There’s a question I’ve started asking at the end of conversations about animal protection, when the arguments have been made and the positions staked out. I ask: what do you think this says about us? The pause it produces is longer than I’d expected. We are comfortable discussing animals’ rights, their welfare, their sentience and suffering, and can fill hours debating their moral status. These are serious and worthwhile conversations that have driven genuine progress over two centuries. But in all this debate about animals, we keep missing what may be the most important question of all. What does our treatment of animals say about us?
I don’t believe this is a sentimental question. I’d argue it’s the most hard-headed one going - because the great movements that changed the world were never solely about those whose treatment was at stake. The abolitionists made their case about what a society that kept people enslaved was doing to itself. The suffragists challenged the bankrupt moral credibility of a civilisation that claimed to be built on reason and justice while excluding half its population from both. The argument was about those who were suffering, yes, but it was equally, and often more powerfully, about all of us.
This is an argument the animal protection movement has not yet made. At least not in a coherent, sustained, or named way that has cut through. Addressing it deliberately might be among the most useful things the movement could do right now.
The founder we forgot
On a Wednesday in mid-June, during the outstandingly wet summer of 1824, twenty-two people (all men, of course) met at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in London to found what became the RSPCA. One of them was a forty-year-old Jewish inventor and entrepreneur named Lewis Gompertz. Later that year, once the weather had improved, he published what Gary Francione would later call one of the most radical books on animal ethics ever written - and one of the least read. Peter Singer, who wrote the foreword to its 1992 reprint, found in it arguments he had believed he originated, a century and a half later.
What made Gompertz distinctive was his starting point. Where most reformers focused on animal suffering, Gompertz began with the morality of the humans who caused it; with what cruelty does to the human condition, and what it reveals about a society that not only tolerates it but is built upon it. In his personal life he was, by personal conviction, an abolitionist: no animal products, no animal transport, no animal entertainments. But, and this is the vital point, he was also a pragmatist who spent his working life pursuing incremental welfare reform. He understood that the destination and the path are different things, and that each step along the path matters, provided you know where you are going.
Despite his foundational contribution, he was expelled from the organisation he helped create in 1833, after the SPCA amended its constitution to require operation on “Christian principles”. A measure I believe to have been designed specifically to remove its only Jewish founding member. His unwavering opposition to fox hunting, a pastime enjoyed by some of his more influential colleagues, had made him inconvenient. He was removed, in short, for being too consistently principled. The movement has been having this debate ever since.
The inconvenience
That word, ‘inconvenient’ is doing considerable work here. I believe it is the root of most of what blocks the animal protection movement, both internally and in the slow social progress it makes.
Al Gore’s great contribution to climate politics was not scientific. The science was already settled. His contribution was to name the principal obstacle with disarming clarity: inconvenience. The interests at stake in fossil fuels were simply too large, too embedded, and too profitable for the truth to be welcome in polite company.
The animal ethics problem has the same structure, and is in some respects more deeply embedded. The moral and scientific case for taking animal sentience seriously has been made compellingly, and with increasing sophistication, for two hundred years. The question is not whether animals suffer, or whether that suffering matters morally. The question is why acting on that knowledge is so extraordinarily difficult. And the answer, in my view, has less to do with the quality of the argument than with the scale of what genuine change would require.
Modern civilisation is built, to a degree that is genuinely uncomfortable to confront, on the use of animals. Food, medicine, clothing, sport, entertainment; the industries in which animal suffering is routine are not peripheral to daily life. They are central to it. The global meat industry alone was valued at approximately $1.49 trillion in 2024. 85% of its animals are factory farmed. To take animal sentience seriously, to honestly reckon with what it implies, is not a minor adjustment. It is, to borrow Gore’s framing, a civilisational inconvenience of the first order. And it is personal. We are all implicated. Deep down, most of us know it.
This, I believe, is the real reason Lewis Gompertz was expelled. Not because his argument was wrong. Because it was true, and uncomfortable, and aimed directly at the people in the room.
Who benefits from the argument that never ends?
For the better part of fifty years, the animal protection movement has been pulled between two positions: utilitarian welfarism, which permits animal suffering when the human benefit is judged sufficient; and rights absolutism, which holds to the inherent value of animals but tends, in practice, to make abolition the only morally acceptable goal. Both are held in good faith. Both have driven real change. And both have also, in their perpetual opposition, produced a movement that cannot agree on what counts as progress and that spends remarkable energy arguing with itself. In the shadows of this philosophical disagreement is a tactical one. When is an incremental welfare improvement a step in the right direction, and when is it embedding practices that must be dismantled?
Who benefits from these disagreements? The endless rifts it produces are, at minimum, extremely convenient for the industries that profit from the status quo, and the movement has not examined that convenience with anything like the rigour it deserves. The tobacco industry’s deliberate cultivation of scientific-looking controversy is the obvious parallel. It did not need to win the argument. It just needed the argument to continue.
There is something instructive in the fact that Lewis Gompertz was not refuted. He was removed. The oldest response to an inconvenient truth is not to disprove it. It is to make the person saying it unwelcome. The cleverest response is to make the argument endless.
A different question
I want to propose a different philosophical tradition, one that Lewis Gompertz founded in 1824 and was expelled for holding. Since I cannot ask Lewis what he would call it, I am calling it Humane-ism. A name that carries, deliberately, both senses of the word: what it means to be human, and what it means to be humane.
How a civilisation treats the sentient beings in its power is a measure - I believe the most honest measure available - of its moral development. Not its wealth, its technology, or its legal institutions. Those are means. The measure is what we do with them, and to whom. It is the intuition behind the line widely attributed to Gandhi (that the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way it treats its animals). Humane-ism is about positioning our treatment of animals at the centre of how we judge our own progress, and making the issue about us, our society and our choices.
Three things follow from that, and they need to be held together; because each one, taken alone, has already been tried and found wanting.
The first is that the full moral recognition of animals is the long-term destination of this movement. I state it plainly, not hedged for palatability. An honest examination of whether it is right to cause suffering to beings capable of suffering has, ultimately, only one answer. Most of us, if we’re honest, already sense it. Taking the life of a being who wants to live is - inconvenient as the thought is - hard to square with the values most of us already hold.
The second is that this destination is not near, it is a sense of direction at this stage, not a visible end point, and that welfare reform pursued in the right spirit is genuine progress worth defending. Perhaps the only kind of progress we might see in our lifetimes. There is a version of holding principle that is so pure, it forgets who it is for. The prison abolitionist who will not campaign for a window in the cell, because the cell itself is the injustice, is philosophically consistent, and practically useless to the inmate craving a glimpse of the sky. Moral progress has two speeds. The arc of history bends slowly. The suffering of the individual does not wait for it.
The third is the hardest to hold and the most important. Not every welfare reform is a step along the path. Some are detours which give commercial interests a veneer of moral credibility without changing the underlying dynamic, allowing the public to conclude the problem has been solved when it has only been made quieter. The question I find myself asking of any proposed reform is whether it moves the culture forward or gives people permission to stop thinking. Those are very different things, and the difference matters enormously to strategy.
I have been working on a framework for making that assessment - something I am provisionally calling the Trajectory Test. The idea is to ask of any proposed welfare reform not only whether it reduces suffering, but whether it advances the conditions for deeper change: whether it builds political pressure rather than dissipating it, moves public understanding forward rather than offering reassurance, and keeps the narrative in the hands of the movement rather than the industries being regulated. In its current form it is a set of questions rather than a methodology. What I want it to become (and what I think it will become, with the right collaboration) is something more rigorous: an objective, measurable way of assessing the real strategic value of a welfare improvement, one that does not rely on the advocate’s instinct or the industry’s assurances. The movement makes these judgements constantly, and mostly by feel. We deserve better tools.
But here is what I think the movement has consistently undersold: all three of these principles reframe the question away from the animals, and toward us.
The lesson from marriage equality
A philosophical tradition is only as useful as the arguments it makes possible. Here is what this one looks like in practice.
When Australia looked at the question of marriage equality in 2017, the campaign that won succeeded by arguing about the kind of country Australia wanted to be. I remember watching the result come in, thinking about what it meant for my childhood best friend who emigrated there in the noughties, and realising that something had shifted, not just in law, but in the story a country was telling about itself. The strongest messaging didn’t focus on the suffering of a minority. Instead it was about fairness, decency, and national character - about what it said about Australia if it chose exclusion over inclusion. The “Yes” campaign understood that the most powerful argument was the one that invited the majority to see themselves in the question. The campaign’s most resonant phrase was characteristically Australian: a fair go. I still cannot say those words without involuntarily attempting an accent I have no right to.
This is the Humane-ism move, applied to remarkable effect. Marriage equality was won as a proposition about the values of an entire society. The people who voted Yes were not, for the most part, voting on behalf of someone else. They were voting on behalf of themselves, on behalf of the kind of society they wanted to inhabit. The cause became universal by refusing to be niche.
The animal protection movement has an equivalent argument waiting to be made. The question of how we treat animals is not, at its deepest level, a question about animals. It is a question about us, about the habits of empathy we cultivate or neglect, about the moral honesty we are willing to bring to our daily choices, about the kind of civilisation we are building. That argument, made well, has the potential to move people who would never describe themselves as animal advocates. It speaks to something they already believe about themselves.
More fully human
A person who has genuinely reckoned with what industrial civilisation does to animals, and chosen to act differently, to whatever extent, is not merely kinder to animals. They are I believe a more morally developed person, one who has extended the habits of empathy and honesty beyond the boundaries that convenience would draw. A civilisation that extends genuine moral consideration to other species is not merely more compassionate. It is more fully human.
I am not offering a finished theory. I am attempting to make an argument I believe is overdue. One that Lewis Gompertz was punished for making. The fact that it still needs making is, in itself, the point. It is a conversation started two hundred years ago, in a coffee house in St Martin’s Lane, that the movement has been trying to have - haltingly and often acrimoniously - ever since.
The question I believe he was expelled for asking is the one we most need to answer now. Not: how much does this animal suffer? Not: does this animal have rights? But: what are we becoming? And is that who we want to be?
More about the trajectory test coming next……
Thanks for such insightful provocation. The one thing we should feel powerful to change is ourselves.