444
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, in Part II, Chaps. 10 and 11. As
Perkins summarizes, “Locke discussed the intellectual powers of animals”.
13
And then there was the outstanding historian and philosopher Joseph Ritson
(1752–1803) whose remarkable book An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as
a Moral Duty (London 1802) was committed to ethical vegetarianism, connecting
barbarism perpetrated by humans against animals to those same people who would
commit similar crimes against other humans. Indeed, Ritson suggested that slavery
and cannibalism derived from those sorts of people who would think nothing of
torturing and killing other species. Avowed Ritson, “those accustom’d to eat the
brute, should not long abstain from the man”.
14
Against this backdrop of elegant fire and fury, at the height of the new renaissance, the combined Ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, in Western artistic
and philosophical tradition, we glean clearly the context for that adamant animal
rights predilection, as earlier typified in Percy Bysshe Shelley; and in Oxford
University’s foremost professor of law and ethics, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832),
whose beliefs that universal jurisprudence must convey equal rights to all animals
would help shape the formation of anti-vivisection societies, and, as we think of it
today, the underlying premise of most animal rights philosophy and initiatives.
What Hildrop’s Theorem added to this brief history was the unequivocal illustration of a distinct prospect, namely, that all species other than Man had immortal
souls. But in the case of Homo sapiens, we are deficient by our own betrayals and
despoliations, an escalating syndrome of totalitarian terror over all other animals
(Fig. 48.3).
That dominion is most assuredly and emblematically concentrated on that terrestrial vertebrate tortured more than any other, Gallus gallus domesticus, the
chicken, about whom it is estimated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization that approximately 25 billion live chickens were slaughtered worldwide for commercial production in 2019.
15
An estimated nine billion of those individuals were killed in the United States, while 305 million hens were held captive
in the United States for their eggs.
16
These numbers only approximate the actual
number of fatalities. A “slaughterhouse” is deemed a commercial, licensed operation, in whatever country. Yet, there is no country where home killings of chickens—and other animals—do not occur, and there is no reliable metric to capture
such data. In most economically marginalized regions of the human family, we can
only surmise that the numbers would skyrocket above those official recognized
commercial operations.
13 ibid., Perkins, p. 177. In addition, there is the famed Twelve Stories of the Sayings and Doings of
Animals, by Mrs. Sara Bowdich Lee, Grant and Griffith, London, 1954; the Historia animalium…
by Wolfgang Franz, Johannem Ravestenium, The Netherlands, 1665.
14 ibid., p. 124.
15 http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare.
16 https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/chickens/.Accessed May 5,
2020.
48 The Mind of a Chicken
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, in Part II, Chaps. 10 and 11. As
Perkins summarizes, “Locke discussed the intellectual powers of animals”.
13
And then there was the outstanding historian and philosopher Joseph Ritson
(1752–1803) whose remarkable book An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as
a Moral Duty (London 1802) was committed to ethical vegetarianism, connecting
barbarism perpetrated by humans against animals to those same people who would
commit similar crimes against other humans. Indeed, Ritson suggested that slavery
and cannibalism derived from those sorts of people who would think nothing of
torturing and killing other species. Avowed Ritson, “those accustom’d to eat the
brute, should not long abstain from the man”.
14
Against this backdrop of elegant fire and fury, at the height of the new renaissance, the combined Ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, in Western artistic
and philosophical tradition, we glean clearly the context for that adamant animal
rights predilection, as earlier typified in Percy Bysshe Shelley; and in Oxford
University’s foremost professor of law and ethics, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832),
whose beliefs that universal jurisprudence must convey equal rights to all animals
would help shape the formation of anti-vivisection societies, and, as we think of it
today, the underlying premise of most animal rights philosophy and initiatives.
What Hildrop’s Theorem added to this brief history was the unequivocal illustration of a distinct prospect, namely, that all species other than Man had immortal
souls. But in the case of Homo sapiens, we are deficient by our own betrayals and
despoliations, an escalating syndrome of totalitarian terror over all other animals
(Fig. 48.3).
That dominion is most assuredly and emblematically concentrated on that terrestrial vertebrate tortured more than any other, Gallus gallus domesticus, the
chicken, about whom it is estimated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization that approximately 25 billion live chickens were slaughtered worldwide for commercial production in 2019.
15
An estimated nine billion of those individuals were killed in the United States, while 305 million hens were held captive
in the United States for their eggs.
16
These numbers only approximate the actual
number of fatalities. A “slaughterhouse” is deemed a commercial, licensed operation, in whatever country. Yet, there is no country where home killings of chickens—and other animals—do not occur, and there is no reliable metric to capture
such data. In most economically marginalized regions of the human family, we can
only surmise that the numbers would skyrocket above those official recognized
commercial operations.
13 ibid., Perkins, p. 177. In addition, there is the famed Twelve Stories of the Sayings and Doings of
Animals, by Mrs. Sara Bowdich Lee, Grant and Griffith, London, 1954; the Historia animalium…
by Wolfgang Franz, Johannem Ravestenium, The Netherlands, 1665.
14 ibid., p. 124.
15 http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare.
16 https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/chickens/.Accessed May 5,
2020.
48 The Mind of a Chicken