Contents

I.  The Principle of Animals’ Rights
II.  The Case of Domestic Animals
III.  The Case of Wild Animals
IV.  The Slaughter of Animals for Food
V.  Sport, or Amateur Butchery
VI.  Murderous Millinery
VII.  Experimental Torture
VIII.  Lines of Reform
Bibliography of the Rights Of Animals

Information

Salt's classic Animals' Rights is a practical book. Initially Salt sets forth the principle of animals' rights. He then describes the ways and means of the suffering imposed on animals as an inevitable consequence of the denial of rights. In the course of the book he refutes, often with humour, every argument advanced against animal rights in his lifetime and anticipates and refutes those still to be made. The conclusion offers guidance on "Lines of Reform" in which he explains the importance of an intellectual, literary and social crusade against the central cause of oppression: the disregard of the natural kinship between man and the animals and the consequent denial of their rights.

He urged his readers to look back to the days when human slaves were excluded from the common pale of humanity, with the same hypocritical fallacies used to justify that exclusion as are invoked in the case of animals. By then looking forward; the moral can hardly be mistaken, he said.

The 1980 edition contains a preface by Peter Singer

"A masterpiece; it remains one of the most lucid and persuasive of all the books written in defense of animals," Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books

Editions

George Bell & Sons Ltd., London, 1892, 166 pages
Macmillan Publishing Co., New York and London, 1894, 176 pages
(?) A. C. Fifield, London, 1899
William Reeves, A.& H.B. Bonner, 1899, 98 pages (Revised Edition)
A. C. Fifield, London, 1905, 119 pages (Revised edition)
George Bell & Sons Ltd., London, 1915, 124 pages
George Bell & Sons Ltd., London, 1922, 124 pages (Final Revised Edition)