For the Prevention of Cruelty

The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States

Diane L. Beers

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780804040235
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Animal rights. Those two words conjure diverse but powerful images and reactions. Some nod in agreement, while others roll their eyes in contempt. Most people fall somewhat uncomfortably in the middle, between endorsement and rejection, as they struggle with the profound moral, philosophical, and legal questions provoked by the debate. Today, thousands of organizations lobby, agitate, and educate the public on issues concerning the rights and treatment of nonhumans.

For the Prevention of Cruelty is the first history of organized advocacy on behalf of animals in the United States to appear in nearly a half century. Diane Beers demonstrates how the cause has shaped and reshaped itself as it has evolved within the broader social context of the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society.

Until now, the legacy of the movement in the United States has not been examined. Few Americans today perceive either the companionship or the consumption of animals in the same manner as did earlier generations. Moreover, powerful and lingering bonds connect the seemingly disparate American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of the nineteenth century and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals of today. For the Prevention of Cruelty tells an intriguing and important story that reveals society's often changing relationship with animals through the lens of those who struggled to shepherd the public toward a greater compassion.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Jim Motavalli, “Rights from Wrongs,” E: The Environmental Magazine 14 (March–April 2003): 26–33.

2. C. C. Buel, “Henry Bergh and His Work,” Scribner’s Monthly 17 (April 1879): 879.

3. John Loeper, Crusade for Kindness: Henry Bergh and the ASPCA (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 94.

4. Gerald Carson, Men, Beasts, and Gods: A History of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 116.

5. National Anti-Vivisection Society, “In Defense of the Defenseless,” Expressions 2 (1994): 28.

6. Amazingly, ASPCA attorneys prosecuted a ship’s captain for transporting sea turtles in cruel and inhumane conditions, contending that it was a criminal act to ignore “that the great Creator, in endowing it with life, gave to it feeling and certain rights, as well as to ourselves.” For a discussion of the case, see Buel, “Henry Bergh,” 879–80.

7. Caroline Earle White, Silver Festival of the Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Philadelphia: Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1894), 3–4.

8. Helen Jones, president of the International Society for Animal Rights, interview by author, November 28, 1995, tape recording, Clarks Summit, PA.

9. Two notable contributions to the intellectual history genre—Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World (London: Penguin, 1983), and Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (New York: Penguin, 1987)—skillfully investigate changing attitudes toward animals in England from 1500 to 1900. More recently on the European front, Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and Moira Ferguson’s Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), explore the social history of pet-keeping in France and women’s activism in England, respectively. In Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), James Turner describes the intellectual aspects of animal suffering in both the United States and England. Gerald Carson’s Men, Beasts, and Gods (1972) presents a more expansive history of cruelty to animals beginning with the prehistoric period, but his section on the United States only generally discusses events prior to 1950. On the American front, four of the earliest additions to the historiography of this subject are Sydney Coleman’s Humane Society Leaders in America (Albany, NY: American Humane Association, 1924), William Shultz’s The Humane Movement in the United States, 1910– 1922 (New York: AMS Press, 1968 [1924]), William Swallow’s Quality of Mercy: History of the Humane Movement in the United States (Boston: Mary Mitchell Humane Fund, 1963), and Charles Niven’s History of the Humane Movement (New York: Transatlantic Press, 1967), but all primarily survey the movement without considering larger social forces. More recently, Roderick Nash’s The Rights of Nature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), and Lisa Mighetto’s Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), have constructed thoughtful explorations of the human-nature relationship, but again, both works concentrate on the development of intellectual thought about animals. Sociologists and scholars of philosophy have also enhanced the discussion with their own studies, including James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin’s The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest (New York: Free Press, 1992), and Lawrence and Susan Finsen’s The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994). However, each provides only a cursory description of the pre-1975 movement and lacks a broader historical framework.

10. Based on 1989 statistics from the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; also see Vegetarianism [pamphlet] (Jenkintown, PA: American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1995).

11. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 22–26; and Jasper and Nelkin, Animal Rights Crusade, 58–59.

12. Swallow, Quality of Mercy, 74–75.

13. “Humane Society Pioneers,” National Humane Review 56 (January–February, 1962): 15.

14. Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pref. and chaps. 1–3

15. For a discussion of the family during the cold war years and the changing roles of women, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), and Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984).

16. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 2; Norwood, Made from This Earth, 146–47; Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 4; D. S. Greenberg, “News and Comments,” Science 140 (May 24, 1963): 878; Frank Graham Jr. Since Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 48–68; and Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 81–85.

17. “Genesis,” National Humane Review 56 (January–February 1962): 6; “Early Years,” National Humane Review 56 (January–February 1962): 20; Coleman, Humane Society Leaders, 252 and 255; and Shultz, Humane Movement in the United States, 1910–1922, 109.

18. Mary F. Lovell, “Progress or Inertia—Which?” Journal of Zoophily 8 (January 1899): 7; and Robert Logan, “Popularity and Progress,” Journal of Zoophily 26 (November 1917): 163.

19. AAVS Minutes Books: The Monthly Stated Meeting of the Board of Managers of the AAVS (Philadelphia, November 27, 1942); “The Paper Curtain,” International Society for Animal Rights Report (August 1985), 4 (copy available at ISAR headquarters in Clarks Summit, PA); Jones interview; and Report of the Third Annual Meeting of the NCSAW (New York, May 26, 1962).

20. Buel, “Henry Bergh,” 882.

21. James A Tober, Who Owns the Wildlife? The Political Economy of Conservation in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 210–12.

22. For the zoophil-psychosis accusation, see Charles L. Dana, “The Zoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• one: Resurrecting the Voice
• two: A Movement Takes Shape
• three: Leaders and Followers
• four: “The Voice of the Voiceless”
• five: Reaching Out to the Mainstream
• six: “Our Most Strenuous Protest”
• seven: The Road to Liberation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index