ANIMALS, CRUELTY TO

the willful or wanton infliction of pain, suffering, or death upon an animal, or the intentional or malicious neglect of an animal. In varying degrees, it is illegal in most countries in the world, and, in the late 20th century, interest in endangered species gave further impetus to the anticruelty movement. Reflecting such interest, many laws have been passed, although they are seldom enforced without active and vocal public pressure being brought to bear upon the appropriate enforcement officials. The movement against cruelty to animals is rooted in antiquity. Pythagoras taught kindness toward all subhuman creations as a duty, and the poet Bion put it in its simplest terms: Boys stone a frog in sport, but the frog dies in earnest. Even the Romans, despite the barbarities of the circus, had feelings about proper treatment of animals; when Pompey the Great organized a particularly revolting slaughter of elephants, the populace rose up and cursed him for his ruthlessness. If St. Francis of Assisi was the greatest friend of animals, Ren Descartes, the French philosopher, was perhaps their greatest enemy. He believed that animals had no souls and that, as thinking and feeling processes in his view were part of the soul, animals could feel no pain. Further, Descartes concluded that animals were mere machines. He and his followers marveled that these mechanical robots, as they called them, could give such a realistic illusion of agony. Late in the 18th century, the English jurist Jeremy Bentham phrased the matter differently: The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Perhaps the world's first anticruelty law was included in the legal code of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (U.S.) in 1641, which stated that No man shall exercise any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use. In 1809 the Scottish Lord Erskine presented a bill in Parliament to prevent cruelty to such animals as horses, pigs, oxen, and sheep. The bill passed the House of Lords in the face of sarcasm but failed in the House of Commons. In 1822, however, Richard Humanity Dick Martin was responsible for the passing of the Martin Act, which applied to large domestic animals. Two years later in England, in 1824, came the world's first animal welfare societythe Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (which in 1840 added the prefix Royal to its name at Queen Victoria's behest). France was not far behind. In 1845 General Jacques Delmas de Grammont founded the Society for the Protection of Animals; in 1850 he also pushed through an act similar to the English statute, known as the Law Grammont. Other countries that soon followed suit and initiated both laws and animal welfare societies included Ireland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and The Netherlands. A pivotal figure in the anticruelty movement in the United States was Henry Bergh, Abraham Lincoln's minister to Russia. In St. Petersburg, Bergh had seen a Russian droshky driver beating a horse, and from the moment of that incident to the end of his life he campaigned for animals in every issue from bullfighting to vivisection. Largely through Bergh's efforts, the first anticruelty society in the United Statesthe American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animalswas chartered in the state of New York in 1866. By the late 20th century, animal welfare societies and laws against cruelty to animals had come to exist in almost every country in the world. Associations ranged from the Japan Animal Welfare Society to Spain's Society of Animals and Plants, the latter being particularly notable because, though located in one of the few countries still tolerating the bullfight, it undertakes to protect plants as well as animals. International anticruelty societies also developed; among these are the World Federation for the Protection of Animals, with headquarters in Zrich; the International Society for the Protection of Animals, with headquarters in London; and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, with headquarters in Yarmouth, Mass., U.S. The late 20th century also witnessed the burgeoning of a number of specialized animal advocacy groups, including those dedicated to the preservation of endangered species (e.g., certain whales, dolphins, seals, and tigers); those that protested against painful or brutal methods of trapping and killing; and those that protested the use of animals for research and in product testing (e.g., of cosmetics).