Person, Animal, Thing

The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things

Bibliographic Data

ID8089401
AuthorsLynn Festa (corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume33
Issue2
Pages1-44
Publication date2009-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEighteenth-Century Life (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0098-2601 • E-ISSN: 1086-3192
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00982601-2008-044
OpenAlexW2045686351
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited21

Drawing on Parliamentary debates, print polemics, and satirical prints, this essay traces the rhetorical erosion of seemingly categorical distinctions between human and animal, animate and inanimate, person and thing, in the controversy that arose around the 1796 imposition of a tax on dogs. The passage of this seemingly slight piece of legislation created impassioned debates about the nature and welfare of animals, about the rights of individuals to possess or keep property, and about the way the kinship felt for animals tampers with the seemingly self-evident borders of kind. At a moment in which sentimental humanitarian concern with the rights and interests of animals had reached new heights, the taxation of dogs seemed to reclassify the animal as a thing and to draw into question the relation between humans and their ostensible best friends. Although proponents of the bill endeavor to proceed as if dogs can be considered on the same terms as other kinds of taxable luxuries (devouring resources that might better be devoted to humans), opponents of the tax focus on the bonds of mutual dependency and reciprocal obligation that tie humans and animals together, arguing that the right to keep a beloved entity such as a dog expresses a distinctively human need to keep something beyond mere, bare, necessity. Inasmuch as humanity is expressed and inheres in the relation people take to other creatures, the seeming superfluity of the dog embodies the essence of what allows, or enables, people to act as humans

Aesthetics · Animal rights · Animal welfare · Creatures · Environmental ethics · Humanity · Kinship · Law and economics · Legislation · Natural (archaeology · Obligation · Political science · Relation (database · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty

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