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ilosophers debated the place of animals in human morality. The Pythagoreans (6th–
4th century BCE) and the Neoplatonists (3rd–6th century CE) urged respect for
animals’ interests, primarily because they believed in the transmigration of souls
between human and animal bodies. In his biological writings, Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
repeatedly suggested that animals lived for their own sake, but his claim in
the Politics that nature made all animals for the sake of humans was unfortunately
destined to become his most influential statement on the subject.
Aristotle, and later the Stoics, believed the world was populated by an infinity of
beings arranged hierarchically according to their complexity and perfection, from the
barely living to the merely sentient, the rational, and the wholly spiritual. In this Great
Chain of Being, as it came to be known, all forms of life were represented as existing
for the sake of those forms higher in the chain. Among corporeal beings, humans, by
dint of their rationality, occupied the highest position. The Great Chain of Being
became one of the most persistent and powerful, if utterly erroneous, ways of
conceiving the universe, dominating scientific, philosophical, and religious thinking
until the middle of the 19th century.
The Stoics, insisting on the irrationality of all nonhuman animals, regarded them as
slaves and accordingly treated them as contemptible and beneath notice. Aggressively
advocated by St. Augustine (354–430), these Stoic ideas became embedded in
Christian theology. They were absorbed wholesale into Roman law—as reflected in
the treatises and codifications of Gaius (fl. 130–180) and Justinian (483–565)—taken
up by the legal glossators of Europe in the 11th century, and eventually pressed into
English (and, much later, American) common law. Meanwhile, arguments that urged
respect for the interests of animals nearly disappeared, and animal welfare remained a
relative backwater of philosophical inquiry and legal regulation until the final decades
of the 20th century.

Animals And The Law