The Animal Claim

Book excerpt: Today, we tend to react skeptically to claims about our access to the animal mind, the political importance of compassion, and the natural origins of community. However, such claims were widespread in the Restoration and eighteenth century, the long Age of Sensibility. Even so famous a skeptic as the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote that animals undoubtedly feel, think, love, hate, will, and even reason. In "The Animal Claim," Tobias Menely shows that for Hume and other thinkers of his time, the acknowledgment of creaturely voice was crucial to their theories of community. Looking primarily to the long eighteenth century in Britain, Menely argues that sympathyincluding sympathy with animalscame to be regarded as a foundational resource of social relation, and that it fell to poets, in particular, to represent creaturely voice in the public sphere. Menely connects this development to new ideas of political community in Britain and the emergence of a viable discourse of animal rights in the age of legislative reform. The result is an original contribution to both animal studies and eighteenth-century scholarship."