'Our Kindred Creatures' unflinchingly documents America's capacity for animal cruelty over a period spanning the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s. In the 19th century, horses in the pre-automotive age were whipped mercilessly and forced to haul impossibly heavy loads. High-society women sported fanciful hats adorned with the plumes of birds slaughtered wholesale for fashion. In New York City, stray dogs were rounded up and killed by drowning in a giant metal box. This period still influences Americans’ love of certain animals today, and our indifference toward many others.
BEN GOLDFARB: American society has a confused, contradictory relationship with animals. Many dog owners have no compunction about eating feedlot-raised pigs, animals whose intelligence, sociality, and sentience compare favorably with their shih tzus and beagles. Some cat lovers let their outdoor felines contribute to mass bird murder. A pescatarian might claim that a cod is less capable of suffering than a chicken. Why do some species reside comfortably within our circles of concern, while others squat shivering beyond the firelight, waiting for us to welcome them in?
Wasik and Murphy’s book often makes for disturbing reading, so unflinchingly does it document humankind’s capacity for cruelty… In Our Kindred Creatures, their meticulously researched history of the dawn of the animal-rights movement, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy argue that America’s animal attitudes were largely shaped over a period spanning the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s…
In the 19th century, horses, ubiquitous beasts of burden in the pre-automotive age, were whipped mercilessly and forced to haul impossibly heavy loads. Medical-school instructors vivisected rabbits in anatomy lessons. High-society women sported fanciful hats adorned with the plumes of egrets, terns, and other birds “slaughtered wholesale for the cause of fashion”; offshore bobbed ships full of live sea turtles flipped on their shell, slowly dying as they waited to become soup. Every day in New York City, stray dogs were rounded up and “killed by drowning in a giant metal box … used to dispatch some sixty to eighty dogs at a time.”
It was during those decades, Wasik and Murphy write, that many Americans came to realize that animals weren’t mere “objects” but “creatures whose joys and sufferings had to be taken into consideration”… This moral awakening, described by one contemporaneous journalist as a “new type of goodness,” still influences Americans’ love of certain animals today, and our indifference toward many others. These disparate feelings, Wasik and Murphy suggest, are an inheritance from that late-1800s era. They are also influenced by spatial and psychic proximity: Most people are more likely to care about the well-being of a pet with whom they cohabit than a pig that resides in a slaughterhouse.
The future of animal welfare in the United States may depend on whether Americans can expand their concern beyond the boundaries drawn by 19th-century reformers—whether, as Wasik and Murphy put it, we can apply our “reservoirs of pet love” to other, more distant creatures. SOURCE…
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