Transnational Animal Welfare Activism and the Victorians

Keynote speaker: Professor Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter), ‘Victorian dogs and more’

This symposium seeks to map the changing notions of human and non-human animal relations, across the Victorian era, but especially the forms these took at the end of the century. Additionally, it aims to explore how the growth of animal welfare awareness, vegetarianism, anti and pro-vivisection discourses, contributed to legal, philosophical, historical and literary representations of the late-Victorian period in a transnational context. While animal welfare consciousness had been present in Britain since the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth century it reached a pinnacle at the fin de siècle and spilled over to the intellectual milieus of countries that were part of the British empire, including India.

Animal experimentation became a sensitive issue in Britain during this time, with the rise of laboratory medicine and the attendant vaccine researches of Louis Pasteur. The competing claims of science and animal rights have been rife with debates, conflicts and moral crises and, in Britain, a strong and vociferous anti-vivisection movement, committed to the protection of laboratory animals emerged. The Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) was passed in response to its recommendations and several anti-vivisection societies, including the Vivisection Society were founded in its wake. Meanwhile, British residents in India had also expressed strong compassion for Indian animals. In 1861, Colesworthey Grant (1813–80), a British painter and Calcutta resident, established the first Indian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty against Animals (SPCA). The most important contribution of the Indian SPCA (Calcutta) was the introduction of Cruelty against Animals legislation, urging the Bengal government to pass the first Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for Bengal in 1869.

The ethics of vegetarianism and animal welfare which Mohan Das Karamchand Gandhi implemented throughout his later life emerged from his participation in the debates of The Humanitarian League, especially the ideas disseminated by Henry Salt which he encountered during his brief stay in London in the 1890s and from his membership of The Vegetarian Society, whose journal often became a mouthpiece for his evolving views on vegetarianism and animal protection. The deep commitment to the welfare of animals in the life and work of Thomas Hardy, the ideas of a simple and sustainable life in the activist-thoughts of Edward Carpenter, the anti-vivisection voices of Frances Power Cobbe or Anna Kingsford, or the realistic depiction of the human and non-human negotiations in times of natural calamities in stories of Indian writers such as Premchand and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, were all part of this interesting transnational milieu, though not always part of an overt activism. The rise of Vegetarian Societies in Britain and India during the Late-Victorian period contributed to a reworking of the relationship between the human and the non-human animal, that became manifest in society, culture and literature.