Genuine Concern for Animals in England's Nineteenth-Century Animal Protection Movement: The Case Against Reductionist Interpretations

Animal–human history is an increasingly popular area of historical research.¹ Diana Donald's 2020 book, Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of animal protection and the role women have played in moral reform movements. Starting from the premise that the prevention of cruelty to animals is “a pure product of the nineteenth century” (p. 7), this dazzling book takes its reader through a wide range of important topics such as the early history of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), differences between men and women's attitudes toward animals, and the role women played in humane education.² This review will particularly highlight the way that Donald consistently attacks reductionist theses that discount the genuine concern women had for animals in the nineteenth-century British animal protection movement, and how her interpretations consistently refocus our attention on historical evidence of that genuine concern.

Influential histories from the 1980s advanced the thesis that British nineteenth-century animal protection movements were really about oppressing and controlling the working classes by regulating their interactions with nonhuman animals, whether working animals harshly treated in the streets of London or animals used in “blood sport” as entertainment (what we would now call animal fighting).³ Admittedly, many “poor labouring men” were punished by harsh laws to protect the sensibilities of members of the middle and upper classes offended by public and very visible beatings of working animals like donkeys and horses (p. 3). However, the reform-minded were also motivated by the deplorable treatment of food animals driven through city streets to slaughter; such animals might suffer extreme thirst or be pushed through open cellar doors, which often crippled them before they were killed.⁴ Meanwhile, the cruel field sports of the rich were given a free pass.⁵

Despite this apparent hypocrisy, Donald thinks it is a mistake to see “reform of lower-class morals” as “the primary object of the early RSPCA” (p. 59). Why? Upper-class men also often participated in activities targeted by regulation, such as cock fighting and dog fighting (p. 77). More profoundly, Donald argues that it is misguided to understand “the early RSPCA as an authoritarian, single-minded, univocal body, activated from its inception by a purposive ideology […] Members represented a spectrum of viewpoints arising from political and religious affiliations, social class and (importantly) gender” (p. 61). This last part is indeed important. Sustained treatment of gender has been missing from earlier (otherwise excellent) histories such as Hilda Kean's Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (1998), a gap which Donald's book aims to fill.

First, there is the point about women's presence and participation in the early RSPCA, both as members (the grassroots membership was overwhelmingly female) and also as important benefactors (a majority of the society's one-off gifts came from women and, from the 1860s on, donations from women significantly exceeded those from men). (See pp. 103–4 and 274.) Donald explains how despite the predominantly female nature of its membership and the key role women played as a source of the organization's financial support, the RSPCA leadership largely froze women out of its leadership and say over policy decisions.

In Chapter Four, “The ‘Two Religions’: A Gendered Divide in Victorian Society,” Donald examines the way in which female “sentimentalism” around animal treatment came to be set up against masculine brutishness. Young boys were sent “beyond [the] petticoat government” of their mothers, grandmothers, and governesses to public school to be “toughened up” (p. 148). As Henry Salt, future leader of the Humanitarian League, pupil of Eaton in the 1860s and subsequent teacher there, puts it, the education was an inculcation into the “the twofold cult of sport and soldiership” (p. 149). This aimed to prepare boys for life in the colonies, where they would participate in the “enslavement of native peoples and appropriation of their land [and be] provided the conditions for reckless hunting and shooting of big game—another kind of warfare” (p. 149). Such teachings, intended to produce proper men, directly contradicted the express program of female-run groups preaching kindness to animals such as the Bands of Mercy. (See pp. 160–67.) Donald writes that “[t]he gendered contrast of attitudes and ideals of behaviour” (p. 165) set men up for the commercial sphere, where animals would continue to be brutalized, as opposed to the private home, with its privileged “pets,” or favorites.⁶ Donald writes that “female distress over cruelty was a pleasing foil, not a corrective to masculine behaviour” (p. 21). As one contemporary puts it, “[t]he inculcation of humanity to animals in pretty little tracts and illustrated magazines” was a bit of a “farce” (p. 167). These hortatory calls affirmed the normal commercial (coded masculine) world of cruelty, which by and large ignored (female) pleas to end cruelty and accepted increasingly worse conditions for most animals, especially those used for food.

Indeed, the most sobering aspect of Donald's book is her description of the way that contemporaries recognized that “as Britain's imperial power and industrial wealth grew, cruelty actually seemed to be increasing” (p. 45). Donald writes: “A dark thought then arose: was the heartless exploitation of animals an effect of the country's growing capitalist might, rather than an anomaly that further progress would rectify?” (p. 37). Pastimes like hunting and racing grew with affluence. The pressures that led people to beat every bit of work they could out of their laboring animals only intensified under “uncontrolled urbanisation and a fast-developing capitalist society” (p. 85). Through a Marxist lens, the protest against animal treatment looks like it may have been just a “wish to palliate the crueler effects of capitalism in a marginal and harmless way,” smoothing out some of the rougher edges of laissez-faire economics and even distracting attention from the plight of industrial workers (p. 85). Philanthropists came, painfully, to realize that cruelty to animals might well be “intrinsic to the systems of production and commercial competition that provided the prosperity of the nation, and was unlikely to yield to moral persuasion,” either by punishing members of the lower classes or trying to get middle and upper class people to live up to their purportedly civilized standards (p. 90). In other words, this was not a broken system in need of reform; it was a system that was working exactly as was intended.⁷ Here was “[t]he violence intrinsic to imperialism” encoded within the “‘civilized’ culture of the home country” (p. 267).

Donald points out that advances in technology (e.g., transport) “often brought new evils” (p. 237). To take a nineteenth-century U.S. example from another excellent recent book on the history of the animal protection movement by Ernest Freeberg, Chicago slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants replaced the cruelty inflicted upon millions of sheep, cows, and pigs by putting an end to the live rail transport of these animals from western sources to eastern markets where they would be slaughtered.⁸ However, “meat on ice” made from animals slaughtered at or near where they were raised created its own new forms of cruelty, what Freeberg calls “civilized slaughter” (p. 141). Here, he writes, were “the origins of our modern factory farming system, one that calms the public conscience less by removing animal suffering than by removing it from view” (p. 274). Drawing a parallel to today, Freeberg continues: “Those now working to expose the profound cruelties of our factory farming system struggle to make us once again see this suffering, far removed from the experience of consumers and carefully guarded by the meat processors and the state legislators who have passed ‘ag gag’ laws that make sure we do not witness what we could not stand to watch” (p. 275).⁹

Much opposition to cruelty against animals has been and continues to be human- rather than animal-oriented, such as the “Link” movement today, which justifies tougher punishment of animal abusers on the grounds that this abuse will escalate to human harm.¹⁰ By contrast, Donald emphasizes that women in the nineteenth century often genuinely wished to improve the conditions of working animals for their own sake and not for some human end. Donald emphasizes that animals were not just objects upon which to practice benevolence for the sake of humans, for example, opposing public beating and other brutal treatment of animals in the streets as a way to maintain good morals (a nineteenth-century version of “Link think”). She insists that nineteenth-century activists genuinely identified with the animals and their suffering. As eminent and important a social commentator as John Stuart Mill “presumed that animal suffering per se was the real, primary concern of the activists, and that claims for the social or political benefits of anti-cruelty laws were merely a stratagem for winning over a sceptical public” (p. 64).¹¹ This makes sense, since, then as now, many who want to protect animals realize that it can be effective to use anthropocentric arguments and ask humans to think about their own self-interest when it comes to meat eating and other animal-use habits which adversely impact the environment and human health as well as animal well-being.¹² Others want to resist doing so, insisting on a lens of animals for their own sake, given the history of animal interests being so routinely and easily sacrificed for human ones and their extreme vulnerability.¹³ At the very least an awareness of “the gravitational pull of anthropocentrism” is required when retaining human-oriented approaches.¹⁴

Donald writes that many of the exhortations to treat animals kindly by the RSPCA and Bands of Mercy “would have been tedious even to converts” (p. 164). This was all the more so as long as little boys were being effectively taught how to be by learning how not to be, avoiding, for example, the effeminate sentimentalism preached to them by the women in their lives. Other efforts, however, like Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, were wildly successful. Donald's discussion of this work (pp. 164–80), often referred to as the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the animal protection movement, was for me one of the highlights of the book.¹⁵

Black Beauty is often discussed in histories of the animal protection movement.¹⁶ Donald, however, gives the book a richness and depth I have not otherwise encountered, delving into Sewell's Quaker background and the chronic pain from which she was suffering when she wrote the book. Donald examines carefully the work's criticism of the bearing rein or check rein, used to keep a horse's head held high and neck arched, giving “a noble and spirited appearance … at the cost of obstructing the windpipe, straining the neck muscles, damaging the eyes by exposure to the sun overhead, causing stumbles over unseen obstacles, and bringing on premature debility” (p. 177). Women were accused of being the “greatest devotees” of this rein, as it prevented a horse from tugging and made it easier to drive them, “and it created a showy appearance which fashionable women were said to favour” (p. 179). Like the campaign against feathered millinery (feathers used for fashionable women's hats, which resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of song birds), this pitted women against each other. For example, Sewell depicted a countess who insists on using the rein despite the pain it creates for Black Beauty and his doomed companion Ginger. Donald thinks that criticism of the rein should not be seen as “a feminist diatribe against the physical constrictions of women's dress or their confined lives” or “as a symbol of patriarchal oppression” (p. 180). Like the insistence that animal protection was not merely about class control but included a genuine concern for animals for their own sake, Donald insists that Sewell's opposition to the bearing rein, at least on one level, was exactly what it appears to be: the rein being “the most powerful example of the undeserved, gratuitous suffering of sentient animals inflicted by mankind, which prompted the writing of the book in the first place” (p. 180).

As if to guard against disappointment, much animal law scholarship tends to assume that animal protection is always really about something else, controlling abuse out of a desire to protect valuable property or to control the behavior of a disfavored group singled out for harsh treatment by the law.¹⁷ Donald's history reminds us that such interpretations are often only one aspect of the story, even if they are a central part, as is the case with the religious and racial discrimination involved in opposition to Santeria animal sacrifice among the Afro-Cuban population of twentieth-century Florida, bans on Jewish animal slaughter driven by anti-Semitism or Halal slaughter fueled by Islamophobia rather than concern that food animals not be slaughtered without stunning, or efforts to shut down live animal markets or ban the sale of specialty foods like shark fins in North American Chinatowns that are sometimes fueled in part (but by no means exclusively) by anti-Asian sentiment.¹⁸ Donald's refocus on activists’ genuine concern for animals exchanges cynicism for hope in understanding the history of the animal protection movement. This is a refreshing and enlightening take on a topic readers might have thought they already knew well, offering a counterpoint to other histories in which reforming middle-class women (especially those concerned with sexual morality, such as the trafficking of young girls and earlier white slavery moral panics) are often depicted as dangerous busybodies keen to police others, especially other poor and often racialized or otherwise additionally marginalized women.¹⁹ Donald's work offers a warning against reductionism in legal-historical thinking, and not just on the specific topic of the animal protection movement. To that extent, it should be informative reading to many, especially those seeking to highlight the role of women and gender in histories in which this has not been a focus to date.

Women Against Cruelty is a model of how to examine gender on multiple levels. As we have seen, this is true in at least the three following ways: (i) actual female participation as rank-and-file members of the early RSPCA and as major financial donors; (ii) gendered attitudes and their constitutive operation, specifically, (female) sentimentalism playing the foil to normalized (masculine) brutality; and (iii) important tensions between different groups of women, such as those who defended cruel practices in the name of fashion, whether wearing fur or participating in English horse-back style fox hunting, a sport that, at least in the United States, was dominated by women in the twentieth century, and those who identified as reformers and wished to see such practices end.²⁰

For those engaged in present-day efforts to decrease or eliminate cruelty to nonhuman animals, the idea that there can be (and has been in the past) genuine concern for animals feels like a necessary pre-condition for hopeful action. This is especially so in a world in which dystopian fiction is looking less and less like fiction and more like reality, especially in (perhaps now formerly) privileged parts of the world like Canada and the United States.²¹ The vulnerability we share with nonhuman animals has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic and remarkable weather events I personally had never heard of before 2021, including flooding caused by an “atmospheric river” and increasingly frequent and out-of-control forest fires, including one caused by a “heat dome” that melted an entire town in British Columbia, killing at least 619 (predominantly disabled) people in Vancouver who lacked access to air conditioning.²² Such events have prompted the culling of millions of COVID-19-exposed farmed mink in Denmark, Canada, and other countries, and the related decision to phase out mink farming, mostly due to public health concerns, in British Columbia.²³ Extreme weather resulted in probably one billion aquatic animals literally being cooked alive on the west coast and the slow, panicked deaths of thousands of agricultural animals due to drowning or exposure during December floods.²⁴ This is all to say, I believe we are living in a time in which we must lean into hope and a commitment to genuine concern for others, including our nonhuman relations. Donald's history is refreshingly compatible with such an orientation.