The Intimate Bond

by Brian Fagan

  During the nineteenth century, the big-game hunter emerged not only as a popular hero and a “sportsman,” but as an empire builder striking out into virgin imperial territory. His hunts were a symbol of advancing civilization, the subject of patriotic fervor. Colonial administrators, military officers, even missionaries, and just plain leisure travelers with a “proclivity” for shooting descended on Africa and Asia, repeater rifles in hand. A tidal wave of big-game narratives weighed down Victorian bookshelves, a genre remarkable for its monotonous and enthusiastic recounting of slaughter, whether of African elephants, Bengal tigers, or North American buffalo. Such hunting raised violent passions in its practitioners, an overwhelming sense of power. They wrote of “whole hecatombs of slaughter,” of big-game hunting as “one of the most powerful affections of the human mind.” They also talked of the salutary effects of life in the open, in the wilderness, where one’s qualities of resourcefulness and enterprise came to the fore. Invariably, the hero was cool in manner, restrained, and of course, had a sense of humor. The published accounts stressed riskier hunts, described the death throes of the quarry in dispassionate prose, everything coming down to an insatiable lust to kill some animal or other. Killing game became a passion for those who served in the colonies.

  As firearms became more accurate and shooting large animals became easier, the emphasis shifted from wholesale slaughter to the bagging of superlative heads and horns. Game became scarcer, which is hardly surprising given the tallies of victims in many hunting narratives. A good day’s hunting in India’s Mysore State could include twenty-nine buffalo, about a hundred fifty hippopotami, and ninety-one elephants in “a most splendid hunt.” By the time a reaction set in against indiscriminate hunting, large tracts of the world had been denuded of their larger animals, this apart from the depredations of the fur trade in North America and elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, the focus of empire changed from conquest and force to administration. As part of that much more prosaic task, a need to conserve, manage, and protect wild animals slowly replaced the most violent confrontation between animals and humans in history. Big-game hunting represented part of the dilemma about animals that confronted the Victorians—and that, to a considerable extent, still confronts us today. Nowhere was this ambivalence more evident than in the emerging middle-class passion for domestic pets.

  Purebreds and Mongrels

  When the poet Lord Byron buried his Newfoundland dog Boatswain in 1808, he interred it on sacred ground with an epitaph that spoke of “all the Virtues of Man without his vices.”9 By Byron’s time, pet keeping was becoming commonplace among more ordinary folk, in a period when displaying public affection toward animals became more acceptable.

  During the mid-nineteenth century, a positive cult of pet keeping arose in Victorian society, generating a huge trade in live animals, with twenty thousand such street traders in London alone.10 Thieves even stole animals and returned them for a ransom, this apart from a booming trade in everything from dog collars to animal brushes, and in books aimed at pet fanciers, hitherto written mainly for owners of hounds and gun dogs. Pet fancying became a virtual obsession for many people, with fanciers becoming the backbone of the RSCPA and other anticruelty groups.

  Nowhere does one witness Victorian ambivalence more clearly than among dog fanciers. From the beginning, a hierarchy developed between the dogs of well-heeled masters and mistresses at one end of the spectrum and working canines and their owners at the other. Dog fanciers cherished elite patronage as a way of identifying with their social superiors. For example, terriers and pugs enjoyed high popularity; bulldogs, originally an animal associated with fighting and lower-class sporting activities, achieved great popularity as pets during the late nineteenth century. By then, the lines had been drawn firmly between sporting dogs of the countryside and the pets of urban fanciers. Canines occupied a whole range of social ranks, with a strong preference among the aristocracy for breeds with little association with lower-class pet lovers. As the nineteenth century unfolded, so the chasm between purebred dogs—the breeds were usually artificial formulations—and mongrels widened. Mixed-breed animals were thought to cause much of the mischief and dog-biting incidents in city streets, and were shunned. Experts solemnly advised pet fanciers to steer clear of mongrels and to embrace purebred animals.

  Part of the ever-closer attention paid to breeds came from the growing popularity of dog shows.11 The first truly formal event, sponsored by a sporting gun maker named Pape, was in Newcastle-on-Tyne, in northeastern England, on June 28, 1859. There were sixty entries in the show, with classes for pointers and setters only. The idea soon achieved remarkable popularity. A large show with more than a thousand entries, at Chelsea, on the west side of London, opened to wide acclaim in 1863. Not that these were the first such functions, for highly informal shows were commonplace in London public houses well before 1859. The audience served as exhibitors and judges, reaching what Harriet Ritvo calls a “convivial consensus.” These events often took place in rooms used on other days for rat-killing contests. For all their humble, and probably often disorderly, ancestry, dog shows caught on like wildfire, many of them purely local events that prepared exhibitors for the major shows of the national circuit. In 1899, almost fifteen hundred dogs competed in the national Kennel Club show. Wrote an expert in 1900, “Taking out Saturdays and Sundays, there is a Dog Show being held somewhere or other on every ordinary day of the year.”12

  Figure 18.2 This cartoon by George Bowers speaks volumes about the Victorian passion for pets. Cartoonstock.

  All this activity revolved around dog breeding. The shows themselves were usually models of decorum, but the conditions behind the scenes were appalling. Cages were inadequate, and water and food were in short supply; chains were too short, so the animals were let out frequently. Under such circumstances the risks of infection, especially from distemper, were very high, so much so that entrants were in as much danger of losing their lives from disease as they were from inquisitive spectators. No railroad provided adequate accommodation for show dogs. They huddled in filthy vans, often dying from cold and hunger. The atmosphere, even at big shows, was conducive to cheating and misrepresentation. The Kennel Club, formed in 1873, came into being as a way of establishing the pedigrees of different breeds. The club’s untiring efforts paid off when showing dogs became a well-regulated and respectable pastime. This was largely the work of middle-class dog fanciers, who were determined to carve out a place in the strongly hierarchical British society of the day.

  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.13 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”).

  Taming the Fowl

  Chickens were everywhere in Victorian England: crowded into urban tenements, wandering in farmyards, always available for the pot. Today they are a food staple throughout the world.14

  Domesticated chickens have a still-little-understood genealogy, which extends back at least seven thousand years, probably longer. The earliest-known possible domesticated fowls are said to have come from archaeological sites dating to about 5400 BCE, in arid northeastern China, their putative bones far north of the ancestral homeland of the bird. None other than Charles Darwin of On the Origin of Species fame declared that the ancestor of the chicken was the red jungle fowl Gallus gallus, a theory recently confirmed by DNA research. Jungle fowls thrive from northeastern India to the Philippines, but they are probably not the only ancestors of domestic fowls. Other ancestors may include the gray jungle fowl of southern India, but the DNA trail is inconclusive. People probably domesticated chickens in several tropical locations.

  Once domesticated, chickens spread widely down trade routes and traveled with armies, perhaps also on ships. Their westward spread may have started in the Indus Valley, whose cities traded with Mesopotamia more than four thousand years ago. Chicken bones come from the port of Lothal, on the Indus Valley’s west coast, a flourishing port for Indus cities of the day. Cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia dating to 2000 BCE refer to “birds of Meluha” and, somewhat later, to “royal birds of Meluha” (Meluha being the Indus Valley), perhaps a reference to chickens. Chickens arrived along the Nile slightly later, as fighting birds or exotics, but did not become popular among ordinary Egyptians for another millennium. The Egyptians appear to have developed artificial incubation, which allowed chickens to lay more eggs.

  Roosters can behave quite fiercely, armed as they are with a bony leg spur. As people discovered thousands of years ago, these birds can be bred and trained to fight with small knives and spurs attached to their legs. Cockfighting became popular throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and, later, in European and American cities. Westerners consider it inhumane; Louisiana was the last U.S. state to ban it, in 2008.

  Eggs were a delicacy for the Romans, who developed the omelet and stuffed roasted birds. In 161 BCE, a law, triggered by concerns about gluttony, limited the consumption of chickens to one per meal. Fowls accompanied armies, their behavior observed before battle, an impending victory being forecast by a bird’s good appetite. The popularity of chickens declined after the collapse of the Roman Empire, perhaps because the large, organized farms and production systems that protected the birds from predators went out of use. Powerful symbolism has surrounded, and still surrounds, the chicken in many societies. For example, in the Gospels, Peter denies Jesus “before the cock crows.” During the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I ordered that a figure of a rooster be placed atop every church in Christendom. Many churches still have cockerel weather vanes.

  Today’s mass raised fowls are a far cry from the chickens of the past, valued for their fighting prowess and their powerful spiritual associations. They were said to make wonderful pets, and even to be excellent mousers.

  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.”15

  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.”16 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.”17 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 appe
ar 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.