Taylor's Vindication of the Rights of Brutes

Thomas Taylor · Down to Earth Series · 31 pages

Thomas Taylor's A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, reproduced complete in seven chapters with a contents page giving each chapter's central idea, and a closing list of further reading. The running head names its author as the English Platonist. Its argument is picked up again in “Western religion alone is to blame for the cruelty to animals,” which carries a section under this book's title, and it belongs with the animal-ethics group that runs through this section — the three Plutarch pieces among them.

Taylor's own advertisement states the design twice over: the particular aim is to prove by demonstrative argument the perfect equality of what is called the irrational species to the human, and the more general aim is to establish the equality of all things as to their intrinsic dignity and worth. The chapters then take the case in order. The first argues that God has made all things equal. The second, that brutes possess reason in common with men. The third draws the practical consequence — that since brutes possess reason we ought to abstain from animal food — and supports it historically by arguing that this was the practice of the most ancient Greeks. The fourth and fifth extend the historical case to the Egyptian priests and then to the Persians and Indians. The sixth turns to the importance of understanding the language of brutes and restoring them to their natural equality with mankind. The seventh closes on particular faculties, arguing that magpies are naturally musicians, oxen arithmeticians and dogs actors — the kind of claim that shows how far Taylor was willing to press the equality he set out to demonstrate.

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