Comment by pazimzadeh

It's just as hard to prove that it's a new stance as an old one since people didn't have any way of writing down their feelings about it in a way that we'd know (or the time to do so)

I think there are quite a few ancient civilizations which clearly had great respect/reverence towards other animals and often gods have features or personality traits of particular animals

The fact that the old testament specifically states that humans have dominion over other creatures means that it needed to be said - even back then there had to be people who didn't think so, or felt guilty about it