I picked up Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature the other day† and I have to say that it allows me to view this whole episode quite clearly. Pinker

I picked up Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature the other day† and I have to say that it allows me to view this whole episode quite clearly. Pinker documents the increasing ratcheting down of violence in humanity, perhaps not in absolute terms but certainly in percentage of population terms. Take modern Western Europe, it has statistically the lowest homicide rate compared to anywhere and any time. The decrease in violence has occurred with what Pinker calls Rights Revolutions at two points in history, around about the time of the American and French revolution and mid-twentieth century onwards. So we have people asserting the rights of man in general leading to the abolition of chattel slavery, the rights of woman in particular, gay rights, the rights of children, and recently the rights of animals. In England the last blood sport (fox hunting) was recently outlawed in the teeth of much protest from the good old boys that think cruelty to animals is A OK. These rights revolutions stem from ideas born out the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment which led most famously the amendments to the US constitution but which have there parallel in most of the Western world. Forces that work against these ideas are thus called counter-enlightenment forces. Getting back to the issue at hand (I've got a point I tells ya!) these laws represent a back-sliding and we should take these counter-enlightenment forces very seriously - we are talking about a centuries long struggle to eliminate violence (of whatever type) from our societies. I guarantee you that future generations will look back at our times and recoil in horror at the way we treat animals in much the same way that systemic torture, bear-baiting, corporal punishment, domestic abuse and so on leave most of us (apart from the odd sadist and sociopathic outlier) sickened nowadays. † I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Here it is on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115