Early modern Europe produced a philosophy - Cartesianism - and an attendant experimental method that denied to non-human animals the capacities for reason, consciousness and even suffering.
On this logic, animals would have no place in a history of violence, lacking as they would the mental equipment to translate force into cruelty. This chapter's appearance in just such a history attests to Cartesianism's decline in influence, a decline hastened, ironically, by the recent findings of experimental science itself.
The emergence of more inclusive attitudes towards animal subjectivity exceeds summary here, but broadly speaking these attitudes derive from two sources: a revived philosophical tradition, stretching from Plutarch to Montaigne to Bentham and beyond, that grants other animals the ability to think and feel in roughly human, if more limited, terms; and modern ethology's discovery, among animal groups, of the abilities to ‘solve simple problems through process of reasoning and insight, [to] plan for the immediate future... to understand and use abstract symbols in communication', and even to engage in altruistic behaviour.[828]Yet by 1500 non-human animals had long suffered violence from human populations worldwide, violence inflicted partly in pursuit of necessities like food and clothing, but also largely for exercise and entertainment. Between 1500 and 1800 this latter violence underwent a transformation consonant with the spread of European imperialism: as European nations established colonies around the globe, so they exported European forms of animal entertainment to their new subject territories while also assimilating foreign products, animals and practices to European notions of pastime. This process in turn altered the ecology both of European nations and their colonies, with the resulting changes forcing reciprocal adjustments to the animal sports themselves. A survey of this transformation must distinguish between hunting - the most esteemed form of recreational animal abuse in the early modern world - and a secondary cluster of related spectator sports such as cockfighting, bear- and bull-baiting and bullfighting. The pages that follow consider these kinds of pastime in turn, while also offering brief comment on the history of sports - such as horseracing and jousting - which did not aim directly for the death of participating animals but nonetheless inflicted violence upon them.
More on the topic Early modern Europe produced a philosophy - Cartesianism - and an attendant experimental method that denied to non-human animals the capacities for reason, consciousness and even suffering.:
- Early modern Europe produced a philosophy - Cartesianism - and an attendant experimental method that denied to non-human animals the capacities for reason, consciousness and even suffering.
- The culture of early modern Europe was suffused with violence. Christianity's central event prior to the Reformation, and in the case of the Roman Church through the centuries that followed, was the violent death of Christ on Calvary,
- As the colony that gave Europe its archetype of tropical cannibalism and consumed more African bodies than any other American slave system, Brazil warrants a central place in the history of early modern racial violence.
- Early Human Approaches
- Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p., 2020