Our Fellow Creatures: Who Were They? Who Are They?

Abstract

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries we have grown used to using the term “fellow creatures” to refer to non-human animals — from dogs and cats to horses and hippopotamuses. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the term was also used to refer to non-human animals. But from the late eighteenth century (when the term began to be used for several decades with much greater frequency), through the nineteenth century, and through most of the twentieth century too, “fellow creature” was a term used to connect like to like — horses to horses, sheep to sheep, or, much more commonly, humans to other humans. Why the change in the late eighteenth century? And why the further change in the late twentieth century? This paper argues that political activism played a key role — and that the activism of those leading the fight against cruelty towards animals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was implicitly in competition with the struggles to improve the lot of black Africans, the poor, women, and other oppressed categories of humans — causes that sought to end the treatment of these groups as “no better than animals.”