The Post weekend book section has a nice write-up of a new book called For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, written by Kathryn Shevelow. The book focuses on the animal protection movement that arose in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, a movement that came in the face of widespread and gratuitous cruelty toward animals, from bear-baiting to excessively cruel slaughterhouse practices.

The reviewer, Jonathan Yardley, mentions this in passing, but several prominent activists on behalf of animal protection were Evangelical Christians, including those like William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftsbury who were major reformers in other areas. They saw the extension of mercy to all God’s creatures as a logical part of the Christian mission and not something competing with better treatment of human beings.

UPDATE: Here’s another review – from the San Francisco Chronicle – making the point that, with factory farming, “[a]nimal cruelty today may not be as overtly barbaric as in the 18th century, but because of factory farming it is much more widespread.”