The Intimate Bond (37 page)

Felines, Fowls, and Lagomorphs

At the time when dog shows became all the rage, cats were not regarded as fancy or prestigious animals. Classifying them into distinct breeds was virtually impossible, but the first cat show, held at London's Crystal Palace in July 1871, was a smash hit, and was said to be a process of discovery, a chance to compare different felines.
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The show was so successful that, within a decade, annual events became commonplace throughout Britain. Originally, coat colors distinguished what appeared to be classes of cats, but efforts to establish divisions almost invariably came back to color, except for imported breeds such as the Siamese. Longhairs, shorthairs, tabbies—all were grist for the classificatory mill as a plethora of specialized cat societies came into being during the late nineteenth century. What was at issue was a search for a hierarchy of cats, just like that attributed to dogs. The search was, of course, illusory, often clothed in the doting rhetoric of obsessed cat owners.

Dogs and cats became big business, but we often forget that the Victorians kept all manner of pets—everything from exotic African
and Asian beasts in the private zoos of the aristocracy to tropical birds, snakes, and fish in the heart of cities. Selective breeding of rabbits began as early as medieval times, when they were treated as domesticated farm animals. Several breeds had emerged by the sixteenth century, but the real boom in house rabbits came in the nineteenth century, in the hands of lagomorph owners, as dedicated to rabbits as their fellow enthusiasts were to dogs and cats. New breeds were selected out for their color, size, or other display characteristics as rabbit shows gained popularity. The enthusiasm for exotic breeds reached its height with the so-called Belgian hare craze, which saw thousands of them imported into Britain and the United States after 1888. Unfortunately, at the same time, rabbits came into widespread use for medical laboratory experiments and for studies of the human reproductive system, among other things. Chickens had been familiar farm animals for thousands of years, but a fashion for display birds developed in the late nineteenth century, with the importation of exotic, finely feathered birds from Asia, including the long-feather-footed Silkie from China (see sidebar “Taming the Fowl”).

Whether the focus was cats, dogs, prize horses, or rabbits, pet fancying thrived on the sentimentality of owners, often lampooned by
Punch
. Those who raised animals for food and other purposes often ridiculed pet fanciers, on the grounds that the latter's animals were useless except for emotional or rhetorical purposes. True, but it was the efforts of such animal lovers that gradually transformed public attitudes toward animals.

The kinship between humans and animals has never been static, having been at the mercy of changing social norms and fleeting trends. But an ambivalence about beasts endured in nineteenth-century societies, with their huge chasms between rich and poor. Many people in nineteenth-century Britain felt strongly that economics and the demands of a job were far higher priorities than the humane treatment of animals. At the other extreme was the deep, almost sexual pleasure that many wealthier members of society took in hunting, especially the aristocracy, the so-called huntin', shootin', and fishin' crowd. In 1860, the poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold memorably described the upper classes as “barbarians” with a “passion for field sports.” Oscar Wilde went even further when he described fox hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
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We in a seemingly more enlightened age—and that is questionable—deplore the indiscriminate nineteenth-century slaughter of animals large and small in the name of “sport” as vicious exploitation of helpless creatures. Can we condemn the Victorians? Of course we can, but
to do so is to miss the point. So many diverse strands shaped the relationship between animals and humans during the nineteenth century that it's impossible to detect a single unfolding narrative: rhetoric and symbolism were influential, as were interactions between individuals, between members of different social classes, and between people as varied as antivivisectionists, big-game hunters, humanists, pet fanciers, social agitators, and scientists. Nineteenth-century British society—to take only one example—had many, greatly entangled threads, as does the Britain of today. The often tragic history of Victorian animals is a reflection of the differences between the people and groups who interacted with them.

In her Golden Jubilee address of 1887, Queen Victoria noted “with real pleasure, the growth of more human feeling towards the lower animals.”
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She was correct, for profound changes were under way that continued into the twentieth century, only to be dampened by the currents of two world wars and severe economic depression. Decades were to pass before enthusiasm for animal welfare resurfaced vigorously, during the 1960s and 1970s; it continues to this day. Queen Victoria would have been pleased; Britain is now regarded as a world leader in animal protection.

Selective Benevolence

Over the centuries and millennia, we've learned a great deal about animals. We know that their behavior and physical attributes play a powerful role in how we perceive them. Cats, dogs, horses, and rabbits fare better than sharks or snakes in the popular imagination, still affected by stereotypes of them, developed during the nineteenth century, as savage and dangerous beasts. We have also learned that human economic, cultural, and demographic factors play a major role in how we perceive of, and treat, animals. So do age, education, ethnicity, occupation, religion, and sex.

Bioethicist Peter Singer points out that contemporary attitudes toward animals are “sufficiently benevolent—on a selective basis.”
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However, this benevolence is in constant danger of erosion unless we
make a radical break with more than two thousand years of Western thought that place humans above animals. Singer argues that children have conflicting attitudes toward animals. Their parents encourage them to eat meat to make them strong. At the same time, the children are read stories with animal characters that invariably end happily, and are surrounded with cuddly pets such as cats and dogs, or stuffed animals. In the increasingly urbanized societies of today, fewer and fewer children experience the realities of a farm: the pens, the stalls, animals trucked to the marketplace to become meat. If they see a farm, it is often from an automobile, with buildings but few animals in sight. We are isolated from the animals we eat. Indeed, it is often a surprise for a young child to learn that he or she is eating animal flesh. Numerous wildlife programs appear on television, to the point that many viewers know more about leopards and great white sharks than they do about chickens or calves raised in cages where they can barely move. Nor is the public as a whole aware of the enormous body of research involving animals that goes on behind closed doors. Massive ignorance walls us off from animals raised for food or recruited into laboratory science. There's a widespread assumption, too, that the situation cannot be so bad, for surely the government or some animal welfare organization would have stepped in. The fact is that we do not want to know the truth about the victims of such treatment, partly because we don't want it to weigh on our consciences. The victims are, after all, nonhumans.

It is perfectly true that there are large, influential animal welfare groups in many countries, among them the Humane Society of the United States and the RSPCA, whose early activities we describe in chapter 17. Over the past century, these admirable organizations have become more concerned with pets and wild beasts than with farm animals. In recent years, however, numerous, more radical animal liberation and animal rights groups have come into being that have raised public consciousness about the cruelties of intensive animal production. In response, the more prominent well-established organizations have now become more aggressive about the plight of farm and laboratory animals.

Ultimately, in confronting this issue, we confront a fundamental assumption enshrined deeply in Western thought: that humans come
first. Thus, animal problems have no force as a serious moral or political issue in society. To assume this means to believe that animals simply don't matter, that their suffering is less important than that of people. Much of this distress is pain—and we know that animals suffer pain as much as we do. Think, for a moment, of the suffering we impose on animals. Peter Singer estimates that more than a hundred million cattle, pigs, and sheep, also billions of chickens, go through the industrial food mill a year. In addition, some twenty-five million animals become victims of experiments. We like to think that we are less savage than other beasts, but this is a delusion. We kill other animals for food, for sport, for products to adorn our bodies. For thousands of years we've also tortured animals, as well as humans, before putting them to death. We may talk of bears or lions as savage predators, but we are the super killers.

We also ignore the extent to which nonhuman animals have complex social lives and relationships with other individual beasts. Chimpanzees and wolves have intricate social lives, as do many other species. Witness the discomfort sheep feel when separated from their flock. Yet we persist in talking of such behaviors as “instinct.” As the Cro-Magnons of twenty thousand years ago fully realized, animals are not inanimate creatures that one can mold for one's own purposes. And as Singer points out, “having given up the role of tyrant, we should not try to play God either.”
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Singer and others have argued that it's indefensible to discriminate against living things purely on the basis of the species to which they belong. It's just like discrimination on the basis of race. Animals have interests, and these interests are not necessarily ones that are beneficial to people. The practice of raising and killing animals for food is deeply ingrained in today's industrial societies and involves very powerful and affluent vested interests. Nevertheless, animal liberation groups have made significant gains in recent years. Veal crates (containers that severely restrict the movement of calves through their short lifetimes) are now illegal in the United Kingdom. Battery cages (cages that prevent free movement) for chickens are outlawed in the Netherlands and Switzerland; Sweden has proposals for a complete ban on any devices that prevent animals from moving around freely. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few gains in the United States.