How It All Got Started
Everyone loves babies, including animal babies. They're so cute when they're so little. So sleepy!
Animal studies' adorable baby-phase began a long time ago with Aristotle and the Greeks. You may have heard of The Great Chain of Being. No, not the Texas hardcore band: that idea of the ancient Greeks that all beings exist on a linear scale, ranked from low (rocks, animals) to high (human beings, gods). Despite their clear penchant for hierarchy, the Greeks did think animals had some human-like traits.
In a lot of ways the ancient Greeks were already pretty modern—there was even a resident vegetarian named Porphyry who was the Jonathan Safran Foer of his day. Proto-PETA Porphyry aside, while admitting some similarities between humans and animals, Aristotle made a really important division between these two supposed "categories" of beings—animals, he argued, do not possess reason.
To have reason you need language, and because animals can't speak or write, well, they have no reason. Easy as that. Game over. Or, rather, game on—for using animals in ways that serve human ends without much consideration for animals' wants and needs. This is humanism par excellence.
At the heart of this story is a key distinction based on language—who's got it; who doesn't. Animal studies in the sciences still operate with Aristotle's distinction in mind in the majority of its work. When scholars and thinkers in the humanities started to question Aristotelian distinctions between humans and animals in the nineteenth and particularly in the twentieth century, the foundation was being set for a new approach to literary studies. Darwin's revolutionary new way of thinking about the relation between humans and animals (guess what? we're related!) fueled a lot of this rethinking.
In the decades following Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), Victorian feminists like France Power Cobbe who were lobbying for women's' suffrage also began to advocate on behalf of animals—starting dog shelters and arguing for better animal welfare standards. Turns out that it's not just Bieber who is into this sort of thing.
Fast-forward to the 1970s and Peter Singer's path breaking book Animal Liberation. Singer argued that animals don't deserve just better welfare and treatment but actually deserved rights. This crazy 180 of a trajectory—from seeing animals and humans as entirely different, to seeing animals with a compassionate eye, to then seeing them as possessors of rights—marks the beginnings of animal studies theory.
And all of the ideas within this trajectory are still very much in play and up for debate.