Fellow feeling for animals, compassion, kindness, friendship, and affectionare expressed in every time and place and culture, in primordial artifacts,Egyptian tombs, Homer’s description of the old dog Argos, as much as inHenry Moore’s 1980 drawings of sheep. Perhaps no argument for kindnessto animals was ever made that had not already been made long before. InEngland, however, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, there was achange, a gradual, eventually enormous increase in the frequency of suchexpressions. Kindness to animals was urged and represented in sermons,treatises, pamphlets, journals, manuals of animal care, encyclopedias, scientificwritings, novels, literature for children, and poems. There were also,of course, writings on the other side, defenses of traditional practices, suchas bullbaiting, but they were far less numerous than the literature I foreground.To what extent all this writing registered or helped bring about ageneral change of mind, and to what extent it contributed to developmentsin the actual treatment of animals, are questions that cannot be answeredwith much certainty. I pursue them briefly in a moment, but the literatureitself, the discourse, is my primary subject.

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