Introduction

On 10 October 1965, The Sunday Times Weekly Review inaugurated a series called ‘Minority View’. The first entry in this series was an essay, ‘The Rights of Animals’, by Brigid Brophy. In 1971, Brophy published an essay, ‘In Pursuit of a Fantasy’, in the collection Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans. In 1979, she contributed an essay entitled ‘The Darwinist's Dilemma’ to Animals’ Rights – a Symposium. In these three essays, Brophy, a novelist, critic, and campaigner for feminism, peace and all manner of reforms, provided the seeds of an animal rights theory.

Brophy had published her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, in 1953 and the plot involved, among other aspects, rescuing an ape from a zoo to prevent the animal from being sent into space. So, Brophy's interest in how humans used animals for various purposes began much earlier. But there can be no doubt that her 1965 and 1971 essays establish her as the original animal rights advocate of the modern period. Others, such as Henry Salt and Leslie J. Cross, had written about animal rights. Lewis Gompertz condemned all animal use and made important improvements on the design of the bicycle because he opposed the use of horses for transport. But, as Richard D. Ryder notes, Brophy provided a ‘restatement of the animal rights ideal’ as part of the revival of the animal movement in the 1960s and 1970s and did so before modern philosophers showed any interest in the topic.

In this essay, I will discuss how Brophy effectively if not explicitly rejected key components of the position that had become conventional wisdom in Britain (and most other places) concerning our moral obligations to animals. That position – the animal welfare position – maintained that it was morally acceptable to use animals for human purposes as long as we treated them ‘humanely’. I will also discuss the position that ultimately came to define the modern ‘animal movement’. Unfortunately, it was not Brophy's animal rights position that prevailed.