Man’s best friends raised the bar for redefining humanity under rights law

What It Means To Be Human, Joanna Bourke

HER name was Mary Ellen Wilson, and she was found chained to a bedpost, carrying the signs of a brutal beating. That was in New York City in 1873. She was so malnourished — and had been, over a lengthy period of time — that her rescuers assumed she was aged about five. In fact, she was nine.

The woman who found and freed her tried to get the police to do something about the person who had so brutalised the child. They refused to take action against Mary Connolly, the woman to whom she had been indentured and who had brutalised her, because no law protecting children from cruelty allowed them to take such action. The woman who rescued her did a little lateral thinking and approached the president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, persuading him that Mary Ellen Wilson was “a little animal” deserving of action. He agreed, and a court found Mary Connolly guilty of felonious assault.

“Such individual efforts could only have a minimal effect,” writes Joanna Bourke. “Their attempts to give children the same protections against cruelty as animals were dramatically enhanced when, in 1884, Benjamin Waugh founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”

Waugh proposed that a wife be allowed to give evidence on behalf of her child against a cruel husband and father, pointing out that women, at the time, counted for nothing when it came to the protection of their children, whereas their evidence would be accepted and credible were they to testify on behalf of a mistreated dog.

Bourke’s account of the infinitely slow progress of great minds towards the acceptance of women and of children as fully human points out that “from the start of the human rights age, people barred from ‘mankind’ (with its inalienable rights) protested against their exclusion. Women were particularly vocal from the start”.

They were vocal, but not necessarily effective in changing the mindset of the men who defined what was human and what was not. Less vocal, and markedly less effective, were slaves. Even those who took up the anti-slavery cause tended to demean and patronise those for whom they sought freedom, locked as they were into an understanding of humanity as essentially defined by white, wealthy men.

What is most striking about Bourke’s elegantly evidenced and argued account of what it means to be human is the number of authoritative humanitarians who, within their own times, justified the exclusion of groups — including slaves — from their definition of humanity. Take, for example, the philosopher from the University of St Andrews who argued that slavery was a “necessary step in the progress of humanity”. First of all, slaves tended to come from areas of constant tribal warfare where their chances of being slaughtered were fairly high. Therefore, capturing and exporting them to plantations in the American south could, he argued, be construed as something of a break for them, since it “gave some scope for the growth, however feeble, of kindlier sentiments towards the alien and the weak”.

This growth potential, of course, was predicated on their surviving the slave ship and the master who then took charge of them and of their survival. But the philosopher didn’t waste time on such minutiae. Instead, he rushed to establish that having slaves take on the more tedious aspects of labour “gave to the free population sufficient leisure for the pursuit of science and art and, above all, for the development of political liberty”.

But that didn’t write finis to the benefits accruing to a slave-owning society. By way of an olive in the martini, free men observing the lives of slaves would more fully understand what they might otherwise have glossed over: the full value of their own freedom. All in all, then, he concluded: “Slavery made possible the growth of the very ideas which in the course of time came to make slavery appear wrong.”

One of the recurring themes in Bourke’s book is the comparison between the rights of animals and those of humans. She notes that most people, when they even consider animal rights, tend to favour those animals most closely aligned with domestic life or those regarded as being in some way near to mankind in intelligence or potential. In this context, she recounts the now-familiar experiments with chimps and other primates to equip them with sign language, adding some detail on what happened these animals when the experimenters were done with them. They were returned to live with a species with which they had no points of commonality and abandoned by the “humans” who had robbed them of their capacity to relate to their animal peers. One of the chimps, horrified by the presence of other chimpanzees with which it failed to identify, signed that he was surrounded by “black bugs”.

One Briton detained at Guantanamo Bay would have sympathised with those unfortunate animals. Jamith Al Harith was told on his arrival that he had no rights in Gitmo, and reality was hammered home to him and his fellow detainees day after day.

“We stopped asking for human rights,” he remembers. “We wanted animal rights. In Camp X–Ray my cage was right next to a kennel housing an Alsatian dog. He had a wooden house with air-conditioning and green grass to exercise on. I said to the guards, ‘I want his rights,’ and they replied ‘that dog is a member of the US army’.”

Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birkbeck College in London who has previously won the Wolfson History Prize. This latest work is a meticulously researched, dense but not difficult exploration of the changing perceptions of what it means to be human over more than two centuries.