Kathryn Shevelow composed For the Love of Animals with her cat Graham swiping at her computer cursor, living testimony to what animal protection has accomplished. Instead of dying of hunger and disease, Shevelow writes, a "grey tabby kitten ... was saved to grow up into the beloved cat named Graham who sits on my lap, purring."
In the same spirit, Shevelow, a scholar of 18th-century English literature and culture, has structured each of her book's three parts as a duet between descriptions of the animal abuse that outraged so many observers and accounts of the English protection movement's tortuous but steady progress as an integral part of the 18th and early 19th centuries' great reform movements.
- For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, by Kathryn Shevelow, Henry Holt, 352 pages, $30.50
In Part 1: Dumb Brutes, Shevelow describes typical street scenes. Carters flogged overloaded horses and donkeys until they collapsed, then sold them to slaughterhouses to be rendered for their hide and flesh. Butchers carelessly slaughtered cows, pigs and other animals behind their shops or in abattoirs visible to passersby. Scientists suffocated, poisoned and disemboweled live animals in painful, public "experiments." In both town and country, staged and savage animal fights, often to the death, were popular entertainment. In the practice of "baiting," mutilated bulls, declawed bears and other creatures were tethered and pitted against dogs as raucous spectators cheered and laid wagers. Cocks and dogs were forced to fight other cocks and dogs in pits; the words cockpit and underdog are legacies. On country estates, hunters with dog packs chased and then killed exhausted foxes and hares.
Animals were also charged with criminal offences and tried in court. Those convicted - hogs that had killed children, dogs and cattle found guilty of buggery - were burned alive, baited to death or hanged; the word hangdog stems from the practice of hanging dogs.
But as cities grew and prospered, so did the custom of pet-keeping: animals welcome to live inside the house, given individual names, fed rather than eaten, and expected to provide companionship and affection rather than labour. Diarist Samuel Pepys had a monkey, a canary and an eagle; Charles II had Cavalier King Charles spaniels, permitted in all public places including the Houses of Parliament; portraitist William Hogarth had a pug; tiny, misshapen poet Alexander Pope had Great Danes, all named Bounce; Dr. Samuel Johnson had cats, including his "very fine cat," Hodge.
"Probably no other development in the history of humans' relationship with beasts had such a profoundly positive impact upon the status of animals," Shevelow writes. "As more and more people of all social classes shared their lives with pets ... it became increasingly difficult to think of animals as soulless machines or irrational bundles of appetites."
By the end of the 18th century, the notion of man's separateness from the rest of creation was breaking down. Shevelow ends Part 1 with utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's ringing cry: "The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? but, Can they Suffer?"
Part 2: Nature's Cry opens with a discussion of the glimmering awareness of torturing animals as a prelude to human cruelty. Shevelow illustrates this with William Hogarth's engravings The Four Stages of Cruelty, which depict a doomed man who tortures a dog, then beats his horse, progresses to murder and is finally executed.
At the same time, some priests and philosophers began to query man's dominion over beasts, and to debate whether animals had souls, intelligence, intrinsic value, an afterlife. Anglican priest Humphrey Primatt was a pioneer advocate of animal rights such as not being subjected to pain or lingering death. Many abolitionists seeking to end human slavery also deplored cruelty to animals. Some people abstained from meat, vegetarians before the word was invented in 1847.
In Part 3: Speaking for Animals, Shevelow details the excruciatingly slow battle to win parliamentary passage of animal-protection legislation. The specific outrage that anchored the 1802 bill was the baiting of a bull so gentle his tormentors chopped off his hooves to goad him, then pushed him, hobbling on bloody stumps, to defend himself against attacking dogs.
Though the 1802 bill was severely limited and drafted to avoid head-on conflict with such special interests as aristocratic hunters, bull baiters and scientists, the House of Commons voted it down, and subsequent bills met the same fate. Then, in 1821, encouraged by abolitionist allies, MP Richard (Humanity Dick) Martin presented his Ill-Treatment of Cattle Bill. Though this provoked ridicule, outrage and hilarity, especially when one sophomoric wag suggested including "asses," and other jeering MPs added "hares" and "cats," a watered-down version of Martin's bill passed the Commons only to fail in the House of Lords.
It was presented again in 1822 and finally passed both houses and received royal assent, making England the first nation to legally protect animals. But as the plight of a grievously scalded little dog confirmed, the new law did not extend to dogs or, indeed, to most animals.
Outside Parliament, public support for humane treatment of animals intensified, and advocacy groups arose to provide practical assistance, the first established in 1809. In 1824, reformers of all stripes established the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which struggled against rival groups, anti-Semitic attacks on one of its founders and persistent impecuniousness. Then, in 1840, dog-loving Queen Victoria granted it the royal imprimatur, and it stabilized and grew as the RSPCA.
Shevelow's narrative ends in the 19th century, but, she cautions, "our society has arrived at a peculiar, contradictory crossroads, where our attachment to animals seems to be at a level unprecedented in Western history, yet at the same time our postindustrial society inflicts suffering upon animals in vast numbers." Centuries after its birth, the animal-protection movement still faces enormous challenges.
One flaw in Shevelow's excellent and moving description of how the animal- protection movement developed is her portrayal of William Wilberforce as the prime mover of abolition. While Wilberforce and other men fought in Parliament to end the slave trade, scores of well-organized women's associations, which raised substantial sums of money and proselytized, rejected the gradualist approach and targeted slavery itself. Because the crossover between abolitionists and animal-welfare advocates was extraordinarily high, the role of men and women in arousing public opinion and lobbying Parliament on behalf of animals was an important chapter in the animal-protection movement's history.
For the Love of Animals is an enthralling and masterful study made accessible through anecdotes and well-chosen prints. The descriptions of incessant cruelties are difficult to read but as integral to the story as the glacial pace of remedial legislation. If Shevelow's cat Graham could have read what was on the computer screen, he would have purred even more loudly.
Elizabeth Abbott is a writer and dog rescuer living in Toronto. Her most recent book is Sugar: A Bittersweet History. Her most recent rescued dog is Sivkica, from Nis, Serbia.