Love your neighbour (and his pets) continued
Following on from Philip Cooney's CHN about RSPCA President Hugh Wirth's address to the National Press Club in Canberra, Briefing reader, Jennie Baddeley in Parramatta, Australia, wrote to point out to us that one of Wilberforce's friends, the Rev Arthur Broome, was key in the founding of the RSPCA. Broome was an evangelical minister in the Anglican church, and he threw himself into the work of the RSPCA by becoming their full-time secretary and bearing the financial burden himself in hiring other RSPCA employees (see Nigel Scotland, Evangelical Anglicans in a Revolutionary Age, p. 38, and RSPCA NSW History). She notes,
Bull-baiting, cock fighting and even hunting decreased after the society was set up. Suddenly there was a whole lot more accountability with regards to treatment of animals. It didn't solve the problem and there was much opposition, but I would say to Hugh Wirth that the establishment of the RSPCA, a society which benefits animals even today, was started by evangelicals and that they, as part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, have contributed something substantial here.
Wilberforce and his mates were living in a society which did not value human or animal life—where death and pain were commonplace, and exploitation was habitual, particularly in the upper classes. When Wilberforce stated that animals may be used by humans for any purpose, provided they are not mistreated, he was actually being radical for his time: he was trying to get it through to people's heads that other living beings matter, while at the same time making it clear that animals are still useful to human beings. To my knowledge, no other group was making any effort in this regard at this stage in European society, and the early evangelicals were seen as pleasure-destroyers who always had problems with everything.
We confuse the issue these days because it's hard for us to say clearly that we do value the lives of animals and that we care about the way they are treated, without being heard to say that we think the lives of animals are as significant as the lives of human beings. So we don't say anything, thinking that that's better than getting the gospel confused in people's heads or worse.
In any case, Hugh Wirth is not dealing in facts when he makes such extraordinary statements; if anything, the book of Proverbs, which is presumably part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, contains well-known statements that encourage the good treatment and care of animals, e.g. Proverbs 12:10: “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel”.