by Brian Fagan
By the mid-nineteenth century, horse breeding for all manner of tasks had become a highly profitable business. In the United States, the demand for large, powerful horses led to a boom in the importation of large European breeds such as Belgians and Percherons—as many as ten thousand annually during the 1860s. Improved breeding using European stallions increased the size of draft animals by 50 to 75 percent between 1840 and 1900.16 Savvy breeders took advantage of railroads to raise larger horses on the calcium-rich grasses of the Midwest. Breeders, feeding lots that raised and broke in animals, central markets in cities like Chicago—an efficient marketplace brought lower horse prices as the nineteenth century wore on. Standards in the marketplace were such that street railway companies could demand ten-day, no-questions-asked returns for the animals they purchased. Police departments paid for thirty-day warranties, given the difficulties of training their steeds. There were secondary markets for used horses, for black animals sought by funeral directors. Mining companies purchased animals with visual impairments at much cheaper prices, since animals that worked underground often went blind anyway.
Then there were the by-products—stable manure, even street sweepings sold for fertilizer. Before chemical fertilizers came into use, greenhouse farmers prized manure because of the heat it gave off. (By the 1890s, chemicals were so successful for this purpose that stables had to pay for dung to be removed from their premises.) Even in death, a horse was valuable for its hide, for hair as furniture stuffing, for pet food, and for many other uses. Veterinarians or the agents of humane societies shot hundreds of sick, aged, or disabled beasts a year. Others were worked to death, especially when prices were low or business was slack. A carcass might be worth more than a living animal. Rendering companies developed special lifts for removing deceased animals from the streets.
Smarter owners, many of them responsible for large herds, were well aware of the importance of the bond between driver and beast. City streetcar companies required their drivers to groom their charges before going home in the evening. Bonding was important, but the traditional bit and whip were still the predominant ways of controlling animals. This, inevitably, led to some brutal treatment and neglect, which caused owners to worry about their drivers’ behavior when away from the stables. “Know every horse as a mother knows her child,” adjured one company. “Animals always remember the people who treat them right,” wrote one Baltimore driver. His African-American employer even hired a “hoodoo man” to care for his horses.17 Owners encouraged their drivers to name their horses and even went so far as to match African- American drivers with black beasts. Individual names were important in heavy traffic, where a horse would recognize a driver’s call among dozens of others on a noisy street. Not that it prevented use of the whip. One stable management manual even recommended lighting a fire under draft horses to get them moving a heavy load.
Training urban horses required patience and care. Drivers kept a sharp lookout for objects as trivial as a blowing piece of paper that might frighten their charges and cause it to break into a gallop, a natural reflex in the wild. Accidents were commonplace, especially in heavy traffic, and often caused by frightened horses stampeding en masse in crowded streets. In reality, equines were inefficient in strictly business terms. They produced manure and urine and were noisy. They also had the inconvenient habit of dying unexpectedly while on the job and were susceptible to injuries. An epidemic of a particular horse disease could, and did, bring entire cities to a standstill. By the end of the nineteenth century—the century of the horse if ever there was one—the limits of urban horsepower had been reached. There were no further improvements to be achieved by breeding. Inevitably, horse-drawn transportation withered in the face of electric streetcars and the internal combustion engine.
Vivisection and Rabies
The RSPCA enjoyed some success, but cruelty remained, although the invention of the internal combustion engine reduced the number of suffering cab, omnibus, and packhorses dramatically. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s reputation for kindness to animals was almost second to none, and in fact many writers compared the records of Britain favorably with those of southern Catholic countries. Delve more deeply, however, and one confronts a profound ambivalence in the animal-human relationship. Nowhere is this more striking than in the debates over vivisection, which reached a crescendo during the late nineteenth century.18 The RSPCA faced a quandary. On the one hand, it presented comprehensive, closely argued reasons for a total ban on animal vivisection as a form of animal abuse, whether for research or teaching and demonstration purposes, this during debates over the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. On the other, respected scientists insisted that medical research was of such importance that prohibiting vivisection was out of the question. The RSPCA’s primary concern had been with the seemingly irrational behavior of uneducated members of society toward working animals. Ardent antivivisectionists were often sentimentalists, animal fanciers, especially concerned with the suffering of animals normally kept as pets. Impersonal modern science was the villain to such people; whereas to scientists, it represented one of the great achievements of contemporary society. The latter’s organized lobbying efforts argued for a continuation of carefully regulated vivisection in the name of that Victorian ideal, human progress.
There were other ambivalences, notably the hysterical response to rabies, which was one of the passionate debates that emerged in Victorian society. The chances of contracting rabies, a disease associated in the popular mind with contamination and that most Victorian of evils, Sin with a capital S, were infinitesimal. Only seventy-nine Britons died of rabies in 1877, by far the worst year for fatalities during the entire century. Controversy swirled around the causes of the disease, with some people believing that spontaneous generation led to infection; others, that it was contagion from dog bites. To many people, especially numerous cynophobes, dogs were the villains. This distrust of dogs sometimes reached epidemic proportions, prompting the Kennel Review to remark that hydrophobia was “a peculiar madness that seizes men and impels them to destroy dogs.”19 Much of the contagion hypothesis revolved around accusations of guilt, and dogs were the villains, which made them a police matter.
Controlling disease meant watching those canines that deviated from conventional moral and physical norms. Inevitably, the character of both dog and owner became intermingled. For instance, the aggressive poaching and hunting dogs kept by the “lower classes” were suspect. So were smaller pet dogs kept by the poor under squalid conditions. The logical solution seemed to be to kill the suspects. Tens of thousands of dogs perished in the face of perceived rabies threats. According to historian Harriet Ritvo, only 5 percent of the dogs slaughtered during the nineteenth century were mad; three quarters of them were epileptic or strange looking. Ironically, rabies was in decline in Europe owing to the overhunting of wolves on the Continent. Alternatives were muzzling, confinement, and quarantine, despite the development of an rabies vaccine by Louis Pasteur during the 1880s—developed after lengthy experimentation on live animals. The long-term solution for the British Isles was quarantine, first introduced in 1902 and now regulated by European Union and U.K. rules.
“The Lower Class of Persons”
By the end of the nineteenth century, treating animals well had become part of what has been called “Englishness.” By midcentury, prevention of cruelty to animals—and this meant cruelty to working animals and animals owned by the lower classes—had become a major concern of middle-class reformers. Bear baiting and other such sports became symbols not only of animal suffering but of moral depravity. A flood of middle-class Victorian children’s literature preached self-control and masking passions, the argument being that those who treated their fellow creatures badly would end up being evil in later life. Thus arose a pervasive association of cruelty to animals with bad behavior, one that had strong undertones of social discipline and religious morality. The RSPCA’s literature of the day contained heartrend
ing descriptions of struggling, lame horses; of dogs hauling carts while “beaten with a heavy chain.”20 Much of this was absolutely sincere, but most of it was aimed at the “lower class of persons,” said to possess less sense than many of the horses and other animals they tended.
Aristocratic pastimes such as fox hunting were occasionally criticized, but for the most part, they came under the category of “innocent amusements.” Alongside the anticruelty movement, a new phenomenon illustrated an enduring dichotomy in our relationship with animals: the dramatic explosion of pet ownership, which became a passion, not only of monarchs and nobility, but of the burgeoning middle class.
CHAPTER 18
To Kill, to Display, and to Love
The Victorians experienced a profound dichotomy over animals. There was common, and widespread, indifference to suffering beasts that labored on every side. Cruelty and ruthless exploitation of working animals in peace and in war persisted, despite the best efforts of the RSPCA and a growing number of other animal rights organizations to improve their working conditions. (Some such groups used the harsh treatment of animals as part of a broader moral crusade directed at the working classes.) Animals labored in cities without automobiles or internal combustion engines, even with the advent of railroads and steam power. As we have seen, to many people they were ubiquitous, just part of the scenery of urban life. Many poor urbanites had never visited the countryside or a farm and had never seen cattle or sheep in their natural habitats.
Exotic Beasts
Indifference to the plight of working animals flourished alongside a popular fascination with exotic wild animals. Perhaps this is hardly surprising, since much of the world was still little explored. Enterprising showmen titillated the public with displays of rare beasts. A bison, an elephant, even a llama from Peru, exhibited in the Haymarket off Piccadilly in 1805, attracted large crowds.1 Menageries became fashionable attractions. By 1825, London’s Bartholomew Fair hosted at least three of them. One collection of the large cats even allowed visitors free admission if they brought a dog or cat: they could watch it being fed to the lions.2 The Exeter ’Change Menagerie, in Central London, became a major attraction—two upstairs rooms in a commercial building crammed with animals caged so tightly that they could barely turn around. In 1812, the larger of the two rooms housed two tigers, a lion, a hyena, a leopard, a panther, and even a camel. There were traveling shows as well, including one in 1816, at which a lioness escaped from her wagon and attacked one of the horses. All the caged beasts sent a powerful message of domination over distant lands, not only of their animals but of their inhabitants as well.
Figure 18.1 The Exeter ’Change Menagerie, c. 1820. The exhibits included an elephant in a cage so small it could barely turn around. Aquatint after George Rowlandson (1757–1827). Superstock.
Curiosity seekers visited commercial menageries such as the Exeter ’Change or George Wombell’s shows. The Zoological Society of London opened its gardens in a corner of Regent’s Park in 1828 with serious scientific goals. No fewer than 112,226 people visited what the society called “a general Zoological Collection.” The animals, and their carcasses when they died, were available for serious research; access to the gardens was for members only or by invitation, but not for the poor or the populace as a whole. This policy didn’t endure, for financial reasons, however fashionable the London Zoo became among the elite. Such menageries rapidly became a symbol of progress and enlightenment, of emerging empire. The zoo became, as one commentator in the Quarterly Review observed, a way of rescuing the poor from “the fascinations of the public house.”3 Humble visitors were thought to find “improvement” and, indirectly, to participate in conquests of remote, recently explored places.
The Zoological Society used its gardens to make sense of the animal kingdom, to highlight for the general public the links between different species. The Zoo encouraged interaction with the animals, especially feeding the bears, which became so popular that the humor magazine Punch showed a group of them suffering from dyspepsia caused by “31,457 buns.”4 Camel and elephant rides and petting small animals were grist for the popular mill, despite the danger of losing one’s hat to a monkey or baboon, or being spat upon by a camel or llama. The greatest attraction was always the big cats, especially when viewed at feeding time as they growled and roared and tossed about meat and bones with wild abandon. Some animals, like Obaysch, the first live hippopotamus to visit Europe since Roman times, became celebrities, as did numerous gifted chimpanzees. To achieve such status they had to be either large or possessed of unusual intelligence. Stocking the Zoo became a quasi-official duty for consuls and colonial officials, just as collecting Ancient Egyptian antiquities had been a charge for British and French diplomats in Cairo after the Napoleonic Wars.
Maintaining exotic animals in captivity meant successful breeding, and even attempts to domesticate some of them for human use. A small number of wealthy landowners maintained breeding menageries on their estates. Most preferred animals that could be eaten. At his death in 1851, Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby, maintained a park with 345 mammals and 1,272 birds from 94 species. Most were antelope and deer, also llamas, zebras, and other animals gathered not for display but for breeding experiments. Many groups devoted to what was called “acclimatizing” enjoyed feasts of dishes created from exotic beasts. The Acclimatization Society hosted a dinner in 1863 that included bird’s nest soup, kangaroo ham, Syrian pig, leporine, and Chinese sheep.
Kill! Kill! Kill!
Menageries official and unofficial displayed exotic beasts of all kinds as spoils of a growing empire. But they also symbolized the high-risk, adventurous lives of the bold individuals who collected and hunted such creatures. The living trophies of empire went up for sale in London’s wild animal shops, large and small. Most of the animals they sold were smaller species, for to obtain a beast such as a lion meant killing the mother and capturing her cubs, a dangerous undertaking under the best of circumstances.
The frontiers of empire moved away from coasts and into remoter parts of Africa and Asia during the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials collected young animals, especially the most desirable beasts such as lions, tigers, elephants, or zebras.5 Acquiring, caring for, and shipping them was both expensive and time consuming, so the emphasis shifted to spectacular hunting trophies. Now hunters sought magnificent beasts, killed deep in the bush and then sent home to be stuffed and displayed against suitable backgrounds. The symbolism was obvious: victory in the field over animals just as it was over rebellious tribesmen on India’s Northwest Frontier or Zulu warriors in southern Africa. Trophy displays of dangerous animals appeared in museums and attracted large crowds. The Great Exhibition of 1851 included all manner of game animals, from rare British birds to Indian tigers. Exhibits of suitably mounted hunting trophies graced the Paris Exposition of 1867. A collection of hunting trophies “’ecured in the wildest parts of North America by the prowess of British sportsmen” graced the American Exhibition of 1887 in London.
Big-game hunting seemed romantic and dangerous, adventure that unfolded in remote lands and deep in the bush. Elephants and rhinoceroses charged, bears stood on their hind legs to challenge repeater rifles, expert stalkers tracked wary antelope through thick brush. Magnificent, slaughtered antelope or hippopotami in carefully arranged rows graced photographs published in books and displayed, alongside the stuffed heads of the prey, in palatial country houses. Some big-game hunters such as Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming (1820–1866) and Frederick Courteney Selous (1851–1917) traveled deep into the African interior. Gordon-Cumming became an elephant ivory hunter for five years. In 1849, he returned home with thirty tons of trophies and a safari wagon—also a Bushman. In 1850, he published a popular book about his adventures and opened an exhibit that thrived for eight years and appeared at the Great Exhibition in 1851. For an extra charge, the visitor could hear Gordon-Cumming, the “lion hunter,” lecture with a musical accompaniment. He became a popular celebri
ty, widely admired as “the greatest hunter of modern times.”6
While Gordon-Cumming exuded a love of sport and trophy hunting, Frederick Courtney Selous had a long career in colonial service and as a soldier. By 1895, he had spent more than twenty years as an ivory hunter and specimen collector in southern Africa. Eschewing lantern slides, then a hot attraction, he lectured while surrounded by “certain of the most remarkable lions and other animals which had fallen to the lecturer’s gun.”7 He told captivating stories of encounters with lions and hostile warriors that held his audiences spellbound for well over an hour. In 1919, his widow presented no fewer than 524 stuffed mammals from his collection to the Natural History Museum in London, including 19 lions.
By the outbreak of World War I, dead wild animal heads by the hundreds adorned country houses and museums. (Our values have changed. Now many of the same trophies reside in junk stores in an era with far more austere views on big-game hunting.) The mounted bestiary testified to the bloody triumphs of government officials and sportsmen intent on bagging fine specimens, then skinning and drying them in the field before shipping them home, where expert taxidermists attempted to reproduce the animal as it had appeared in the wild. Selous wrote of an eland, a large antelope by any standards, that he hoped to see “set up in such a manner that would recall to my mind, to some degree, the splendid creature he looked when alive.”8