during the Liberal Age (1861-1914)

“…While at the beginning the main force behind animal protection was education and the public sphere was the arena chosen for action, this was gradually changed by the animal experimentation debate which universally ‘multiplied’ the number of animal organisations. In the 1870s and 1880s the anti-vivisectionist movement, which began life in England, spread throughout the major European countries, giving rise to 26 new societies (Traïni 2014, 528–529). Furthermore, ‘feminisation’ of the antivivisectionist cause, owing both to the number of women active in the various associations and to the nature of its propaganda, helped provide the animal protection movement with a sounder political and cultural basis, outmoding the original argument that cruelty to animals was the preserve of ‘uneducated people’.…”

“…Foreigners (English, French, German) were often in the majority on societies’ management committees; their leaflets would be published in different languages and distributed in hotels to raise funds from tourists (Maori 2016, 60). British leadership in the development of anti-cruelty activism was an undisputed fact in the nineteenth century; the English activists saw Europe as a ‘missionary territory’ (Traïni 2014, 528) and the RSPCA was a model for other European animal protection societies (Tonutti 2007, 43–49). However, in Italy such foreign contributors were not just an indirect influence: aristocratic ladies, diplomats and businessmen played an active, and especially financial, role within the associations.…”

Registres émotionnels et processus politiques

“…En tout premier lieu, l'histoire de la protection animale offre plusieurs occasions d'examiner ce que la convergence de ses sympathisants autour d'une indignation morale -en apparence commune -doit ou non à la solidité d'une argumentation reposant sur des principes explicites et univoques. L'histoire très significative, longue et ancienne, des émotions fomentées par les promoteurs de l'opposition à la vivisection est évidemment trop complexe pour pouvoir être évoquée ici 17 . Heureusement, l'exemple de mobilisations plus récentes contre la corrida s'avérera sans doute suffisant pour mettre en exergue la part très relative des justifications discursives dans la mise à l'épreuve d'une indignation en mesure d'assurer la convergence de groupes de soutien très hétérogènes.…”