Gabfest Reads: Why Americans Care About Animals

This episode explores the historical evolution of American attitudes towards animals, emphasizing the interplay between human-animal relationships, legal frameworks, and societal norms during transformative periods.

1. The 30-year period starting in 1866 was crucial in developing American attitudes towards animals.
2. Legislation and activism during this time significantly advanced animal welfare, even as societal and economic changes complicated these relationships.
3. Historical contexts, like the rise of veterinary medicine and legal frameworks, were pivotal in shaping current perspectives.
4. The episode highlights the ongoing moral and ethical debates surrounding animal welfare.
5. It draws parallels between animal rights movements and other social justice movements, emphasizing a shared evolution in societal values.

1: Introduction

Host Emily Bazelon introduces the topic and guests, setting the stage for a discussion on the historical context of American attitudes toward animals. Emily Bazelon: "Welcome to Gabfest reads for the month of May."

2: Historical Overview

The chapter discusses the foundational period of animal welfare in the U.S., starting with the ASPCA's establishment. Bill Wasek: "This is the era when our sort of current attitudes towards animals developed."

3: The Turtle Case

This segment focuses on a pivotal legal case that broadened the scope of animal welfare to include lesser-considered species like turtles. Bill Wasek: "It was very successful, and it really did sort of open the eyes of observers of the time."

4: Societal Impacts

Discussion on how animal welfare intersected with other social movements and the role of women in these advocacy roles. Bill Wasek: "Animal welfare to them felt like it deserved to be on the list."

5: Veterinary Advances

The rise of professional veterinary medicine and its impact on animal and human health, particularly through the control of diseases like rabies. Monica Murphy: "They were really trying to provide a public face for veterinary medicine that was scientific and professional."

1. Advocate for and support animal welfare legislation.
2. Educate oneself about the history and ongoing issues in animal rights.
3. Support organizations that promote humane treatment of animals.
4. Consider the ethical implications of one’s dietary choices and consumer habits.
5. Raise awareness about the interconnectedness of animal welfare and broader social justice issues.

Emily Bazelon talks with authors Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, about their new book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals. They discuss the evolution of animal treatment in America, moral duties to animals, and how to care about more animals than our pets.

People

Emily Bazelon, Bill Wasek, Monica Murphy

Companies

American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)

Books

Our Kindred Creatures

Guest Name(s):

Bill Wasek, Monica Murphy

Content Warnings:

None

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Emily Bazelon
No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law. 18 terms and conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Gabfest reads for the month of May. I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's political gabfest, and I'm here with Bill Wasek and Monica Murphy, who are the authors of the new book our Kindred Creatures, how Americans came to feel the way they do about animals.

Bill and Monica, welcome. Hi there. Thanks for having us. So Bill is the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine and a colleague of mine. And Monica is a veterinarian and a writer.

This is their second book they've written together, and it's about what you call a transformative 30 year period for animal rights and animal welfare in the United States beginning in 1866. And I think that's the founding of the first animal welfare society. It's the time, you say, that created our current attitude toward animals, our love of pets, our reverence for certain kinds of wildlife, and then the distant ignorance of food, animals who live and die at a remove from us. So you say that if we want to understand why we have the complicated feelings we now have animals, that we have to understand this period. What is so formative about it?

Well, at the beginning of this time period, you just have a very different economy. You have a very different use of animals. I mean, horses in particular are everywhere. The horses are the major drivers of not only rural America during this time period or coming into this time period, but also urban America, the industrial revolution, sort of, you know, counter intuitively or contrary to our expectations from where we are now, the machines didn't sweep the horses off the streets immediately. They actually brought a lot more horses onto the streets, bringing in addition to the supplies and dry goods and wet goods and everything else, they always carried the coal that ran the machines that was carried by horse wagon, too.

Bill Wasek
So animals were very much living in and amongst the people of this era. And so the way the animals were treated by people was also on display. Yeah. And the other thing that you had in those sort of urbanizing cities was kind of all the uses of animals were right there for everybody to see. And so coming back to your question about sort of, what is it we mean when we say that this is the era when our sort of current attitudes towards animals developed?

Really, in some ways, it's about the activism that really did transform not just laws, but norms in terms of how cruelly you could treat animals, certainly how cruelly you could treat them in public view, which really did have a huge effect, and I think is kind of an underappreciated social movement in terms of where the period begins and where it ends. But then the bigger transformations in some ways just have to do with the transformations of society and the economy that sort of move the animals out of the city. The ones who live closely with us, like the dogs and the cats and horses, other domestic animals, are treated much, much better. And yet there's this kind of shadow realm of animals that springs up during this time period, particularly around food, where they're sort of off, really away from human society, which makes it much, much harder for us to kind of think about their treatment. And so when we say how we came to feel the way we do about animals, really what we're talking about is the development of this kind of very bifurcated, sort of contradictory set of attitudes where some of them are bosom companions and others are really just kind of an abstraction that makes it really hard for us to think about them.

Or should they sort of feel for them in the way that we really should? Yeah, I think that's really helpful, and it leads me into. I think leads me into a question about the turtle case, which turtles are an animal, which, at the time, I think people didn't see as having feelings, maybe even didn't really consider to be an animal or quite alive at all. Can you talk about that case, the role that it played in changing attitudes? Sure.

Bill Wasek
This piece came up just several weeks into the existence of the first animal welfare society, the ASPCA, or American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was headed up by Henry Berg, who circulated a petition and got the charter for the organization passed in Albany, and very shortly thereafter had animal welfare legislation pushed through with ASPCA. As the enforcer of these new animal welfare laws, he busied himself in his first weeks with the sort of things his supporters had expected from him, coming down on people, beating horses in the streets, and transporting livestock in ways that weren't humane. But when he took on the turtle case, it was sort of jarring to everyone in that it sort of exceeded the powers that his supporters had imagined. They were giving the ASBCA. What the case was about was a shipment of turtles that came up from Florida, as they often did at this time, to sort of fuel the taste for turtle soup, which was a very popular delicacy in northeastern United States and elsewhere.

And the turtles are shipped alive during this era before refrigeration. And so in the hold of the ship on their backs, they make their slow way up from Florida, and then they have cords sort of run through their flippers to ensure that they hold still, and they're going to be put up for sale in the Fulton fish market in New York City. Henry Berg, when the ship had docked, boarded the ship, arrested the captain, and attempted to prosecute him. I mean, did prosecute him, but didn't convict him for animal cruelty. The case was lost on the grounds that the turtle wasn't really an animal, and so it wasn't protected under the new bill, but it created quite a sensation, got a lot of publicity for Henry Burke's cause.

So in that sense, it was very successful, and it really did sort of open the eyes of observers of the time to the fact that animal welfare was sort of a broad concern that would sort of encompass more than just the obvious sort of flogging of animals that was visible sort of out in the streets and might actually inconvenience someone. And in these first years, so I think the first law that you talk about, it's in New York, it's 1866. It's called an act better to prevent cruelty to animals, and it's preventing by act or neglect animal torture with the idea that you could be convicted of a misdemeanor. So for the people who are managing animals in New York, does this come as a big surprise? Like, does it have mainstream support, and how do they feel about it?

It definitely is an elite kind of preoccupation. I mean, as so many of these humanitarian causes were during the time period, it was, you know, the wealthy, the city fathers, you know, the mayor was one of the people who sort of signed the petition for the starting of this organization. You know, the working people were tended to be the target of it. So I'm not totally sure if you were to take a, take a poll at the time that it would have been popular. But people with power among people with power among newspapers, among the sort of fathers of the city, et cetera, it was broadly popular.

Emily Bazelon
I thought this quote was kind of amazing. Henry Burr goes up to someone who's beating his horse and tells him that he's violating this law. And the driver says, can't beat my own horse. Go to hell. You're mad.

Just suggesting that this is like a big attitudinal shift that we're talking about. Just the idea that you would even think about. About livestock as having legal rights, I suppose, in a way that could be different from how humans wanted to treat them. Yeah, I mean, I really do think that it's the change in norms in some ways, because the percentage of people abusing animals who were actually caught and prosecuted was, of course, very small. But the sense that this interaction with your property was subject to moral disapproval was itself, I think, really transformative.

I mean, there's a quote that we use really prominently in the book where there was a profile of Henry Berg in a magazine in the 1870s, where the writer said, it's like he brought a new kind of goodness to America, which is a phrase that we really love, in that feeling of like, hey, wait. It's like there's suddenly a new way of thinking about what's right and what's wrong is the kind of shift that can be very profound. And I think we can see it sometimes in our own era. And one of the things that we really like about this subject really inspired us is that it is a really interesting case study in moral change and kind of how it works. Yeah, I really like that, too.

Emily Bazelon
And I kept thinking about this movement for animal welfare and animal rights against the backdrop of other social movements at the time. Right. I mean, this is the period right after the abolition of slavery, when you have the era of reconstruction, of a kind of attempt at equal rights, which then gets thwarted. It's also the time when women start to really try to campaign to get the vote. It's the time of the temperance movement.

Did you see connections among these various social movements? Like, did some of the people know each other, or is there this expanding conception of morality that's shared? You're exactly right. The same people who were sort of active in the animal welfare movement had been involved in the abolitionist movement and were concerned with other progressive causes, like women's rights and temperance. And even if animal welfare sort of took off in a way that some of these other equally worthy causes didn't, all of them were absorbing this sort of fervor and energy from the post abolitionist moment, where progressives felt like they'd scored a big victory and were sort of like, what's next?

Bill Wasek
What's next for improving society in America and animal welfare to them felt like it deserved to be on the list. Another big kind of transformation that happens during this time period is the acceptability of women in leadership in social movements really changes a lot during this time period. So one of the main characters in the book is this one named Carolyn Earle White, who is in Philadelphia and is really the prime mover, and the founding of the Pennsylvania SPCA, which is one of the first three that gets founded. It's just universally understood that she has to step aside for male leadership in the 1860s. But by the end of our time period, she becomes really active in the so called anti vivisection movement, meaning against medical research on animals.

And she really is undisputedly the leader and the founder of that society. And that's true in England as well.

One of the things that you definitely see is women activists across this whole range of causes, and not just specifically women's causes like suffrage, are really kind of come into their own, and there's a sense that it's socially acceptable by the end of this period for them to be the leaders and not just the foot soldiers in a movement like animal welfare. I wanted to ask you also about the kind of rise of the professional veterinarian. I mean, Monica, this must have been a subject that was of particular interest to you when you describe, and I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce his name, but Alexandre Francois Augustin Lyotard, something like that. Establishing the scientific discipline of veterinary medicine in the United States. And it's happening as there's this terrible disease raging among horses in New York City.

Emily Bazelon
How does that all come to pass? It's true that Lyotard and others were in the process of establishing the first durable veterinary schools, which would train veterinarians in sort of scientific medicine, were setting up the American Veterinary Medical association, which at the time, I guess was called the US Veterinary Medical association. They were really trying to provide a public face for veterinary medicine that was scientific and professional and honorable, and distinguished themselves from all the various charlatans and quacks who were also peddling veterinary medicine. Essentially, anyone could say they were a horse doctor. During this era and into the United States swept a really devastating flu.

Bill Wasek
It was influenza virus, or that's what it's believed to have been given its epidemiology. Of course, they didn't have virus testing at the time. What seems to have happened, though, was a spillover of avian flu into the horse population somewhere near Toronto, and then a really rapid spread throughout the northeastern United States. And across the continent, out to the west coast. The flu affected nearly every horse in every city it came to, it appeared they had no sort of pre existing immunity to this.

So nearly every horse in a rapidly moving wave would go down and not be able to work at all for several days. Thankfully, it wasn't a very fatal virus, but the horses were down and out of work, and it was very jarring to people of the time to see their cities go just completely quiet. The hoofbeats on the pavements and the clattering of the carriage wheels were completely silenced. The ports couldn't really do anything because the horses moved. The winches that unloaded the ships and the railroads couldn't operate because the horses brought the coal.

So it was a nearly total shutdown as it swept into your city. And it was very eye opening. A in terms of helping people realize their dependence on horses, which in some sense fueled the humane cause a little bit because these were indeed valuable servants. But also the professional veterinarian was held up in higher esteem when people realized how much they depended on the health of these animals and their ability to work. So the veterinarians of the era, even though by modern standards, maybe didn't have super great ideas about how to stop or treat the flu, they had better ideas than their contemporaries without any sort of scientific training.

And so they, I think, most importantly, they persuaded the animal owners that they had something valuable to offer, and that really did help sort of set up the profession to be further professionalized.

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Emily Bazelon
Okay. So, as all of this is developing for domestic animals, I want to turn to your chapter about the buffalo. We have this wild animal in the american west that is being slaughtered. How does this take shape? Is the slaughter something that Americans are indifferent to, or is there a movement to stop it?

And what happens? The slaughter of the buffalo was well underway as we enter this time period. It had been going on for more than a century, although it really accelerated in the middle of the 19th century as more people were coming out to the west and more guns were sort of available for use in hunting those bison. And the hides of the bison were sort of craved by industry who wanted to make machine belts out of them. And leaders wanted the bison out of the way to help ensure room for growth of the country and the sort of marginalization of the American Indians who lived on the plains and hunted them.

Yeah. One of the interesting points that is made is that the civil war had really influenced the military thinkers, that one of the ways you could defeat a military adversary within your own sort of national borders was to sort of starve off their source of sustenance that had been seen as really important to the north, military victory. And so they sort of cynically were in favor, or some people were cynically in favor of the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo. The bison, I should say, because they thought that it would make, it would lead to victory in the wars against the Indians. But it was probably also only during this time period that they realized that total obliteration of the bison was even possible, because they did, for so many years, seemed like their numbers were so great that however many were slaughtered or harvested, there would always be more.

Bill Wasek
But that by the end of the 19th century, was very much apparent to be untrue. And so as. As people sort of faced down the extinction of the bison, they saw advantages and disadvantages. And is there any moment where Congress steps in and tries to impose a national solution? I mean, they do.

They try to. It is a debated subject, and ultimately, the bills that were advanced didn't sort of make it into law in time to help the bison. So the effort was. Was pretty much a failure. But there is.

I mean, to your original question, Emily, there is a movement to try to save the bison, and Henry Byrd gets involved, and there's a nascent conservation movement that at least begins to think about the problem. And that's sort of another of the threads in the book, is you do see the stirrings of an early conservation sensibility. During this time period, and partly it's around the bison later in the period, it's about bird protection in particular, you see the early Audubon movement in this period, which is really focused on the problem of killing birds for women's hats, which were just leading to just an incredible amount of quantity and diversity. In Florida and other places, birds were just being shot by the dozens every single day and shipped to city centers for use in women's hats. And so that sort of conservation sensibility is beginning and is kind of intersecting in interesting ways with the animal welfare movement.

Emily Bazelon
So that seems like it's tied into your theme that there are some animals that kind of come under human protection and embrace and others who remain apart from it. And that brings me to dogs, partly because they're my own animal and also because you have this great part of the book about the beginning of the American Kennel Club and the idea of dogs becoming fashionable and a kind of girl for affluent families. But at the same time, in order for them to really become rooted as pets, vets have to figure out what to do about rabies. Right. Can you tell us how that story unfolds?

Bill Wasek
The risk of rabies associated with dogs was never a huge problem in terms of numbers. Rabies deaths were sporadic even before vaccination or other methods of rabies control. But they were terrifying because dogs, who were human companions in various ways throughout our shared history, could suddenly turn on you and become vicious, and their bite could lead to death for you, for your children. And so it forced everyone to hold dogs at a certain distance, not trust them entirely, while this rabies problem sort of continued to capture, if not, if not tons of lives, like tons of imaginations, and fueled a lot of nightmares. So the advent of vaccination for rabies, which first became available as a post exposure vaccination for people who had had dangerous contact with dogs, apparently rabbit dogs, which, at the time, it was a little unclear which dogs were rabid and which weren't.

So even as this wonderful technology became available, there was still a question of who to give it to, who needed this new human vaccine? Ultimately, the same vaccine technology would lead to rabies vaccination, pre exposure for dogs, which is how rabies has been controlled around the world in the 20th century and beyond. And so it was. It was an important transformational moment in our relationship with the dog, because it did allow us to sort of move past that fear of could something happen between us and our dogs that would ultimately make them dangerous or deadly to us? And I wanted to bring in also the industrialization of livestock, which is also something that happens during this period.

Emily Bazelon
And, of course, is so much with us now in terms of how we raise food and how far away it seems and how little, I think lots of people want to think about what it takes to get that food onto our plate. How are people thinking about this in the late 19th century? And how is it a shift away from the kind of tactile immediacy of a family farm where you really interacted with all the animals whose eggs you took or whose meat that you ate? Yeah, it really is a remarkable transformation during just a few decades where around the time of the civil war, before even in New York City, the animals that were being slaughtered, well, first of all, they were being slaughtered largely in the city, and they were coming from very nearby. What you have during the, I mean, I guess this transformation begins in the kind of 1840s and 1850s, is you have the midwestern producers start raising the animals and then shipping them by rail to various population hubs to be slaughtered locally.

So that's the first big shift, then what you have, and this is really the shift that we document more in the book, is then the rise of refrigerated rail cars allows you to do meatpacking. So right next to the stockyards in Chicago, which really becomes the epicenter of this, you have these massive sort of slaughter factories that develop where the animals get sold to armour and company, or swift and company, these big meat concerns, and they will slaughter the animals right there in these big, grim, factory like buildings, and they will pack the meat for shipment, and the meat will get shipped all around the country. And this really kind of completes the transformation of the food animal, of being something that really lives and dwells and dies kind of near you to something that becomes this abstraction, often hundreds of miles away. And it just makes it possible to not really be aware of its existence and certainly not be aware of the kind of scale of the life and death of the animals and the just sort of general kind of grimness of their lives. You're able to sort of put it out of mind a lot more because of that transformation.

Emily Bazelon
Yeah, I was really struck by how this whole period sets up this dichotomy we still live with, where we're incredibly devoted, maybe too devoted to our pets, interested at least in some forms of wild animals like polar bears and elephants. And then mostly we just shut out thinking about the livestock that we consume. Often I wrestle myself with how much to care about animal welfare versus human welfare is one becoming distracted from human misery by thinking about animals. But your book made me think differently about this. I started thinking of caring about animal welfare and rights as a kind of essential marker of the development of society, that there can be energy that goes toward this.

And I wanted to get your thoughts about exactly how we should care. Where does it make sense to place our energy? How do we take some of our overlove and overspending on pets and get more benefit for more animals from that? Is that something we can transfer beyond our own beloved creatures? I think that the awareness, I do think, is a big part of it.

One of the things we talk about in the conclusion to the book is that one of the problems of caring about, for example, food animals, is that it isn't just that they're at a distance from us, but it's also that our relationship between, or should say the relationship between, say, our consumption, the things we spend money on and how they're treated is also just crazily mediated and systemic. Right? Like if you buy a coffee, if you buy a latte, the foam in the latte is not just going to come from one cow, that you could sort of sit and think about that cow, right? It's going to come from hundreds of cows. And the sense of responsibility becomes very diffused.

And I think that climate change is, of course, kind of looms over. I think everything about animal treatment, because one of the big important reasons why we need to think differently about food animals is not just their welfare, but also the fact that they are just incredible source of carbon emissions, and that reducing our reliance on animal products will wind up being really, really important to getting to a sustainable future. But the other thing that I think is analogous there is that climate change has a similar sort of problem, where the connection between what we do and the effects of what we do is so complex and mediated that it doesn't really trigger the moral sense in the same way. And so one of the things that I think a lot about is the process, which I do think is ongoing, if you think about it, of us developing a kind of systems way of thinking about our decisions, we talk a lot about how problems are systemic. And I do think one of the complications of thinking about problems is systemic, is that it means that it's a little bit harder for us to totally understand how the connection between what we do and the effects of it.

And so it's sort of going a different direction from where your question went. But I do think that really forcing ourselves to think about the connection between the decisions that we make and the way that these distant animals are treated is just something that we need to keep front of mind a lot more. Maybe that's sort of not the most satisfying or effective answer, but I'm also not sure that there's any sort of other way to think about it. I'd say, too, that it doesn't feel like a real choice to me to choose between sort of kindness to animals and kindness to our fellow human beings. Because very often when we're choosing the sort of kindest choice for animals, we're choosing something that's basically pro human at the same time and sort of being more aware of consequences of our actions as consumers, as community members that tends to carry towards better behavior towards your fellow creatures, human and otherwise.

Emily Bazelon
Yeah, that's a really good point. Maybe part of this new type of goodness is an open heartedness about other creatures, and in the end, that is going to have benefits for humans as well as animals. It's not really a choice.

Bill and Monica, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your book, our kindred creatures. It really is just such a rich, researched, fascinating read. It has all these different chapters, some of which we didn't get to at all, about elephants and passenger pigeons, all these different facets of animal life in the 19th century. And I think as we end on some really good lessons and thoughts for our time as well. That's it for this month's edition of Gabfest reads.

Our producer is Shayna Roth, Ben Richmond is senior director of operations of podcasts, and Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio at Slate. We'll be back next month with another edition of Gabfestries. And until then, all three of us, John and David and me, will be back in your feed on Thursday with a new episode, the Slate political Gap fest. Bill and Monica, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having us.

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Emily Bazelon
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