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Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

PUBLISHER: Knopf

REVIEWER: Kim Stallwood

 

REVIEW

The authors, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, want their book, Our Kindred Creatures, to make the case that the decades from 1866 to 1896 “saw the birth of the modern attitudes toward the animals in their midst.” (p. 360) The book succeeds in its mission well. Wasik and Murphy explain the nascent social justice movement for animals (anti-cruelty, humane society, animal welfare, animal rights et al) in the USA and how it began in the United Kingdom. Anyone looking to broaden their understanding of animal advocacy and human-animal relations would be advised to read this book.

The reader is guided through an insightful understanding of how animals were viewed and treated in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the USA. It’s only in the Afterword that Wasik and Murphy relate the past to the present and reflect upon the future for the moral and legal status of animals.

From sea turtles killed for soup to horses pulling wagons loaded with goods and people through Manhattan streets. From the mass murder of pigeons and buffalos to dog fights in bars and performing elephants in circuses. From Chicago’s Packingtown disassembling untold thousands of cows to a dog cemetery in Westchester County, New York. From animals in research laboratories to drowning caged unwanted dogs in New York’s harbour. The authors take the reader through a succession of topics. These and many more animal issues are ably explored and described. Often, I feel overwhelmed with information and drowning in emotion when I read books cataloguing animal cruelty. But not with this large book (400 + pages including endnotes). Its fine construction of relatively short and similar-length chapters and its clear and concise writing style make it a manageable read. Each chapter is an informative stand-alone introduction to its subject.

The authors describe the emergence of the US animal movement with descriptions of its founders and leaders of organisations. This includes Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA in New York; George Angell, founder of the Massachusetts SPCA; and Caroline Earle White, founder of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which only men were allowed to lead. Consequently, White founded the PSPCA’s Women’s Branch which she could direct. The more I learn about these leaders the more I admire them for their innovative work, tenacity, and leadership. Today’s generation of animal advocates may complain about their challenges and, if you do, imagine the challenges Bergh et al had 150 years ago. While we’re increasingly dependent upon the Internet, they relied upon organising adults into societies and children into kindness clubs and publishing such landmark novels as Black Beauty and inspirational newspapers and motivational magazines. No TV. No radio. No mobiles. No WWW. No Facebook. Given how much easier it is with today’s technology, I often wonder why we don’t make more progress for animals than we do.

Bergh focused mostly but not exclusively on animal cruelty interventions and prosecutions. Men (for it was mostly men) beat horses and dogs in the streets, Bergh arrested them and brought them to court. Angel invested in ambitious public educational projects. White’s interests were in campaigning against animals in laboratories at the time when the modern scientific method came to the fore. They all decided to compromise some of their actions and positions at some point. Some can be understood, given the time and circumstances. But some went too far. According to Wasik and Murphy, the Chicago meatpackers co-opted the Illinois Humane Society. (p. 306) The stockyards were notorious for animal cruelty, even with the stockyards open to public tours. Circus impresario and serial animal abuser, P T Barnum, was invited to serve as a director of the Connecticut SPCA. Barnum and Berg compromised on the former’s treatment of elephants in circuses. I know from my research for the biography of Topsy the Elephant that the ASPCA didn’t oppose her murder in 1903. (Bergh died in 1888.) The ASPCA was concerned with making sure it wasn’t a public spectacle. Her owners got around this by charging more than 1,000 people a small admission fee to attend.

This book is a fine description of the treatment of animals during this period, the development of anti-cruelty and humane societies and their activities, and public attitudes. But I regret Wasik and Murphy didn’t devote more of their attention to the development of ideas and ethical theories about the moral and legal status of animals of this time. The philosopher Peter Singer is mentioned but they inaccurately cite him as the “thinker who has done more than any other to advance the idea of animal rights” (p. 365) Singer, a utilitarian, is not a rights-based philosopher.

Further, there’s a brief discussion of the concept, which Singer writes about, of the expanding circle and the need to include animals. The philosopher Dale Jamieson is also briefly considered by the authors as the “most profound thinker” on this topic (p. 368). I’ve never been convinced of the expanding circle as a viable moral construct. Any line, circular or otherwise, always means there’s someone outside not being included inside. Further, it’s not simply a question of whether you’re inside the circle or not. There’s also the space, the interrelationships between and among those in the circle, and anyone else outside of it. While I’m sympathetic to Tom Regan’s “subjects of a life” as those who have rights, we are more than individuals. We are communities of various kinds. Indeed, we are communities of communities. But Wasik and Murphy get my approval when they state in the context of current moral challenges, “The new type of goodness we need today has to explode [emphasis in original] the [expanded] circle, in a sense.” (p. 368) I don’t take the verb explode to be literal but a way to convey a sense of “we’re all in this together.” No line should separate any of us. If it does, it must be erased.

Finally, there’s a chapter dedicated to the veterinary profession and its development, which includes the formation of the New York College of Veterinary Surgeons and the American Veterinary Association. One of the authors (Murphy) is a veterinarian. I have a love-hate relationship with veterinarians. Some veterinarians license animal cruelty, particularly in the animal industrial complex. While others are truly compassionate people. I’m troubled by the book’s dedication: “America’s veterinarians—past, present, and future”. Why not “Tireless and fearless champions for animals across the world”? Or, better still, why not “The animals”?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BILL WASIK is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine. MONICA MURPHY is a veterinarian and a writer. Their previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. They live in Brooklyn, New York.

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