> Victorian era misnomer

Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.

I think that largely depends on how you look at it. As with any topic, Greek philosophers had widely different opinions across schools of thought and generations. Many highlighted rational thinking as the line between humans and animals, while still thinking animals intelligent and emotional. I do agree with your point on Darwin, but why that point works is exactly because his work contrasted with the rest of his peers. His work was also far from being widely accepted at first, and was met with heavy skepticism on many, if not most fronts. It was only later that this became a widely accepted part of science.

OK, I think I see what you meant: Not that the "misnomer" arose in the Victorian era, but that the Victorian era was the last era in which you would expect to encounter this "misnomer".

As a counterpoint, I recommend reading Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton. If humans are just animals, they're the most bizarre animal we've ever seen.

a misnomer is a failure in naming ie peanuts, koala bear, etc. I think you mean misconception.

Thanks for denomering my misnomer misconception. Joking aside, I appreciate you correcting me, I'm not a native speaker, so these small issues pop up here and there, and it helps when you point them out.

it's a common error even of native speakers, and I hadn't the faintest clue it mightn't be your first language. I am barely conversant in one, so consider me shamed.

Jeremy Bentham popularized animal rights before the Victorian era. His well-known line was "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?".

This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."

Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.

Ancient romans were already conscious about not killing species off to not make them extinct.