The palgrave international handbook of a 14

Editors’ Introduction
Jennifer Maher, Harriet Pierpoint and Piers Beirne

This Handbook tries to understand animal abuse and how we humans perceive
it and respond to it. This is no easy task. The history of changing attitudes to
animals and to our abuse of them indeed offers a sobering lesson about the
limits of human compassion. What we give with one hand we take away with
the other. So much of that history is ambiguous and of the sort ‘on the one
hand’ but ‘on the other.’ For example, on the one hand, it has been and still is
often claimed about early Judaeo-Christian texts, such as Genesis, that God has
placed at our disposal all the animals that walk or crawl on the earth and those
that swim in the sea and fly in the air—all animals other than humans, that is,
for us to do with whatever we like and to do so without reservation. This was
certainly the viewpoint of theologians such as St Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas. On the other hand, however, especially as first seen in the writings
of sixteenth-century essayists such as John Calvin and Michel de Montaigne
and in the pleas for vegetarianism by the occasional eccentric, those very same
early Christian texts have also been interpreted as obliging us to care for those
(domesticated) animals under our control and to use them fairly and responsibly and without cruelty.
J. Maher (*) Á H. Pierpoint
Centre for Criminology, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, United Kingdom
e-mail: ;
P. Beirne
Criminology Department, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, USA
e-mail:
© The Author(s) 2017
J. Maher et al. (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal
Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_1

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