By Bernard Unti
As an historian of animal protection, I am frequently asked about the origins of compassion for animals, particularly on an individual level. My answer is more an article of faith than an in-depth evaluation of broad historical evidence:
There have always been such people. Just as there always will be.
When did I first come to believe this? I don't recall any longer. But if history is a mansion with many rooms, as a favorite professor once remarked, it seems that there are plenty of animal lovers hiding in its dusty attic.
Tom and the Brindled Dog
It was spring 1995, and I was sitting in a graduate history seminar when a classmate showed me a runaway slave notice, dated October 1784, from the Virginia Gazette and Weekly Advertiser. It was one of hundreds in a book she was using for her own research. Slaveholder William Davis had placed the notice to recover a runaway bondsman, Tom, who had stolen a horse and fled Dinwiddie County.
"I expect he aims to pass as a freeman," the slaveholder wrote. After describing both the fugitive and the stolen horse in some detail, Davis added that the runaway "also carried away a dark, brindled dog, with a short tail and white round his neck and down his breast."
What to make of a man who, in flight for his life, was determined to share his daring and uncertain gambit with a dog? From the slaveholder's perspective, the more details he provided to identify Tom the better the prospects for recapture. Thus, Tom increased his risk, and worsened his odds, by taking the dog with him. Would it not have been easier, wiser, better for him to leave the brindled dog behind?
In ensuing years, I have often thought about these two, partners in a rush for freedom. Where did they run to, and what became of them? Did they escape the reach of their pursuers? And where did they end up?
Sometimes, I try to picture them in flight. I can see the man cradling the dog as he rides, evading slave hunters and desperately seeking safe haven for himself and his brindled friend. But their story ends where it began, with the runaway notice, their fate lost to history.
Every now and then, I like to imagine that they, somewhere in time and space, are still on the run.
There have always been such people. Just as there always will be.
A Philly Kitty and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dog Life
It was early 2002, and I was sitting in a humane society archive in Philadelphia, reading a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. In "A Note," the Public Ledger of January 7, 1916 reported a curious find in excavations near Independence Hall. The note, inside a bottle found 18 feet underground, was presumed to date from the 18th century. "This little cat was for 7 years my very much loved friend and comforter," it read. "Deal gently with her, you who find her bones."
No bones, as it turned out, were found at the site. Still, the note speaks loudly and clearly across the centuries.
So much of the lore about the bond between humans and nonhumans concerns the companion animals of the well-known, the wealthy, and the powerful. These animals are forever memorialized in stories, poems, paintings, photographs, postcards, and more. But there is so much more to the history of us and them. In this note, as in the notice about Tom, I see a hint of something hidden.
It was summer 2002, and I was completing my dissertation on concern for animals. One section, "The Bonds of Emotion," included Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' account of visiting Harriet Beecher Stowe's home. Phelps first described the profusion of flowers and the cheerful presence of children in her esteemed colleague's house, but then noted, "There were always dogs, big and little, curly and straight, but in some form, dog life with its gracious reaction on the gentleness and kindness of family life abounded."
There have always been such people. Just as there always will be.
Fred Myers' Sacrifice
It was spring 2003, and I was completing a history of The Humane Society of the United States. One day several colleagues and I met with the daughter and son-in-law of Fred Myers, the principal founder of The HSUS. We told them what we had heard and read; they told us what they could remember. Together, we did our best to recover and reconstruct the past.
The basic story all of us knew. The sacrifices that Myers and his co-founders made to get the fledgling organization off the ground—sacrifices far greater than most of us would ever have to make even in our busiest hours, our busiest days, our busiest years of working for the cause. In just four years, they not only launched The HSUS, but also helped secure passage of the 1958 federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which guaranteed a painless death to millions of cows, pigs, and sheep at the point of slaughter.
As we talked, I could not help but recall that 95% of the animals used for food today do not have such protections—turkeys, chickens and other birds produced by industrial agriculture. Poultry comprised a much smaller percentage of the whole in 1958, of course, and they were not being slaughtered so callously then either. I could imagine bureaucrats using such reasoning to justify the exemption of poultry from legislative protection during the 1950s.
In the 21st century, however, that exemption has become a gaping loophole through which producers cram nine billion birds a year. Reflecting upon Myers' legacy, I felt a bit chagrined knowing that today, with far greater resources at our disposal, it would likely take us far longer than four years to right this wrong. We hadn't exactly let our predecessors down, but we had some hard work ahead of us.
By this time, better than anyone alive, I could identify and explain the events and motives that led Myers and his colleagues to found The HSUS. But what was it, I still pondered, that sustained them? In all their many days and weeks spent visiting slaughtering plants, laboratories, dog pounds, roadside animal exhibits and other bleak locations, what kept them going?
A few things probably: Their sense of satisfaction in delivering practical relief to suffering animals. Their determination to elevate the ethical and practical standards of the entire humane movement. Their pride in early successes. And their shared conviction that, as Myers put it, "kindness can be effectively taught or encouraged, that cruelty can be substantially prevented, that suffering can be significantly decreased."
But to launch and sustain an organization with such an ambitious agenda—and to even imagine that it would survive long enough to achieve its stated objectives—they had to have something else. They had to have the understanding and faith that others would come along—others as dedicated, true and faithful as they themselves were. People who would carry on when they no longer could.
They knew it, too.
There have always been such people. Just as there always will be.
Bernard Unti, senior policy advisor and special assistant to the president, received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States, is available from Humane Society Press.
