Address on Humane Education (1912)

AUTHOR: Lovell, Mary Frances

KEYWORDS: animal welfare, anti-vivisection, dress reform, ethical veg*ism, labor rights, Temperance, women's rights

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Lovell's intersectional vegan advocacy of animal welfare includes dress reform, anti-vivisection, opposition to the use of animals for amusement, criticism of the Church, insistence on gender and economic equality, Temperance, and humane education. For her, cruelty is the “most hideous of man's divergences from the Divine ideal” and the main reason why the earth is such an “inferno of horror and of pain” (183). The only remedy is “humane education under law for every child” (183). Indeed, Lovell reports on the benefits of, and the progress achieved by, humane education in all kinds of institutional settings, including prisons such as the infamous “Tombs prison” (184). Humane education creates awareness of and empathy towards animal suffering in such contexts as fashion and diet. Lovell writes:

Cruelties which show how little, so far as the development of the finer sensibilities is concerned, humanity has evolved from the primitive state, are continually committed in the conduct of business, in the production of dress, of food, of amusements, of cures for our physical ills. The woman who decorates herself with feathers and wraps herself in furs, perpetuating the crude customs of her savage ancestry, should be made to learn that fur-bearing animals are caught in traps whose cruel teeth enter their flesh, and that they remain in them sometimes even for weeks, thirsty, starving, frantic with pain, dying the slow death of agony and exhaustion, unless, indeed, they freeze or the trapper does arrive in time to anticipate nature with his club (184).

She decries “the monstrosities of feather decoration,” welcoming legislation that restricts the importation of “egret plumes,” and expressing the hope that a time will “come when it will be illegal to wear the plumes of any wild bird” (184). Of the horror in slaughterhouses, she writes:

The people who enjoy their chops and roasts and steaks do not generally visit slaughter-houses, but what is done there should be made known to them, and the whole unspeakable savagery of the cattle traffic. I who speak to you have seen a steer hanging up by one leg, head down, and looking about while a man was stripping off its skin. It had not died at the proper time, and the machinery could not stop. If this could happen when the place was being shown to visitors who came by invitation, what, think you, are the daily scenes? (184).

Lovell speaks out against the use of animals for amusement, including the gruesome methods of training. She emphatically condemns the practice of vivisection, and criticizes the church for remaining silent on all of these issues. She urges her fellow humanitarians to make more use of the “public press” to advocate for the cause (184-185). The article concludes with a glimpse into a utopian future, in which total equality is achieved, including gender, political, economic, species, and international (even postnational) equality:

Some bright day kindness and mercy will be the rule, and the aegis of its beneficence will cover man and beast alike. In that day, men and women, politically equal, will make government itself the source and exponent of the Golden Rule, and the people will illustrate the brotherhood of man. With cruelty extinct, man will be no longer the base betrayer of his sister woman, but her chivalrous friend. He who once was the slave of intoxicating drink, will now be free, because the reign of law, beneficent and just, will have forbidden the existence of that which destroyed his manhood. Cruelty being eliminated, and kindness having taken its place, there will no longer be bitter contests between employer and employed, but they will agree, “in honor preferring one another.” The brotherhood of nations will have superseded even patriotism, and there will be no more war. There being no cruelty, and therefore no fear, the wild beasts also will become tame and kind, “and a little child shall lead them.” Saner and holier methods than that of vivisection will have been found for preventing disease, and there will be no more pain (185).