Organized Animal Protection in the United
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CHAPTER IX EMOTIONAL BONDS, RELIGIOUS MORALITY, AND EVOLUTIONARY KINSHIP Until recently, scholarly commentary concerning animal protection has generally emphasized the primary importance of Darwinism's assertion of human and animal kinship to the emergence of organized animal protection in both England and North America. 1 In fact., personal experience with animals and religious values, not reflections or anxieties occasioned by the theoryof biological kinship between humans and animals, were the decisive influences on humane thought and conduct during the first decades of activism in the United States, as in other nations. Darwinian ideas about the continuity between human and animal life did not motivate the individuals who launched the American humane movement, and evolutionarydoctrine did not surface as an explicit argument for animal protection until the 1890s. Instead, early humane leaders in the United States built their arguments upon older views of the relationship between humans and animals. In making the case that animals deserved better treatment, humane advocates relied upon a popular knowledgeof animals that emphasizedtheir individuality, consciousness, and mental capacities, and acknowledged them as beings with whom people could form emotional bonds. Animal 1 SeeJames c. Turner.Rcctorioe With die Beas: Animals. Pain, and Huroaoity in the Victorian Mind(Baltimore: JohnsHopkim University �. 1980), 00-78;Linda Gordon, Heroes of TheirOwn Lives: ThePolitics and History of Family Violence(New York: Viking. 1988), 34; andSylvia Sperling, AnimalLiberators Rese@rch and Motality (Berkeley: Universityof Californial>rc:$, 1988), 21-22. 3.Sl 352 protectionists also drew uponlongstanding religious views concerning human stewardship, animal souls, and the practiceof such Christian virtues as kindness and mercy. The Bonds of Emotion Elizabeth StuartPhelps began her account of a visit to Harriet Beecher Stowe's home by describing the profusion of flowers and the cheerful presence of children. Phelps went on to remark that "there were always dogs, big and little, curly and straight, but in some form, dog life with its gracious reaction on the gentleness and kindness of family life abounded." Phelps's observation attestsnot only to the salience of pet keeping in Victorian life, but also signals the degree to which animals became central to the social construction of the nineteenth-century home environment. 2 The diverse practices of Victorian era pet keeping, as Katherine Grier notes, were "motivated variously by heartfeltemotion, middle-class identity, popular aesthetics, and intellectual curiosity." The presence of animal companions was closely connectedto the ideology of domesticity, the middle-class cultural ideal that cast the home as a safe and stable environment, overseen by women, in which children could be properly trained in the values appropriate for their transition to adult life. Domesticityencouraged interest in animals, concern for their well-being, and attention to their emotional lives. More 3 imponantly, it drew them into the moral sphere of the middle-class home. 2 Elii.abethStuart Phelps, Chapters From a Life (Boston: Houghton. Mifflinand Co .• 1896), 134. 3 SeeKalherine C. Grier,. .Animal House: Pet Keepingin Urban and Subwban Householdsin the Nonheast, 1850-1900,"in Peter Benes,ed., New England's Creatures: 1400-1900(Boston: Boston UniversityPress, 1995), l09-29; idem,"Material Culture as Rhetoric:'Animal Artifacts• as a CaseStudy," in Ann SmaltManin and J. Ritchie Garrison.American Material Cultmc: The Shape of the Field 353 In the Victorian household, the animalwas recognizedas an individual. Stowe told her young readers, "Everyanimal has his own character, as markedand distinct as a human being," and Mary Lovell recollected that in her childhood home "the family cat was a personage,not a nonentity." Through a range of reciprocal interactions, children and adults alike encountered animals as playmates, dependents,defenders, and members of the family. They formedpsychological attachments, and sawanimals both pampered and mistreated. They experienced loss and sorrow at animals' death or disappearance, and mournedthem accordingly.• Given their specialstatus as cohabitants of the sameliving space with humans, companion animals were critical to the rise of the humane movement. The sentimentalization of individual animals as intimate companions allowed people to exercise their social abilities, explore their potential to empathize, and enjoy emotional closeness and devotion. At the same time, such subjective experience of animals ledto greaterrecognition of their moral significance,and accountedfor much of the support accordedto animal protection. From an early stage of the movement, the fundamental lessons of kindness, fairness,and humane treatment were conveyed through household animals. In addition, regular interaction with them inspired and sustaineda rich tradition (Knoxville: Universityof TennesseePress, 1997), 85-91: and idem."Childhood Socialization and CompanionAnimals, United Stales 1820-1870," Societyand Animals7, 2 (1999), 95-120. Domesticityis the subjectof a subslanlialbody ofscholarship, but see Daniel WalkerHowe, "Victorian Culturein America."in DanielW. Howe, ed.,Victorian America (Phila.: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1976), 25- 26; and BarbaraLee Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 1981). passim. 4 HarrietBeecher Stowe, "Dogsand Cats," Storiesand Sketchesfor the Young (New York: A.M.S. PressFacsimile Edition, 1967),102; and"Mary F. Lovell," Woman'sPro� 5 (Dec.1895), 179. GraceGreenwood captures the rangeof experiencechildren had with animalsin Historyof My Pets (Boston:Ticknor, Reed. and Fields. 1851). 354 of animal lore that focused on their consciousness, intelligence, future life, fidelity, service, and heroism. 5 While this tradition of anecdotal wisdom and experience predated the formation of the humane movement in the United States, animal protectionists embraced it. In time, the use of such anecdotes became central to the claim that animals deserved moral consideration. Once established, humane publications served as important registers of popular interest in the emotional lives of animals, presenting a steady flow of stories and articles reflectingupon the nobility, love, altruism, and devotion that non-human animals showed toward humans and other animal species. Such lore encouraged the attribution of personality, character, and feeling to animals. This discourse comprised both avowedly fictional and professedly genuine accounts of such experiences. Yet their authenticity mattered less than the fact of their broad circulation, and such narratives were not confined to animal protection journals. They enjoyed an increasingly wide dispersion in the nineteenth-centurypopular press.6 s On the role of companionanimals in humanemotional development,see James H. S. Bossard. "TheMental Hygiene of Owning a Dog,"Menial Hygiene28 (1944): 408-13. Keith Thomaspoints out that many of the eighteenth-centuryauthors who arguedfor humane treatmentformed close relationships with non-humananimals; Keith Thomas,Man andthe Natural World: A Historyof the ModemSensibility (New York:Pantheon Books. 1983), 119-21. Onthe importanceof petkeeping to the riseof late twentieth centwyanimal protection,see James Serpell, In theCompany of Animals:A Studyof Human-Animal Relationships(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 187. 6 "A Dog,"The New York Reader3 (1819), 26; "TheDog ofCogniou.''The Man, 28 Feb. 1834: "Canine'Fraternity,'" and"Anecdote of a Cat," Water-CureJournal and HeraJd of Reform 7 (1849), 58-59; F. 0. Morris."Dogs and TheirDoings," Hatper's Weekly. 29 Apr. 1871, 398-99, and 17 June 1871, 564- 65; "A Shrewd Dog," Phila.Transcript 6 July 1873, PSPCA-PA, SBK 1866-1877;"Some New Stories AboutAnimals," N. Y. Times.2 Jan. 1874, 2; and"A Catto beCared For," N. Y. Times.27 Apr. 1874, S. Onehumane reformer devoted an entirebook to anecdotesof caninefidelity. heroism. inteUigence, love, anddevotion. SeeSarah Bolton, OurDevoted Friend, The Dog(Boston: L. C. Page andCo., 1902). 3SS One scholar writing of nineteenth-centuryFrance has characterized the keeping of animals and the prevalence of certain kinds of narratives about animals as means for coping with the sociallydisorienting impacts of modernity. In the alienating, cold, and unfeeling context of modem life, Kathleen Kete asserts, animals-and especially dogs served both symbolic and practical needs for comfort, solace, sympathy, sentiment, loyalty, and intimacy. For its part,the anecdotal tradition identifiedand highlighted 7 (supposed)animal traits that human beings found commendable in one another. However, animal protectionists' usage of such narratives suggests that they resonated not so much as symbols of something lost or lamented, but rather as the markersof a culture working to reproduce and reinforce its most cherished values through a continuous didactic. The anecdotal tradition was not the reflexive discourse, self-conscious or unconscious, of an emotionally troubled middle-class constituency; it was a dynamic one that acknowledged and celebrated animals as central participants in the social life of the Victorian household. Anecdotes of animal fidelity resounded powerfully within nineteenth-century humane thought, even as they helped to shape the cultural context in which animal protection flourished. Humane advocates reliedon such accounts to make the case that the consciousness, intelligence, and emotion