Mobilizing Traditions in the First Wave of the British Animal Defense Movement

This book addresses the history of the animal defense movement—anticruelty, antihunting and antivivisection—in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, up to the First World War. Its five main chapters describe how Christianity, politics, natural history, evolutionary theory, and literature were “mobilized” in support of animals. Chen-hui Li’s stated goal is a “true understanding of the cause.” The emphasis is therefore on how and why people did things, rather than what they did, for which one might turn to earlier historians of the anticruelty movement, such as Vyvyan, Lansbury, and Kean.

Those new to the subject may be impressed by how many reasons there were to defend animals: Christian stewardship, liberation of the oppressed, reverence for nature, recognition of kinship, and compassion for suffering to name but a few. It is not surprising then that campaigners for animals were a diverse crowd: Evangelical Christians, Tories, neo-pagans, followers of Eastern religions, naturalists, socialists, feminists, reformers, and sentimentalists all found common cause; it was “here comes everybody,” except for the majority who did not trouble themselves about animals at all. As Li points out early on, delving for the campaigners’ “real” motives can prove a distraction. It is more edifying to study how early animal defenders went about achieving their aims than to speculate about their unconscious motives for doing so. Of course, animal activism incorporated human social concerns: Suffragettes saw animals as emblems of their own disenfranchisement, while the poor feared that unchecked cruelty to animals would encourage powerful perpetrators to find human victims. Li’s conclusion (p. 334) that the animal defense movement was responsible for “significant shifts in cultural values, attitudes and practices” looks beyond the fact that few animals were actually saved as a result of early activism—indeed, vivisection and factory farming would increase exponentially in the 20th century—to its intellectual legacy; there are few arguments against cruelty that were not developed during the “first wave.”

The chapter on Christianity refreshingly accords it an honored place, though the claim that the anticruelty movement mobilized Christianity implies that its teachings were co-opted to persuade people to do the right thing, rather than the anticruelty movement having been driven by the reaction of Western Christians to the perceived rivalry of science, “a comparatively new Goddess” (p. 65).

Socialism is given the most credit among the political traditions that inspired the animal welfare movement, though secular criticisms of Christians, that the majority of them were unconcerned with animals (p. 100), was equally true of socialists. A revealing quote from John Burns exposes their concern that compassion for animals diverted attention from the plight of the poor. Theosophy is mentioned in connection with socialism, though one might have wished for a fuller treatment of the “new age” movement for its own sake, as a counterpoint to the rights-based arguments of many radicals. As Li insightfully observes, rights won the day because they had the practical advantage of being nonnegotiable: Why carefully cultivate people’s virtue to make them act with compassion, when one can stridently demand rights? The clamor for justice rather than love (p. 123) foreshadows a legalistic approach to politics and ethics that justify some of the 20th century’s worst conflicts. Kier Hardy’s was a subtler type of socialism, inculcating compassion for animals in the hope of encouraging young people to care for humankind too. On encountering a stray dog, Kier Hardy “let his heart go out to it.” If only more politicians had done the same.

The relationship between the natural history tradition and the anticruelty movement has received less attention from historians than that of politics or religion. The burgeoning 19th-century fascination with the animal world had its roots partly in a Christian admiration for the works of the Creator and…