My approach

I am a historian focused on social movements and NGOs in Britain and the US, especially animal protection and nature conservation organizations, in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 2016 I completed a DPhil in Modern History at Oxford University: ‘“A More Humane Society”: Animal Welfare and Human Nature in England, 1950-1976’. My supervisor was Sir Brian Harrison.

The organized animal welfare movement dates to 1824 with the founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England; since then, thousands of local and national organizations in many parts of the world, particularly the UK and the US, have formed (and dissolved). This movement has been largely overlooked by academic historians, perhaps in part because it is thought of as ‘sentimental’ or emotional in tone or subject. But the durability of the animal protection movement alone – and the fact that some organizations have hundreds of thousands of dues-paying members and control annual budgets in the millions of dollars or pounds – suggests that it deserves closer examination.

Animal protection has always been a multi-faceted concern. From its inception, the cause has intersected with a range of other movements and concerns, including anti-slavery, women’s rights, peace, and environmentalism. Throughout its history it has been linked to a variety of alternative health and religious movements. These linkages provide rich a cross-section of beliefs and attitudes to explore, including ideas about the body and health; the significance of pain; life in the city versus the countryside; the preponderance of violence and cruelty; the influence of education and the nature of the child; the significance of altering personal behavior; and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

The long lifespan of the movement provides an opportunity to study organizational change or stasis over time: what arguments and tactics changed? Which stayed the same? How did the movement contend with social and economic shifts that, though outside of their control, nevertheless could have great impacts on how they functioned? What elements helped to foster the popularity of animal rights philosophy from the mid-1970s? Other unique features of the movement, including the prominence of women among not only its membership but leadership, bear examination.

Significant, too, of course, are the animals the movement was and is mobilized to protect. The wide diversity of animals and their uses in society - from pets, to farm animals, to experimental animals, to wild and un-owned creatures of the land, sea, and sky - reflect the wide diversity of historical opinion about those animals and how they should be treated. Animal welfare and rights advocates often express complicated attitudes towards different kinds of animals, as do almost all of us. These attitudes reveal opinions about nature, domesticity, civilization, and the wild that are important to explore.

Then there are the issues that the movement has failed to address, including the homogeneous makeup of the movement’s leadership and rank-and-file: the US and UK movements were and are still largely composed of white people. Anti-hunting campaigners and vegetarians - especially the more radical wings of those movements - have addressed issues of class and privilege, but the US and UK-based animal-protection movement generally has not attracted great working-class support, and has often been accused of targeting working-class jobs and recreations while leaving alone those of the middle and upper classes. Throughout its history, most wings of the movement have intentionally sought support from the middle and upper classes and expressed (and even defined) middle-class values. What do these tendencies reveal about the societies in which this movement functioned, and the movement itself?

There is no doubt that the animal protection movement has made substantial contributions to Western culture, not the least of which consists in its ongoing attempts to better understand the natural world and animals and determine our proper relationship to them. Such matters ultimately concern us all.