Henry Stephens Salt

Henry Stephens Salt (20 September 1851 - 19 April 1939) was an English writer, classicist, and social reformer whose 1892 book Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress is one of the earliest systematic arguments that non-human animals possess moral rights. Peter Singer and Tom Regan both cite Salt as a direct precursor to the modern animal-rights movement.

Life

Born in Naini Tal, India, to a colonial officer and raised in Shrewsbury, Salt read classics at King’s College, Cambridge, and returned to Eton as an assistant master. He resigned in 1884, calling his colleagues “cannibals in cap and gown,” and moved with his wife Kate to a labourer’s cottage in Tilford, Surrey, to live on a small income by writing, gardening, and walking. He became vegetarian the same year.

Work

Salt’s 1886 pamphlet A Plea for Vegetarianism reached the young M. K. Gandhi in London and, by Gandhi’s own account in his autobiography, converted him from reluctant to convinced abstainer. Animals’ Rights (1892) argued that if humans have rights grounded in the capacity to suffer and to have a life of one’s own, the same reasoning extends to animals; he rejected the “jus animalium” of mere kindness in favour of justice.

The Humanitarian League

In 1891 Salt founded the Humanitarian League with Howard Williams and Ernest Bell. The League campaigned against hunting, vivisection, corporal and capital punishment, flogging in schools, and the plumage trade — treating cruelty to humans and animals as a single ethical problem. It ran until 1919. Salt also wrote the first serious biographies of Thoreau (1890) and Shelley (1896) and lived to see the first edition of Animals’ Rights reissued in 1922.

For the lineage he helped start, see animal-rights theory; for the tradition he joined, see vegetarianism in history.