From Natural Rights to the Rights of Nature. It is true that Lawrence, Bentham, Nicholson, Salt, and other nineteenth-century English humanitarians might have gone further. Their emphasis was strictly on animals and domesticated ones at that. "Environment" did not figure in their vocabulary, but their humanitarianism was an ideological building block leading to environmental ethic, Further development awaited the science of ecology and proof the the "kindship" or "brotherhood