In 1789, jeremy bentham famously asked, in relation to animals: “The question is not, can they reason, nor, can they talk, but, can they suffer?” Ovid proclaimed in the Metamorphoses, “Oh, what a wicked thing it is … to fatten on the body of another, for one live creature to continue living, through one live creature's death.” John Salt, a philosopher of the early 20th century, first used the term animal rights and propounded many of its core contemporary ideological arguments.

It was not until the 1970s that animal rights crystallized as a political movement based around an ideological belief that animals have moral rights. Animal rights proponents differ from animal welfare advocates, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which ...