THE French philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650), was never one of my favourite thinkers and even less so as a result of his negative attitude towards animals. Humans, he believed, have a conscious mind that is capable of arriving at the realisation ‘I think,’ whilst animals do not possess souls and are therefore little more than machines that are programmed to act purely on instinct. As Sarah Bakewell explains, a

“dog, for Descartes, has no perspective, no true experience. It does not create a hare in its inner world and chase it across the fields. It can snuffle and twitch its paws all it likes; Descartes will never see anything but contracting muscles and firing nerves, triggered by equally mechanical operations in the brain.”

It is interesting to compare this Cartesian attitude with that of Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), political theorist and husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), who harboured a markedly contrary approach towards our fellow creatures. Ordered as a young child to drown some puppies, Woolf mentioned many years later that he was incapable of viewing these newborn animals as worthless, soulless vessels:

“Looked at casually, day-old puppies are little, blind, squirming, undifferentiated objects or things. I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, a terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws. I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an ‘I’, that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning in the multitudinous seas. It was I felt and feel a horrible, an uncivilized thing to drown that ‘I’ in a bucket of water.”

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps, individual creatures – human or otherwise – seem rather unimportant, but no political idea is worth its salt if it cannot take into account kindness and compassion.