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APRIL 2003

Chronology of humane progress
(Part 1 of two parts: from Moses to Walt Disney)
by Merritt Clifton

1300 B.C. –– Hebrew law as proclaimed by Moses includes provisions for humane slaughter and care of work animals.

740 B.C. –– Rise of Isaiah, the most prominent of the Hebrew vegetarian prophets, and the prophet who most emphasized opposition to animal sacrifice.

600-500 B.C. ––Buddhism and Jainism rose in India in opposition to sacrificial cults within mainstream Hinduism, which otherwise encourages vegetarianism and requires members of the highest caste, the Brahmins, to be vegetarian. Both Mahavir, the last of the 24 great teachers of Jainism, and the Buddha taught vegetarianism and compassion for all beings. Said Mahavir, “It is not enough to live and let live. You must help others live.” This is the idea embodied in the Jain word ahimsa. Both Mahavir and the Buddha also taught that humans have an obligation to shelter and care for their aged and infirm work animals just as they would shelter and care for aged human beings. Whether this inspired the Hindu tradition of sheltering cattle in gaushalas and pinjarapoles, or simply revived it, is unclear and is disputed. Either way, however, it was in this era that sheltering cattle became the first established and enduring form of sheltering animals as an act of charity. Both Jainism and Buddhism may have evolved from the beliefs and practices of the Bishnoi, Sindhi, and Thari people. The renowned Indian conservationist Valmik Thapar, described the Bishnoi in his 1997 book Land of the Tiger as “the primary reason that desert wildlife still exists on the subcontinent. The women of the community have been known to breastfeed black buck fawns and save insect life,” he wrote, “while many of the men have died in their efforts to counter armed poaching gangs. Bishnoi is an offshoot of Jainism,” Thapar asserted, reversing the tradition claimed by Bishnoi elders, “which teaches that all nature’s creations have a right to life. This belief reached its apotheosis in 1778 when 294 men and 69 women laid down their lives to protect the khejri tree. A senior officer of Jodhpur state arrived to cut down the trees, which were needed for burning lime. The first to challenge him was a woman, who hugged one of the trees and was promptly decapitated. Her three daughters followed suit and were also axed. Many others followed. This mass slaughter led to a royal order that prohibited the cutting of any tree in a Bishnoi village.” To this day, Bishnoi villages are wooded oases in the otherwise harsh Rajasthan desert, where wildlife congregates in proximity to the people. The Thar region of Pakistan is adjacent to the Rajasthan desert of India. Although the Thari people are now mostly Islamic, their traditional teachings about the sanctity of life somewhat resemble those of the Bishnoi. The Sindh desert is farther west in Pakistan. The Sindhi people, related to the Thari, have similar beliefs, but are now culturally divided: Sindhis who practice Hinduism long ago migrated into the Mumbai region of India, while those who practice Islam remain in Pakistan.

580 B.C. –– Birth of Pythagoras, Greek scientist and philosopher, who taught vegetarianism and the equality of women as part of a theory of reincarnation.

250 B.C. –– (India) Introducing the first animal protection laws in the Indian civil code, the Buddhist emperor Asoka practiced a form of Buddhism which like Hinduism and Jainism holds that animals should not be eaten, and that an aged or disabled cow or work animal should be retired and well-treated. Asoka sent missionaries to Thailand and Sri Lanka to teach Buddhism, including his son Arahat Mahinda. Interupting a hunt upon arrival in Sri Lanka in 247 B.C., “Arahat Mahinda stopped King Devanampiyatissa from killing the deer and told the king that every living creature has an equal right to live,” according to Sri Lankan elephant conservationist Jawantha Jayewardene. Persuaded, the king became a Buddhist and “decreed that no one should kill or harm any living being,” Jayewardene continues. “He set apart a large area around his palace as a sanctuary that gave protection to all fauna and flora. This was called Mahamevuna Uyana, and is believed to be the first sanctuary in the world.” Arahat Mahinda and the other Asokan emissaries also introduced animal sheltering as a central function of monasteries wherever they went. Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka to this day often double as animal shelters, though at some the custom was long ago distorted into keeping just a lone chained temple elephant.

34 B.C. –– Approximate date of the birth of Jesus of Nazereth. In accurate historical context, Jesus appears to have been the most militant leader of his time of Jewish opposition to animal sacrifice, which was then still practiced––in very high volume––at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus built directly upon the teachings of the vegetarian prophet Isaiah, and his direct predecessor in advocacy, the vegetarian John the Baptist. The Jerusalem Christian church, founded by Jesus’ brother James, taught and practiced vegetarianism, and historian Keith Akers argues in The Lost Religion of Jesus (2001) that after about 200 years of recorded existence, the congregation became the forebears of the Sufi sect within Islam. “The Sufis express an extraordinary interest in Jesus and have sayings of Jesus and stories about Jesus found nowhere in Christianity,” according to Akers. “Especially interesting and significant is the treatment of Jesus by al-Ghazali, an 11th century Islamic mystic who is widely credited with making Sufism respectable within Islam.” The Jesus described by al-Ghazali “lives in extreme poverty, disdains violence, loves animals, and is vegetarian,” Akers summarizes. “It is clear that al-Ghazali is drawing on a tradition rather than creating a tradition because some of the same stories that al-Ghazali relates are related by others both before and after him, and also because al-Ghazali himself is not a vegetarian and clearly has no axe to grind. Thus, these stories came from a pre-existing tradition that describes Jesus as a vegetarian.”

46-120 –– Life of Plutarch, Roman biographer and historian whose works were part of a standard classical education for 1,700 years before his lesser-known essays “On the Eating of Animal Flesh” and about animal intelligence found a fully receptive audience. Plutarch especially influenced the 19th century vegetarianism (and attempted vegetarianism) of American Transcendentalist and Abolitionist leaders including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott (and his daughter Louisa May Alcott), and Henry David Thoreau. Following the example of Plutarch, who founded a successful vegetarian community at Chaeronea, the Alcotts founded a vegetarian commune called Fruitlands in 1843, which ran afoul of an ill-timed dalliance by Bronson Alcott with a female member who was not his wife. Plutarch also persuaded the conversion to vegetarianism in 1811-1812 of the British Romantic poet Percy Shelley and of his second wife Mary, whose 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first prominent literary expression of anxiety about human scientific meddling in the life process. Other prominent vegetarians who attributed their beliefs in part to Plutarch included French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and Russian novelist and advocate of vegetarianism Leo Tolstoy.

341 –– Sri Lankan King Buddhadstra found a higher calling as a veterinarian.

497 –– Formation of the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China, by Ba Tuo, a vegetarian Buddhist evangelist from India. Although Shaolin from 527 on was also influential in spreading the non-vegetarian branch of Buddhism throughout China, strict followers of Ba Tuo have remained vegetarian despite centuries of oppression from foes including dog-eater sects, Genghis Khan, tyrannical Chinese warlords and emperors, and the Communists under Mao tse Tung. Rather than bear arms against other living beings, the monks of Shaolin gradually invented, developed, and popularized the practices of judo, ju-jitsu, and karate.

622-570 –– Muhammed built Islam on existing regional religious beliefs, apparently including the teachings of the remnants of the Jerusalem branch of Christianity, which may have become the Sufi branch of Islam. These included pro-animal teachings. According to Islamic scholar Jasmi Bin Abdul, “The care and love of wild animals has been emphasized both in the Qur’an as well as in Sunna, the traditions of the Prophet. In verse 54:28, there is a reference to Allah insisting that the people of Tamud share the water with their camels. In the Sunna of Prophet Muhammad, we see many instances to show that He advocated kindness toward animals. According to one tradition, Allah punished a woman because she imprisoned a cat until the cat died of hunger. The Prophet also tells us that a prostitute’s sins were forgiven because she gave water to a thirsty dog,” a story which if better known would suggest that women subject to the Islamic fundamentalist law of Sharia should be spared stoning for alleged adultery if they have been kind to the street dogs who are much feared and despised in many Islamic nations. [ANIMAL PEOPLE has verified the authenticity of the story by finding three other scholarly references to it.]

1150 –– Sri Lankan King Nissanka Malla carved into a stone a decree stating that, “It is ordered, by beat of the drum, that no animals should be killed within a radius of seven gau from the city” of Anuradhapura, his capitol. The decree combined consideration for animal welfare with concerns about public health and sanitation, and about the emotional effect on children of witnessing slaughter.

1150-1250 –– Rise and persecution of the Cathari, a vegan sect in southern France who were eventually exterminated by the Albigensian Crusade and the institution of
the Inquisition in 1233.

1182-1226 –– Life of St. Francis, the most prominent of a long line of Catholic saints who rescued animals, intervened to prevent the killing of wild predators, and practiced vegetarianism. Although such practices seem to have been honored as holy much more often than not, there never seems to have been a strong belief within mainstream Catholicism that they should be adopted by ordinary people. Francis in almost all of his teachings except his acceptance of the Catholic hierarchy headed by Rome closely paralleled the Cathari, and the Church was during his own time and afterward often vexed to the point of rewriting history by the difficulty of distinguishing Franciscanism from Catharism.

1197-1253 –– Life of Richard of Wyche, Bishop of Chichester, an early British critic of the morality of slaughter.

1334-1354 –– Bubonic plague killed up to 75% of the human population of Europe and Asia. Brought to Europe from Constantin-ople by returning crusaders, and the flea-infested black rats who stowed away on their vessels, it attacked most virulently after terrified cities blamed it on “witchcraft” and purged from their midst both the majority of people who had medicinal skill (mostly older women) and their “familiars,” mostly the cats who had provided rat control.

1452-1519 –– Life of Leonardo da Vinci, scientist and painter, who prominently
practiced and taught vegetarianism, and wrote that, “The time will come when humans look on the slaughter of beasts as they now look on the murder of men.”

1480-1540 –– Life of Bartholomew Chassenee of France, a distinguished jurist whose first case was an impressive defense of rats before the ecclesiastical court of Autuns, making him the first “animal rights attorney” on record. His last case, in defense of a doomed “heretical” sect called the Waldenses, used the same arguments and tactics, and might have saved the Waldenses, in the opinion of observers, had he not died before the trial was over.

1516 –– Sir Thomas More of Eng-land included mention of kindness toward animals and the abolition of animal sacrifice and sport hunting as signs of the moral advancement of the citizens of his fictitious Utopia.

1533-1592 –– Life of Michel de Montaigne, a French attorney whose 1588 essay Of Cruelties denounced abuse of animals as “the extremist of all vices.”

1567 –– Pope Pius V issued a papal bull condemning bullfighting and other forms of animal fighting for entertainment as “cruel and base spectacles of the devil,” whose promoters are subject to excommunication. Pope Pius IX reiterated the 1567 bull in 1846, and Pope Pius XII cited it in 1940 in refusing to meet with a delegation of bullfighters. The 1567 papal bull eventualy brought prohibitions against bullfighting throughout Italy, plus a 1928 ban on bullfighting to the death in Portugal, amended in 2000.

16th century -– “The Mogul emperor Akbar the Great established zoos in various Indian cities which far surpassed in quality and size anything in Europe. Unlike the cramped European menageries, Akbar’s zoos provided spacious enclosures and cages, built in large reserves. Each had a resident doctor, and Akbar encouraged careful study of animals. His zoos were open to the public. At the entrance to each he posted a message: ‘Meet your brothers. Take them to your hearts, and respect them.’” [David Hancocks, A Different Nature.] This appears to be the first clear differentiation between exhibition of animals for entertainment and exhibition as attempted humane education.

1596-1650 –– Life of Rene Descartes, of France and Holland, among the most prominent of the early vivisectors whose work sparked an antivivisection movement in Europe even before there were organized humane societies. (Covered extensively by Richard Ryder in Animal Revolution, 2001 edition.) Descartes was memorably satirized more than a generation after his death by the French philosopher Voltaire, who also attacked “the barbarous custom of supporting ourselves upon the flesh and blood of beings like ourselves,” but continued to eat meat.

1634-1703 –– Life of Thomas Tryon, a vegetarian shepherd from Glouces-tershire, England, who crusaded against slavery and advocated the “natural rights” of animals. He appears to have been instrumental in persuading many leading Puritans that animals have souls. The repression of animal-baiting by the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell included killing the animals, however, as well as punishing the human perpetrators.

1641 –– The Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted as their Liberty 92 (of 100 “liberties” which were in fact the laws of the colony) the statement that “No man shall exercise any Tirrany or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usually kept for man’s use.” This is the first humane law adopted by any western nation.

1665 –– The Great Plague of Lon-don followed a wave of persecution of “witches” and cats.

1684 –– A man is pilloried in Sagan, Germany, for cruelty to a horse. Other early German convictions for cruelty to animals were recorded in 1765 and 1766.

1721–1728 ––Spanish medical historian Juan Gomez-Alonso, M.D. has identified a rabies epidemic which swept eastern Europe during these years as the historical origin of the vampire legends, later grafted by the Victorian era British novelist Bram Stoker to the much earlier legends of Vlad the Impaler, the original Count Dracula, and Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian “blood countess” who bathed in the blood of virgins.

1748-1832 –– Life of Jeremy Bentham, British attorney whose 1780 book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation includes a footnote on “Interests of inferior animals improperly neglected in legislation by the insensibility of the ancient jurists.” The footnote concludes, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” It may be the most quoted footnote phrase of all time. Bentham was a friend of Lord Thomas Erskine, 1750-1823, who in 1809 made the first attempt to pass a British humane law.

1789 –– Kaiser Joseph II of Germany banned animal baiting for sport.

1790 –– Emergence in Vermont of the Dorrilites, a short-lived vegan sect which allegedly practiced “free love,” and may have inspired both the Millerites, who became the Seventh Day Adventists, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints.

1794-1851 –– Life of Sylvester Graham, U.S. Presbyterian minister and temperance crusader, who invented the Graham cracker as an alleged cure for lust. Sylvester Graham became a vegetarian circa 1826 under the influence of the Rev. William Metcalfe, founder of the first vegetarian church in Philadelphia. Metcalfe had been a member of the first vegetarian church in England, the Bible Christian Church founded by William Cowherd near Manchester in 1809. Graham’s followers included William Alcott, M.D., the first prominent vegetarian in the Alcott family, cousin of Bronson Alcott.; pioneering newspaper publisher Horace Greeley; and Seventh Day Adventist Church builders Ellen and James White. Two others, John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., 1854-1941, and his brother W.K. Kellogg, 1860-1951, went on to invent and popularize peanut butter, corn flakes, granola, and soy milk.

1805-1844 –– Life of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, better known as the Mormons. Smith wrote in his History of the Church that he “exhorted the brethren not to kill a serpent, bird, or an animal of any kind unless it became necessary in order to preserve ourselves from hunger.” A later Mormon church president, Joseph F. Smith, wrote in Gospel Doctrine that, “I do not believe any man should kill animals or birds unless he needs them for food. I think it is wicked for men to thirst in their souls to kill almost everything which possesses animal life.”

1809-1882 –– Life of Charles Darwin, whose 1859 book The Origin of Species both established the theory of evolution as a scientific verity and established human kinship with animals. Darwin himself was an outspoken opponent of cruelty to animals, especially trapping, and had strong anti-vivisectionist leanings, criticizing exercises undertaken “for mere damnable and detestable curiosity,” but never fully broke ranks with fellow scientists to clearly denounce experiments which in his view had some redeeming purpose and value.

1822-1904 –– Life of Frances Cobbe, founder of the Victoria Street Society (1875), which became the British National Anti-Vivisection Society, and later founder of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (1898).

1822 –– “Humanity Dick” Martin won passage of the first British humane law. British prohibition of dogfighting and cockfighting followed in 1835. Rat-fighting was not banned until 1911. There is record of cruelty cases being prosecuted occasionally under other legislation prior to the Martin Act of 1822, including a 1749 case in Gloucester in which two men were convicted of spitefully killing a mare. One man got the death penalty.

1824 –– Formation of the London SPCA, which began enforcing the 1822 humane law five years before Sir William Peel formed the first London police force. About 150 convictions were won in 1824, the first year for which records exist. The London SPCA nearly went bankrupt in 1828, but was saved by Lewis Gompertz, inventor of the expanding chuck which makes changing drill bits possible. Gompertz was drummed out in 1832, however, for the alleged offenses of being a Jew and a vegetarian. He went on to found the Animals’ Friend Society, which he headed until 1848. The London SPCA became the Royal SPCA by charter granted by Queen Victoria in 1840. Victoria herself donated money to antivivisection efforts, but the British Charities Commission has recently interpreted antivivisection campaigning to be outside the scope of the charter.

1827-1915 –– Life of Ellen Gould (Harmon) White. An early convert of Seventh Day Adventist Church founder William Miller (1782-1849), she along with the other “Millerites” prepared for the “Second Coming of Jesus” in 1844. When the Second Coming did not come, Ellen White and her husband James White built the remnants of the sect into a substantial vegetarian religion. The Adventists have de-emphasized vegetarianism since her death, and the deaths of those who knew her, to the point that the majority of Adventists today are not vegetarian.

1828 –– New York passed the first U.S. state anti-cruelty law, followed by Massachusetts in 1835 and Connecticut and Wisconsin in 1838. Every state had an anti-cruelty law by 1913, including Alaska, whose first anti-cruelty law actually preceded statehood by 46 years. Obtaining meaningful enforcement in any state really only began in 1990, when a Massachusetts man became the first American known to have actually been jailed for abusing an individual animal.

1830 –– Saxony adopted an anti-cruelty law, followed by Prussia (1838), Wurt-temberg (1839), and Switzerland (1842). “Pastor Albert Knapp founded the first German animal welfare society in 1837 in Stuttgart; Nuremberg and Dresden followed in 1839, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt in 1841, Munich in 1842, and Hanover in 1844. In Switzerland, animal protection societies were formed in Berne in 1844, in Balse in 1849, and in Zurich in 1856,” according to Richard Ryder in Animal Revolution. Anti-cruelty societies were also founded in Oslo in 1859, Gothenberg in 1869, and Strangnas in 1870. The Lithuanian SPCA, recently revived after a long suspension during the years of Soviet occupation, was founded in 1873.

1839 –– Formation of the Scottish SPCA. Circa 1850 the Scottish SPCA produced more than 100 glass photographic plates to teach inspectors how to investigate cruelty and neglect of horses. Long forgotten, the plates were recently rediscovered at the Scottish SPCA headquarters in Balerno.

1844 –– Formation of the New York State Association for the Preservation of Fish & Game, a distant ancestor of the National Wildlife Federation. In 1881 it hosted the massacre of 20,000 passenger pigeons––the last great flock netted in the wild––at a Coney Island fundraiser.

1851-1939 –– Life of Henry Salt, vegetarian advocate, founder of the anti-hunting Humanitarian League in 1891, and influential teacher of both the vegetarian and antivivisectionist playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the vegetarian moral philosopher and politician Mohandas Gandhi, at whose request Jawaharal Nehru wrote into the Indian constitution the statement that it is every citizen’s duty to prevent animal suffering. Although others including Abraham Lincoln apparently used the phrase “animal rights” in various contexts, Salt is believed to have been the first person to advocate an animal rights movement.

1860 –– Mary Tealby, 59, a London divorcee who was already dying of cancer, founded Dogs Home Battersea near the Holloway debtors prison, as “The Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs,” to care for the animals of the inmates. Charles Dickens saved it from fiscal failure with an article called “Two Dog Shows,” comparing and contrasting the plight of Tealby’s rescued dogs with the luxury enjoyed by Crufts Dog Show contestants. Tealby died in 1865. The shelter moved to the present location in 1871.

1862 –– Formation in Sri Lanka of the Animals Non-Violence Society and passage of the first wildlife protection law adopted under British rule. The first Sri Lankan anti-cruelty law was not passed until 1907.

1866 –– Henry Bergh founded the American SPCA Other early U.S. humane societies include the Massachusetts SPCA, founded by George Angell in 1868; the San Francisco SPCA, founded in 1868; the Pennsylvania SPCA, founded in 1869; and the Women’s Humane Society of Philadelphia, founded by Caroline Earle White in 1870, after women were excluded from the board of the Pennsylvania SPCA. Bergh, Angell, and White had all been anti-slavery activists before the Civil War, and viewed animal advocacy as an extension of their work on behalf of human rights. Both Bergh and White were also instrumental in fouding societies to protect children from neglect and abuse, while Angell was regarded as “The father of humane education.”

1872 –– The Women’s Humane Society of Philadelphia became the first humane society to take an animal control contract, followed in 1895 by the American SPCA and the San Francisco SPCA. Humane societies did not commonly do animal control until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929-1930 encouraged many humane organizations to take on the job as a way of stabilizing their income. Typically, however, animal control was (and is) done at a net loss over time, and tends to become the only major activity of the humane societies that do it.

1874 –– Formation of the Bombay SPCA, the longest continuously operating western-style humane society in India.

1876 –– The American Humane Association is formed as an intended umbrella for the humane movement. Resolutions passed at the founding convention called for protecting the North American bison, beaver, and bald eagle from extinction, and for protecting livestock from suffering and abuse in transportation and slaughter. In 1878 the AHA separates into separate divisions for child protection and animal protection. The child protection division operates the orphanage system for the state of New York, 1895-1950.

1877 –– Publication of Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell. Sewell’s mother wrote many books for children, but Black Beauty was the only published work by Sewell herself, who died less than a year after the first edition appeared. A British Quaker, born in 1820, Sewell suffered a knee injury at age 14 which left her even more dependent upon horses for transportation than most people of her era. She became an expert horse handler, using only a loose rein and no whip. “Anna and her mother protested” when they saw horses being beaten, according to Joan Gilbert in the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. “Some drivers threatened to beat them too.” Use of the bearing rein was ubiquitous, and Sewell hoped to abolish it. Bearing reins, explained Gilbert, held horses’ heads and necks in “an unnatural and painful arch. It cut off their wind as well, and many young horses were ruined due to respiratory problems.” Under the influence of Black Beauty, Gilbert continued, “The bearing rein went out of style…Ironically, during Sewell’s funeral procession, her mother noticed that all the horses wore bearing reins. She went from carriage to carriage, requesting that they be removed, which they were.” Massachusetts SPCA founder George Angell distributed a private printing of 100,000 copies to U.S. horse handlers. “In the span of about 100 years, over 30 million copies have been printed, an all-time record for fiction,” Gilbert concluded. “Black Beauty has been made into at least eight movies. Three British sisters, Christine, Diana and Josephine Pullein-Thompson, wrote two sequels to Black Beauty ––Black Beauty’s Kin and Black Beauty’s Family..” In addition, Black Beauty inspired Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory to name the first and largest of the Fund sanctuaries The Black Beauty Ranch, and the name has been used in connection with many other humane projects.

1881 –– Circus magnate P.T. Barnum and friends founded the Connecticut Humane Society, partly to forestall humane criticism of circuses. Like many other early humane societies, Connecticut Humane was active in child protection, and continued to provide various child protection services by contract with the state until the early 1970s.

1881 –– Unsuccessful attempt of the Victoria Street Society to prosecute British monkey vivisector David Ferrier causes vivisectors to organize the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research the following year. This is the first known anti-animal welfare organization.

1882 –– Formation of the Swedish Anti-Vivisection League.

1882 –– Caroline Earle White founded the American Anti-Vivisection Society. The New England Anti-Vivisection Society was formed in 1895, and the U.S. National Anti-Vivisection Society was established in 1929. The early anti-vivisection societies fought against cruel experiments on humans, including illiterates, prisoners, and the mentally handicapped, and were prominent opponents of eugenics, the notion of “improving the race” by prohibiting reproduction of “inferior” races and classes of humans ––an idea which in the early 20th century was favored by both the political right and the left.

1888 –– The Ryerss Infirmary for Dumb Animals was among the first U.S. humane societies begun specifically to protect horses and other farm animals.

1889 –– Formation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in response to the prolific killing of birds by “sportsmen.” Ironically, the RSPB itself now engages in the prolific killing of birds if they are judged to be alien threats to native species.

1889 –– George Angell formally incorporated the American Humane Educa-tion Society as a subsidiary to the Massa-chusetts SPCA. Actually begun in 1882, it focused for about 30 years on forming schoolroom humane education clubs called the Bands of Mercy. More than 265,000 Bands of Mercy were chartered by Angell’s death in 1909. His successor, the Rev. Francis Rowley, organized a Band of Mercy convention in Kansas City circa 1912 that drew 25,000 children plus 15,000 parents and teachers. Rowley also started the Jack London Clubs to seek the abolition of animal use in entertainment, inspired by the London book Michael, Brother of Jerry. The Jack London Clubs claimed 750,000 members at peak. However, Rowley incurred enormous debt in building Angell Memorial Animal Hospital, opened in 1915, dominating the MSPCA program ever since. Financially hobbled for more than a decade even before the Great Depression, the MSPCA allowed the Bands of Mercy to disappear and the Jack London Clubs to fade, though they still existed at least on paper as late as 1963. Jack London was a self-proclaimed Red, at a time when the term still had the original meaning of “radical” rather than the narrower later meaning of “Communist.” The early Soviet Communists nonetheless regarded him as a “fellow traveler,” and for that reason, Jack London Clubs formed in eastern Europe as the White Fang Societies were virtually the only pre-Communist humane institutions in that part of the world to survive the Communist era.

1891 –– Formation of the National Canine Defence League. Initially focused on
vivisection, within 20 years NCDL evolved to emphasize improving the care of pet dogs. For much of the 20th century it focused on providing veterinary services, but since 1980 it has become the British leader in promoting dog adoption, and since 1996 has cosponsored the International Companion Animal Welfare Conference, with the North Shore Animal League International, to assist eastern European humane societies.

1891 –– Formation of the Animal Humane Society of Hennepin County, Minnesota, the only humane society ever known to issue a public statement in favor of lynching, which the board felt was an appropriate punishment for child molesters. The statement was not influential: Minnesota and North Dakota are the only two U.S. states which have never had any lynchings.

1895 –– The American SPCA and American Humane Association abandon active lobbying to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat, in a still shadowy political division of roles associated with the ASPCA obtaining the New York City pound contract while the AHA obtained the New York state contract to operate orphanages. Legislative efforts to ban hunting––which had nearly succeeded at one point––were dropped, while the lead role on wildlife issues was ceded to the organization which had been the N.Y. State Association for the Preservation of Game, merged with the New York Sportsmen’s Club at some point, and eventually metamorphized through further mergers and alliances into the New York Conservation Council, the original New York affiliate of NWF. Under the ASPCA, the former practice of drowning stray dogs in the Hudson River was replaced by gassing them. The number of homeless animals killed by the ASPCA soared over 100,000 per year in 1908, and averaged more than 250,000 per year from 1966 through 1968, when Lloyd Tait,