The immediate question that claims our attention is thisif men have rights, have animals their rights also?From the earliest times there have been thinkers who, directly or indirectly, answered this question with an affirmative. The Buddhist and Pythagorean canons, dominated perhaps by the creed of reincarnation, included the maxim not to kill or injure any innocent animal. The humanitarian philosophers of the Roman empire, among whom Seneca, Plutarch, and Porphyry were the most conspicuous, took still higher ground in preaching humanity on the broadest principle of universal benevolence. Since justice is due to rational beings, wrote Porphyry, how is it possible to evade the admission that we are bound also to act justly towards the races below us?

Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. It was Salt who first introduced Mohandas Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi's study of vegetarianism. Salt is considered, by some, to be the "father of animal rights," having been one of the first writers to argue explicitly in favour of animal rights, rather than just improvements to animal welfare, in his Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.