With abolition achieved, American reformers, “their imaginations, trained for decades on ghoulish narratives of cruelty to enslaved people,” cast about for new noble causes. Animal welfare was already popular in Britain and boasted royal patrons; an American version seemed to promise high sentiment, built-in drama, and brisk results. “There were unscrupulous streetcar companies to litigate against,” the authors write, “dog-fighting rings to be broken up, exotic-animal exhibits and horse races to monitor, little boys to educate in the habits of kindness.” A confident urban elite took to the alleys and the cattle cars, eager, advocates proclaimed, for “a new type of goodness.” Our Kindred Creatures is the story of their wrenching re-education.
Adventures in reform over the course of three crucial decades guide the narrative, from the 1866 founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) to the 1896 creation of the Bronx Zoo. Animal rights activists used the courts and the press to protest the shiploads of tortured green sea turtles headed for New York City soup tureens, the packs of stray dogs routinely axed and bludgeoned in Philadelphia, the Kansas bison shot from train windows by eastern sportsmen. Big money of the Gilded Age pushed back. New York’s horse-drawn streetcar business, infamous for equine mistreatment, was controlled by the Vanderbilts. America’s medical establishment insisted that good science demanded high-volume vivisection: pain equaled progress.
Wasik and Murphy scour primary sources to fine effect, mapping the beachheads and standoffs of a secular awakening staffed by eccentrics, from P. T. Barnum to the determined women behind the Audubon Society. Their book is both an American bestiary and a case study in imperfect, vertiginous moral change, helped along by a bug and a novel. The Great Epizootic of 1872 (a horse flu pandemic, the worst in history) brought the nation to a standstill—and accelerated the rise of serious veterinary medicine. In 1890, George Angell of the Massachusetts SPCA was sent a copy of the novel Black Beauty and promoted it heavily; soon millions wept over a faithful horse abused by humans, and Anna Sewell’s equine autobiography became the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of animal protection.