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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
ANIMAL ETHICS SERIES
Creative Compassion,
Literature and
Animal Welfare
Michael J. Gilmour
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
Series Editors
Andrew Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
Clair Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry. This series will explore the challenges
that Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional
understandings of human-animal relations. Specifically, the Series will:
• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accom-
plished, scholars;
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14421
Michael J. Gilmour
Creative Compassion,
Literature and
Animal Welfare
Michael J. Gilmour
Providence University College
Otterburne, MB, Canada
ISSN 2634-6672 ISSN 2634-6680 (electronic)

The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series
ISBN 978-3-030-55429-3 ISBN 978-3-030-55430-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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Series Editors’ Preface
This is a new book series for a new field of inquiry: Animal Ethics.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry.
In addition, a rethink of the status of animals has been fuelled by a
range of scientific investigations which have revealed the complexity of
animal sentiency, cognition and awareness. The ethical implications of
this new knowledge have yet to be properly evaluated, but it is becoming
clear that the old view that animals are mere things, tools, machines or
commodities cannot be sustained ethically.
But it is not only philosophy and science that are putting animals on
the agenda. Increasingly, in Europe and the United States, animals are
becoming a political issue as political parties vie for the “green” and “ani-
mal” vote. In turn, political scientists are beginning to look again at the
history of political thought in relation to animals, and historians are
beginning to revisit the political history of animal protection.
As animals grow as an issue of importance, so there have been more
collaborative academic ventures leading to conference volumes, special
journal issues, indeed new academic animal journals as well. Moreover,
v
vi Series Editors’ Preface
we have witnessed the growth of academic courses, as well as university

posts, in Animal Ethics, Animal Welfare, Animal Rights, Animal Law,
Animals and Philosophy, Human–Animal Studies, Critical Animal
Studies, Animals and Society, Animals in Literature, Animals and
Religion—tangible signs that a new academic discipline is emerging.
“Animal Ethics” is the new term for the academic exploration of the
moral status of the non-human—an exploration that explicitly involves a
focus on what we owe animals morally and which also helps us to under-
stand the influences (social, legal, cultural, religious and political) that
legitimate animal abuse. This series explores the challenges that Animal
Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional under-
standings of human–animal relations.
The series is needed for three reasons: (1) to provide the texts that will
service the new university courses on animals, (2) to support the increas-
ing number of students studying and academics researching in animal-
related fields and (3) because there is currently no book series that is a
focus for multidisciplinary research in the field.
Specifically, this series will
• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals;
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished,
scholars and
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in
character or have multidisciplinary relevance.
The new Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics is the result of a

unique partnership between Palgrave Macmillan and the Ferrater Mora
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. The series is an integral part of the mis-
sion of the Centre to put animals on the intellectual agenda by facilitat-
ing academic research and publication. The series is also a natural
complement to one of the Centre’s other major projects, the Journal of
Animal Ethics. The Centre is an independent “think tank” for the advance-
ment of progressive thought about animals and is the first Centre of its
Series Editors’ Preface vii
kind in the world. It aims to demonstrate rigorous intellectual enquiry

and the highest standards of scholarship. It strives to be a world-class
centre of academic excellence in its field.
We invite academics to visit the Centre’s website www.oxfordani-
malethics.com and to contact us with new book proposals for the series.
Oxford, UK Andrew Linzey

Oxford, UK Clair Linzey
Preface
Sitting proudly on my bookshelf is an early edition of Anna Sewell’s 1877

novel Black Beauty bearing the inscription, “To Michael from Grandma
[Ethel] Stanley, 1974.” It was first presented to her, according to an earlier
inscription, on September 30, 1917. She would have been eleven at the
time, just a generation removed from Sewell. I wasn’t much of a reader in
1974 so this book collected far more dust than dogears for many years to
come but, though Grandma Stanley could not have known it, in time
Sewell’s autobiography of a horse proved transformative. Stories change
us. To read them is to see the world with new eyes. Sewell’s Black Beauty
awakened a sensitivity to animal suffering that is never far from my mind.
Along with literature, direct encounters also inform our views about
animals and their wellbeing. One incident stands out in memory. It was
a long low barn, dimly lit, the air thick with dust. Having never been on
a farm this was all new to me. I was nineteen at the time, in the fall of
1986, and in my first year of university at a small rural campus on the
Canadian prairies. An area farmer needed able-bodied workers for a few
hours and offered each of us $25 to do some ‘chicken catching.’ Coming
from the city I had no idea what that meant but money was in short sup-
ply and that was incentive enough to go along. This was more than thirty
years ago but I recall certain details. We arrived after dark. Chickens cov-
ered the entire floor of the enormous barn, sitting or standing listlessly.
Our job for the next few hours was to reach under the birds and quickly
ix
x Preface
grab their legs before they fully woke up, then lift them so they were
upside down. They start flapping their wings immediately so it’s physi-
cally taxing––my arms, shoulders and back ached for days afterwards.
The more experienced and stronger ‘catchers’ managed two birds in each
hand. Once we had our chickens, we took them outside to waiting trucks
and lifted them to others who stuffed the startled birds into small cages.
After each delivery we returned to the barn for more, repeating the pro-
cess until the floor was empty of living birds. The process was not smooth.
A bird might slip away at some point and have to be wrestled down. The
lids on the cages were shut quickly and often caught a wing or a foot or a
head. And worst of all was the feeling of occasional breaking bones when
grabbing or carrying the startled birds. Their bodies seemed brittle.
I now regret my participation in that ‘chicken catch,’ and having since
learned more about the factory farming of chickens for meat and eggs,
I’m left with three lasting impressions. The first is the brutal force of
human domination of some animals. Those birds––manipulated into
docility by the lighting––were completely powerless against the muscle
and machinery driving that business. The second is the unnaturalness of
that low, dark, stinking place. Chemicals, overcrowding, body manipula-
tion (through selective breeding, beak cutting), shortened lives. Third, it
made me realize the enormous distance between the barn and the dinner
plate. At that time, I had no idea what meat and dairy production
involved. Not really.
Literary horses like Black Beauty and his friends, and real, frightened,
fragile chickens. The ones products of the imagination, the others actual,
vulnerable, sentient beings. And all of them, in their own way, whisper-
ing a compelling challenge to my then habitual indifference to animals as
neighbours deserving moral consideration. Stories do not always remain
between the covers of books. They linger, sometimes attach, unbidden, to
the stuff of our lives. To meet and enjoy fictional animals is to risk meet-
ing them again in unexpected ways. I cannot hear a toad without smiling,
as the sound brings Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)
to mind. Am I less likely to throw a stone at one for having read that book?
Another encounter. The punchline of the Good Samaritan parable
comes at the beginning of that famous story rather than the end, and it is
not Jesus who delivers it but instead a nameless onlooker. When Jesus
Preface xi
asks what is required of people to inherit eternal life, that onlooker cites
Torah: love God and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10:27; cf.
Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 6:5). Jesus agrees with him, but the man
presses further, asking, Who is my neighbour? Jesus’s story about an
assault and robbery, and the unlikely hero who comes to the victim’s aid
is both commentary on the portion of Torah recited, and an answer to
the man’s question. As the parable illustrates, love is owed to a stranger
left for dead on the side of the road. Your neighbour is the one in need.
Your neighbour is the one in need, even when they are not part of your
community. We are to love across boundaries. Love not only family and
tribe, or those of our race and nation, or gender and religion, or sexual
orientation and socio-economic status. Love not only the citizen but also
the refugee. Simply love your neighbour as yourself, says Jesus. Love the
one in need as you love yourself. That’s all it says. My neighbour does not
always look like me or believe like me but that’s no matter. Jesus collapses
the two great commandments of Torah. If we love God, we love our
neighbours, whoever they are. We love our neighbours because we
love God.
Animals are neighbours too. There’s nothing in the story limiting this
boundary-defying love to bipedal types. If this sounds odd, note the
vague kinship between the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus’s
remarks about an animal fallen into a pit (Matthew 12:11): “Suppose one
of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you
not lay hold of it and lift it out?” Of course you will. Yes, this is self-
serving to a degree (sheep have economic value) but it remains aiding a
distressed animal for its own sake is a religiously sanctioned response. You
are not to pass by one in its moment of need any more than you pass by
the human victim of a robbery laying in a ditch at the side of a road. You
help, and you do so even if it is the Sabbath. Humans extending kindness
to nonhumans––Jesus expects it of the God-fearing. And perhaps it
deserves notice it works both ways in the parable. The Samaritan is not
the only one who helps the injured man because he places the stranger
“on his own animal” to get him to an inn for care (10:34). A brief hint of
cross-species compassion?
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a work of fiction. Jesus often told
stories as a way to teach. For me, just as Grahame’s The Wind in the
xii Preface
Willows enriches my experience of the croaking toads I hear, Jesus’s par-

able now attaches to a real-world encounter with a real-world animal. A
few years back a student contacted me about a stray dog she found injured
at the side of the road after being hit by a car. She stopped to help, taking
the puppy she named Daisy to a nearby veterinary clinic even when
unsure how to fund the expensive surgery/amputation needed to save
her. This was a costly act of kindness. Costly just like the kindness shown
by the Samaritan (“he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper,
and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you what-
ever more you spend’” [Luke 10:35]). She met one of God’s creatures in
need––like a sheep fallen in a pit, like an injured man on the side of the
road––and ignoring the species divide offered a boundary-transgressing
act of mercy. The tripod Daisy now lives with me, forever in my mind
intertwined with Jesus’s parable and this student’s enactment of its ethical
mandate. Story meets reality, fiction meets fur.
This book considers that step. How do works of the imagination shape
our attitudes and behaviors toward actual animals, and what do they con-
tribute to debates about ethics? Through consideration of a very small
sampling of representative works, I suggest authors (1) educate by reveal-
ing otherwise hidden worlds; (2) empathize with the vulnerable, inviting
and urging readers to do the same; and (3) envision new possibilities for
human-nonhuman interactions.
In the 1923 publication translated as Civilization and Ethics, Albert
Schweitzer insists a person is truly ethical, “only when he obeys the com-
pulsion to help all life that he is able to assist and shrinks from injuring
anything that lives.” Such a person does not ask whether and to what
extent this or that life deserves sympathy. Leaf or flower, worm or insect,
all life is sacred. Ridicule for being sentimental is sure to follow but such
an individual is undeterred. A time will indeed come, Schweitzer pre-
dicts, when people will recognize thoughtless injury to life is incompati-
ble with ethics. “Ethics is responsibility without limit toward all that lives.”
The year 1923 also witnessed the publication of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor
Dolittle’s Post Office. In it he writes of a paradisal island called No Man’s
Land where animals have (note the vaguely biblical phrasing), “lived at
peace for a thousand years.” Dolittle is indeed “the first human in a thou-
sand years that has set foot” there. He alone among people, the island’s
Preface xiii
residents recognize, presents no threat. He alone, to borrow Schweitzer’s

description, responds to the compulsion to “help all life that he is able to
assist.” Indeed, the Doctor spends “several days” offering the animals
advice and tending to their various ailments.
The simultaneous publication of these very different books offers a
convenient segue into our subject. At the risk of being overly fanciful,
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle is a playful, top-hatted version of Schweitzer’s
“truly ethical” person. The two writers envision a kinder, enchanted world
where there is reverence for all life and a willingness to care. The one
travelled there by means of rigorous theological and philosophical inquiry,
the other by means of highly imaginative storytelling. Our concern is
with the second path.
Otterburne, MB, Canada Michael J. Gilmour

Contents
1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal

Welfare Movements and a Literature of Compassion 1
2 It’s a Bad World for Animals: Activism and Sentimental

Literature 45
3 Eating Meat, Eating Misery 77
4 Lessons on Animals and Science with Doctor Rat 99
5 St. Francis Visits Rabbit Hill: Visions of Coexistence123
6 A Sort of Temple: Religious Themes in Animal Literature157
7 The Mark of Cain: Human Hunters and Animal Predators191
8 Animals, Mourning, and Cat-lovin’ Bastards225
Index251
xv
About the Author
Michael J. Gilmour is Associate Professor of English and biblical litera-

ture at Providence University College, Canada. He is a Fellow of the
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the author of Eden’s Other Residents:
The Bible and Animals and Animals in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.
xvii
1
Introduction: The Parallel Voices
of Modern Animal Welfare Movements
and a Literature of Compassion
My father recited poems out loud at home. I have vivid memories of him
reading “The Bells Of Heaven” (Ralph Hodgson), “Snake” (D. H. Lawrence),
and a poem I have never been able to relocate about a fox caught in a trap
with young in the den. The innocence of anymals and the cruel power of
humanity was manifest in sorrow, anger, even bitterness in my father’s soft
voice. Already then, his sentiments echoed my own experiences with humanity
and anymals in rural America. I also recall my mother singing the folksong,
“The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night,” and how my father would say, “The
fox has to eat, too.” I realize now that the poems themselves might never have
reached me if my parents had not read and sung to us when we were young.
Through their voices—through this shared experience of literature—I gained
more than what was written on those dog-eared pages.
—Lisa Kemmerer, Montana State University Billings, philosopher-activist
Personal correspondence. On her use of the term anymal, see Prof. Kemmerer’s “Verbal Activism:
‘Anymals’,” Society and Animals 14.1 (May 2006): 9–14. It is a contraction of any and animal,
which indicates all individuals of any species other than the speaker/author. She prefers it to the
regular spelling because it avoids the suggestion humans are not themselves animals, as well as the
dualism and alienation implied by the prefixed term nonhumans or the qualifier other animals.
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave
Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_1
2 M. J. Gilmour
Animal stories are metonymic. Esther is perhaps the most famous pig in
the world as I type this, and the accounts of her adventures, beautifully
and humorously reported by her caregivers Steve Jenkins and Derek
Walter, belie the idea of pigs as mindless automata. They give her a voice,
they tell her story.1 She is a personality, complete with an emotional range
and a capacity for pleasure and pain. She is mischievous, and able to bond
with humans and other nonhumans. Though anthropomorphism and
sentimentalism invite the ridicule and censure of some, such stories, fic-
tional and nonfictional, are persistently popular and effective tools for
promoting kindness to animals. Jenkins and Walter persuade their read-
ers to see more than meat the next time a livestock truck passes on the
highway. The nameless pigs on that truck are just like Esther. They too
have personalities. They too have a capacity for pleasure and pain.
Though it took me many years to realize the potential of literature to
further the efforts of animal compassion agendas––the long-neglected
copy of Black Beauty mentioned in the Preface left closed and unheeded––
other readers and writers long before and since Anna Sewell credit stories
for awakening an affection for nature and the desire to care for it. Jane
Goodall, for one, identifies fiction as a formative influence:
As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature,
animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was
filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it
was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in
other worlds. My very favourite books at the time were The Story of Dr.
Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan books.2
1
Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, with Caprice Crane, Esther the Wonder Pig: Changing the World
One Heart at a Time (New York: Grand Central, 2017); and Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, with
Caprice Crane, Happily Ever Esther: Two Men, A Wonder Pig, and Their Life-Changing Mission to
Give Animals a Home (New York: Grand Central, 2018).
2
Jane Goodall, with Phillip Berman, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (New York: Warner,
1999), 11.
1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare… 3
As she puts it elsewhere, “I learned from nature. … I also learned from

the books that my mother found for me about animals. I read and read
about animals. Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan and Mowgli.”3
This book approaches storytelling as a form of animal advocacy and
considers the contributions of literature toward a widened circle of care.
With Jane Goodall, I include Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle novels
among my favorites in the category and refer to them throughout. There
are a few reasons for this. Not only does the central character model kind-
ness to animals and confront forms of cruelty, but the stories also illus-
trate a useful way to approach conversations about welfare. Many find
the objectives of advocates to be extreme, unrealistic, and divorced from
all that is familiar. Meals without meat? Clothes without leather? Science
without laboratory rats? Circuses without elephants? Impossible. This is
the way we live and the way it’s always been. In many contexts, to suggest
we do without such uses of animals is to shut down the conversation even
before it begins. But literature often succeeds where communication in
other forums breaks down. When couched in a compelling story, we tend
to be more amenable to new ideas.
Consider Lofting’s opposition to fox hunting. Allyson May’s study of
this English pastime observes how soldiers returning from the Great War
viewed it in different ways. For some, their experiences on the battlefield
provoked “nostalgia, affection for the pre-War, comparatively innocent
world of the hunting field,” but for others, Lofting among them, the War
resulted in “a heightened compassion for the suffering of animals as well
as men.” Fox hunting was no longer an innocent distraction. Indeed, it
was during Lofting’s time as a soldier in Flanders and France that his
Dolittle stories first appeared.4 According to Gary D. Schmidt, “None of
the novels can ever be read outside the context of … the trenches of the
3
Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff, The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 69. In Reason for Hope, she also writes appreciatively of The
Wind in the Willows and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), both of which
involve, in very different ways, highly imaginative depictions of animals (11–12).
4
Allyson N. May, The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781–2004: Class and Cruelty (New York:
Routledge, 2016), 74. See too chap. 6 of May’s book, “The Flight from Modernity: Nostalgia and
the Hunt.” She closes that chapter observing that fox-hunting’s survival “past the Great War and the
Second World War into the twenty-first century in many ways can be explained by the very fact
that it is not modern” (184). Italics original.
4 M. J. Gilmour
First World War, where horses, unprotected against the green billows of
gas that belched across the fields and cascaded into the trenches, died
screaming out of burning lungs.”5 This is where Lofting’s longing for a
kinder relationship with nature begins:
While he could somehow avoid despair and place the war in the context of
a reasonable explanation––these were apparently rational creatures who
had consciously decided to commit atrocity––he could not accept the
destruction of horses. While the troops could protect themselves against
the green gas that poured into the trenches and coated the landscape, the
horses could not. It sprang into their lungs, blistered their tissues, and
led to agonizing death.6
The Dolittle stories, Lofting explains, began life as letters home to his
children during the War, and the idea of a medical person caring for ani-
mals has direct connection to what he saw:
One thing … that kept forcing itself more and more on my attention was
the very considerable part the animals were playing in the World War and
that as time went on they, too, seemed to become Fatalists. They took their
chances with the rest of us. But their fate was far different from the men’s.
However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired of; all
the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his
aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.7
There is even evidence his tenderness toward animals extended beyond

the battlefield. The usually placid Lofting once attacked three men, one
armed with a knife, who had hobbled some wild horses. Having dis-
patched the three, he cut loose the horses, emptied the rifles, and, wiping
the blood from his cheek, sauntered back to his camp, unruffled, to read
a story to his son.8
5
Gary D. Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, Twayne’s English Authors Series 496 (New York: Twayne,
1992), 51.
6
Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 13.
7
As cited in Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 6.
8
Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 2. Schmidt here relates the anecdote as told by Lofting’s son, in Colin
Lofting, “Mortifying Visit from a Dude Dad,” Life 30 (September 1966), 128–30.
The result of those wartime experiences was a fictional world depicting

an alternative vision of human-animal relations, with deep criticisms of
many entrenched attitudes and activities, fox hunting among them:
“‘What a childish sport!’ [Doctor John Dolittle] murmured. ‘I can’t
understand what they see in it. Really, I can’t. Grown men rushing about
the landscape on horseback, caterwauling and blowing tin horns––all
after one poor little wild animal! Perfectly childish!’”9 But his response
involves more than ridicule and disdain. Dolittle inevitably comes to the
aid of animals in distress in all the stories. On one occasion during his
travels, he meets a mother fox named Nightshade, and she asks him to
look at one of her pups who has something wrong with his paw. While
attending to the cub, they suddenly hear the approach of hunters.10 The
account of the vixen’s terror––the despair of a mother helpless to protect
her children––highlights the brutality of the sport. The same pack and
the same hunters killed Nightshade’s sister the week before.11 Dolittle
hides the mother and babies in his pockets before the dogs arrive, and
once they do, tells them to lead the horse-riding men in another
direction.12
Having addressed the immediate threat, Dolittle then listens to
Nightshade as she relates at length another occasion when fox hunters
threatened her life. The first-person, point-of-view description is
unsettling.
Nightshade, the vixen, paused in her story a moment, her ears laid back,
her dainty mouth slightly open, her eyes staring fixedly. She looked as
though she saw that dreadful day all over again, that long terrible chase, at
the end of which, with a safe refuge in sight, she felt her strength giving out
as the dogs of Death drew close upon her heels.13
9
Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924;
New York: Aladdin, 2019), 173. He describes fox hunting as “childish” again on p. 170.
10
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 166–68.
11
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 168. Dolittle’s opposition to sport hunting is longstanding. The
sound of the horses, dogs, and hunters’ shouts reminds him of an earlier experience that “made him
an enemy of fox hunting for life––when he had met an old fox one evening lying half dead with
exhaustion under a tangle of blackberries” (168).
12
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 168–71. Dolittle, of course, speaks animal languages.
13
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 176. Full account, 174–77.
6 M. J. Gilmour
As readers of these stories come to expect, the good Doctor comes up

with a solution for her and her family. Because dogs rely on scent, he
recommends spirits of camphor and eucalyptus as a way to mask their
smell and throw pursuing dogs off the trail. He wraps vials of these medi-
cines in handkerchiefs. Nightshade is to carry them and when dogs give
chase, drop a rock on one of them to break the glass and role on the
damp, smelling cloth. It proves so effective foxes all over the region
request their own so-called Dolittle Safety Packs.14 The result is far reach-
ing: “‘It’s no use,’ Sir William [Peabody] said [to a companion], ‘we can’t
hunt foxes in this district unless we can breed and train a pack of eucalyp-
tus hounds. And I’ll bet my last penny it’s Dolittle’s doing. He always said
he’d like to stop the sport altogether. And, by George! so far as this county
is concerned, he’s done it!’”15 Within this imaginative space, Lofting
brings a fox hunt to an end. He enacts a welfare fantasy. As the child nar-
rator of the earlier book The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle puts it, being part
of the great man’s animal-filled, animal-friendly household is “like living
in a new world.”16
In this episode, Lofting educates readers by showing them what this
past time actually involves, awakens empathy through a sympathetic por-
trait of a terrified, desperate mother, and in highly imaginative fashion
envisions the possibility of an end to senseless bloodshed. Such fanta-
sies––maybe, just maybe––lead us to wonder what we might do for ani-
mals in our own ‘county,’ how we too might create a “new world.” Art
precedes reform. A visit to Toad Hall is incentive enough to stop throw-
ing stones.
Some theorists recognize literature’s potential to disrupt prior under-
standings, to render strange the otherwise ordinary. Terry Eagleton, for
one, writes of Bertolt Brecht’s ability “to unsettle [audiences’] convic-
tions, dismantle and refashion their received identities, and expose the
unity of this selfhood as an ideological illusion.”17 He “uses certain
14
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 177–84.
15
Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 184.
16
Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1
(1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 60.
17
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 162.
dramatic techniques (the so-called ‘estrangement effect’) to render the

most taken-for-granted aspects of social reality shockingly unfamiliar,
and so to rouse the audience to a new critical awareness of them.”18 To
adapt the concept to the present issue, welfare-leaning animal writing has
a defamiliarizing, estranging effect. By questioning and often refashion-
ing received behaviors, unconventional possibilities present themselves
(Dolittle’s “new world”). And so it is we have a substantial number of
writers who imagine life without fox hunts, or meals without meat, or
clothes without leather, or science without vivisection.
Writers sometimes acknowledge this capacity of storytelling to unset-
tle the taken-for-granted and spark a realignment of priorities. When
discussing the stories read to him when a boy, Richard Adams, one-time
president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
and the author of Watership Down mentions the Lofting series with par-
ticular fondness, and credits them for his turn toward advocacy. Hugh
Lofting “wrote with warmth and humor, and again, the characters are
likeable and well-drawn. In the best of the books the narrative grip is
powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for ani-
mals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr.
Dolittle must answer for it.”19 He develops this point again later: “there is
nothing amiss with the Doctor’s passionate concern about the abuse of
animals. He turned me against circuses, fur coats and other such evil
things––for life.”20 Taking my cue from Jane Goodall and Richard Adams,
I also look to Lofting for wisdom in the pages that follow. This is not,
therefore, a work of traditional literary criticism. I write with advocates in
mind, aiming to persuade them that the arts bring much to the forma-
tion of humane values. It is a potential resource for reform efforts. As
much as possible I allow the novels and poems introduced to speak for
themselves, with only minimal interaction with scholarly analyses of
18
Eagleton, Literary Theory, 162.
19
Richard Adams, The Day Gone By: An Autobiography (1990; London: Penguin, 1991), 22.
20
Adams, Day Gone By, 106. If Lofting was progressive in his thinking about animal welfare, he was
also mired in some of the worst prejudices of his historical moment. As often noted in the critical
literature, early editions of the stories include some egregious racist remarks. Later editions of the
books remove offensive passages.
8 M. J. Gilmour
them. What the book contributes, I hope, is a way of reading that brings
the welfare interests of creative writers to the forefront.
Welfarist Reading
From Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan to the work of primatologist Jane
Goodall; from gassed horses on the battlefields of World War I to Hugh
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle; from The Wind in the Willows to the sound of
croaking toads I hear. The boundaries between real and imagined animals
are often porous, and the potential for the experience of one to shape our
experience of the other, in both directions, is ever present. Writers help us
see animals we might otherwise overlook. To meet Esther the pig in print
is to view those inside the livestock trucks we pass with new eyes, and our
interactions with real animals intrude on our experience of fiction, the
way Daisy the tripod is for me a marginal gloss to the parable told in
Luke 10:25–37. Readers’ propensity for mingling the imagined with the
real and vice versa makes animal literature a rich resource for the promo-
tion of humane themes. As C. S. Lewis puts it, in verse, our “love” for
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle or Nutkin in the Beatrix Potter tales “no doubt––
splashes over on the / Actual archtypes,” by which he means the real
hedgehogs and squirrels that lie behind those artistic representations.21
Literature helps us “love” the animals we meet after closing our books.
Those who advocate for animals bring a different set of concerns and
questions to literature than those typical of other critical approaches. A
welfarist perspective, for lack of a better term, is attentive to ways animals
appear in fiction and verse. It considers what this novel or that poem
teaches us about animals and our interactions with them. It looks at ways
art surfaces ethical questions by critiquing cruelty or exhibiting models of
compassion, both of which invite a reassessment of our own actions. Use
of the term welfarist criticism is idiosyncratic so perhaps an analogy helps
to clarify my objectives. This reading strategy employs a hermeneutic of
suspicion like that found in Marxist literary criticism, which maintains
21
C. S. Lewis, “Impenitence,” in Poems (1964; New York: HarperOne, 2017), 5–6. Lewis first
published this poem in 1953.
works of fiction do not exist independently of historical contexts.

Literature is ideological and individual works expressions of class conflict.
Ideology, according to Michael Ryan, refers to “the beliefs, attitudes, and
habits of feeling which a society inculcates in order to generate an auto-
matic reproduction of its structuring premises. Ideology is what preserves
social power in the absence of direct coercion.”22 Literature potentially
perpetuates and legitimizes the dominant, structuring premises. If there
is a hidden subtext below the surface that perpetuates power structures
serving the interest of some, while oppressing many more, the critic’s role
is to expose those potentially damaging biases.
If we examine the law, politics, religion, education and culture of class-
societies, writes Terry Eagleton, “we find that most of what they do lends
support to the prevailing social order. And this, indeed, is no more than
we should expect. There is no capitalist civilisation in which the law for-
bids private property, or in which children are regularly instructed in the
evils of economic competition.” Art and literature often contribute to
this bolstering of the status quo. While it is true there “is no sense in
which Shelley, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Brontë, Dickens,
George Orwell and D. H. Lawrence were all shamelessly pumping out
propaganda on behalf of the ruling class,” if we consider “English litera-
ture as a whole, we find that its critique of the social order rarely extends
to questioning the property system.”23
Welfare-inclined animal literature and criticism reveal hidden ideolo-
gies. Most works of fiction reinforce a worldview that privileges people
over other animals, maintaining might is right, that human reason is the
measure of all things, and that the exercise of “dominion” over the earth
and its creatures is a God-given privilege. Such assumptions are often
implied when not stated directly, a habitual default insisting, That’s just
the way it is. In addition to explicit arguments asserting humanity’s right
to rule, there are also ‘gaps’ in the vast majority of stories where animals
are present. Think of stories about pre-mechanistic warfare with armies
on horseback, where nothing is said of the injuries from spears or bullets
22
Michael Ryan, “Political Criticism,” Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and
Laura Morrow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 203.
23
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2011), 153–54.
10 M. J. Gilmour
or green gases those horses sustain. Think of meals around the campfire
or dinner table that say nothing of the sacrificed animals supplying the
meat. Think of the leather and fur characters wear. Think of the animal
labour supplying the muscle for travel and construction in historical fic-
tion. All are untold stories. The unacknowledged animal is everywhere in
fiction. But when writers shift focus, when they privilege animal wellbe-
ing and tell their stories, ‘the way it is’ is suddenly open to scrutiny.
Telling Their Own Stories

Isa Leshko admits the early stages of work photographing elderly animals
for a book involved a degree of self-interest. It offered a way to confront
her own fears about aging and decline. But she and the project trans-
formed after spending time with her subjects and learning their stories: “I
became a passionate advocate for these animals, and I wanted my images
to speak on their behalf. It seemed selfish to photograph rescued animals
for any other reason. From that point on, I approached these images as
portraits in earnest, and I endeavored to reveal something unique about
each animal I photographed.”24 Some creative writers think of their art in
similar terms. Katherine Applegate says this about writing the children’s
novel The One and Only Ivan: “I wanted to give [the gorilla] Ivan (even
while captive behind the walls of his tiny cage) a voice of his own and a
story to tell.”25 And indeed, Ivan and his friends have stories to tell, and
they are not all pleasant. They include acts of human kindness but also
cruelties. The novel presents the good and the bad, and because of this
has a pedagogical function. It is a work of the imagination but also an
education in what human interactions with animals––at their best, at
their worse––look like. The story is a peek behind the surface veneer and
carnival atmosphere of a cheap shopping mall zoo attraction. Veneers
hide something less appealing underneath. What goes on after closing
hours at this particular mall?
24
Isa Leshko, Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2019), 11.
25
Katherine Applegate, “Author’s Note,” in The One and Only Ivan (New York: HarperCollins,
2012), 308.
There is a substantial library of animal stories of the last two hundred

or so years, roughly the period of modern animal welfare movements,
doing the same thing. These stories take readers to places they do not
usually go and show them things they do not usually see. They offer
glimpses of torments animals endure at human hands. What might a
once-free-roaming gorilla think after years of confinement in small quar-
ters? We do not know all there is to know about the cognitive processes
and the emotional lives of other species but that there are cognitive pro-
cesses and emotions in nonhumans is plain to see. Though a highly imag-
inative fantasy, the exercise of exploring how animals perceive human
behaviors is a valuable one, as is the ability of storytellers to show us a
broad spectrum of human-animal interactions. Between the lines of such
stories are ethical questions. Is it possible a caged animal is unfulfilled?
Are the entertainments gained by circuslike spectacles really worth the
pain and distress inflicted by trainers on those required to perform?
This desire to give suffering animals a platform to tell their stories puts
Katherine Applegate in good company. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is
justly celebrated as the template for welfare-oriented animal autobiogra-
phies, and as Jane Smiley observes, its author’s “motive for giving voice to
a horse was not entertainment, but moral teaching.” Her self-appointed
task as an author, “was to propose ways for equine mistreatment to be
mitigated.”26 To read Black Beauty is to experience something of what it
is like to have an uncomfortable bit in the mouth, to be worked to exhaus-
tion, to be left in the cold, to be whipped, abused, underfed, and
neglected. For many readers, then and now, consideration of ways our
actions help or harm animals is not reflex. Sewell understood this, and
like Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan, the objective is welfare reform.
Black Beauty is a work of fiction, but Sewell expects the story to detach
from its ink and paper to persuade readers who interact with actual horses
to be kind. In that way, it is a confrontational book, challenging such
26
Jane Smiley, “Foreword,” to Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877; New York: Penguin, 2011), ix.
Many note the contributions of Sewell’s Black Beauty toward greater awareness of animal suffering.
“The novel had a very powerful impact on the public,” writes Paul Waldau, “and it, along with
much other literature modeled on it, increased concern greatly for not only the welfare of work
animals but for dogs as well” (Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011], 42).
12 M. J. Gilmour
things as fashion as it concerns horse-drawn carriages, and economic

expediency in businesses relying on animal labour. Ethical arguments in
animal literature are always Davids facing any number of self-concerned
Goliaths.
Questioning Authority
“Do not accept injustice even if you hear it in my name.”27 This, Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks argues, is the import of the strange story related in Genesis
18 about God’s plan to destroy the cities of the plain. When God
announces it, Abraham questions the justice of the intended action: “Will
you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? … Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (18:23, 25).28 It is an extraordinary
scene and an unexpected question to ask. Does Abraham really think he
is more righteous than God? If we go back a few verses, Sacks suggests,
there is an important clue putting the exchange in context:
The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, see-
ing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the
nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that
he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of
the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may
bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” (Genesis 18:17–19)
That initial question, which Abraham overhears, is an invitation for him

to act, and it sets the terms of the challenge. “God is inviting Abraham to
respond,” according to Sacks. God chose Abraham to keep the way of the
Lord, to do what is right and just. By not hiding plans to destroy the cit-
ies on the plain, Sacks notes, God puts Abraham in a position to respond
using those very terms.
27
Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York:
Schocken, 2011), 243. Italics original.
28
Here and throughout I use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, unless otherwise
indicated.
Abraham is to be the voice of the right (tzedakah) and the just (mishpat).
These then become precisely the words he uses in his challenge: ‘righteous’
(tzadikim) and ‘Judge/justice’ (ha-shofet/mishpat). Abraham challenges
God because God invites him to challenge God.
The story contrasts with that of Noah who, while making the ark, does
not protest God’s announced plan to destroy the world. “That is what
made Abraham, not Noah, the hero of faith,” Sacks continues. “Noah
accepted. Abraham protested. The religion of Abraham is a religion of
protest against evil, in the name of God.”29
My interest in this biblical commentary is more rhetorical than theo-
logical. Though hardly an exact analogy with the Abraham story, the lit-
erature discussed in this book is in most cases a literature of protest. What
interests me about this reading of Genesis 18 is the questioning of moral
authority, the challenge of what is otherwise sacrosanct, which in
Abraham’s case would be any and all acts of God. To question this author-
ity, according to Sacks’s reading, is appropriate. Genesis affirms Abraham’s
willingness to protest and question.30
Conventional thinking places humanity at the centre of all things and
there is a tendency to recoil from the idea of any debt of moral consider-
ation owed to nonhuman life. Humans hunt, eat, sacrifice, and vivisect
animals. We use them for entertainment and labour. It is in our interest
to do so. If indeed humans are the measure of all things, an instrumental
use of animals––they are here for our use, to do with as we please––is the
de facto good. To challenge such presumption is akin to Abraham chal-
lenging God but that is, at least in the opinion of many authors, what
righteousness and justice demand. Many creative writers of the last two
hundred years––again, roughly the time of modern welfare reform
efforts––challenge the ‘god’ of anthropocentrism, the elevation of human-
ity above all else. Animal literature is often a literature of protest, putting
before readers human acts toward animals deemed absurd or abhorrent.
Ideal readers of this literature choose not to accept (as Noah does) but
rather to question, protest, and resist (as Abraham does). They creatively
29
Sacks, Great Partnership, 243, 244.
30
Sacks, Great Partnership, 244.
14 M. J. Gilmour
reject cruelty and invoke alternatives to entrenched self-interested behav-

iors. The imagined spaces such authors put before us are sites of moral
response, of attempts to realize dreams of peace.
During a brief stop in the little town of Monteverde, in the Capa
Blanca Islands, Doctor John Dolittle engages in a form of protest against
bullfighting, which occurred there every Sunday, and resulted in the
death of six bulls and many horses each time. (After teasing and angering
the bulls, each one “was allowed to tire himself out by tossing and killing
a lot of poor, old, broken-down horses who couldn’t defend themselves …
[then] a man came out with a sword and killed the bull”).31 The Doctor
is rarely angry in these stories, but becomes so on this occasion. He
despises the bullfights, which he describes as “a cruel, disgusting busi-
ness.” They are in his view ridiculous, “cruel, cowardly shows.”32 When he
says this to the wealthy Don Enrique Cardenas, a very powerful and
influential person on these islands, Dolittle finds himself voicing an
unpopular, contrarian view. Said differently, he questions an accepted
good, he challenges authority, he confronts a cultural norm. When Don
Enrique takes offense, Dolittle sees an opportunity. He insists he can
outperform the best matador in the ring, and puts the following proposal
to the incredulous Don Enrique: “‘If I can do more with angry bulls than
can [the matador] Pepito de Malaga, you are to promise me that there
shall never be another bullfight in the Capa Blancas so long as you are
alive to stop it. Is it a bargain?’”33 Dolittle succeeds, of course. He first
speaks to the bulls who are only too glad to play along if it ends the
weekly slaughter. When the big day comes, Dolittle has the bulls per-
forming various tricks before the mostly delighted crowd, and those same
bulls run the celebrated Pepito de Malaga out of the ring.
Some are angry because Dolittle’s performance threatens their way of
life, which to them is a long-established good. When Dolittle calls for the
release of five bulls at once during the fight, Pepito the matador objects,
demanding Don Enrique not allow it because “it was against all the rules
31
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 156–57.
32
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 156, 157. It surprises the narrator Tommy Stubbins to see
the usually mild-mannered Dolittle “red in the face with anger” and it reminds him of the Doctor’s
similar reaction when speaking about zoos keeping tigers and lions in captivity (156; cf. 57–58).
33
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 159.
of bullfighting.”34 Dolittle does not play by the rules though. He thinks

differently, he sees animals differently, he treats them differently. This
fanciful, highly imaginative character illustrates a confrontation with
established norms, with authority, with rules, with what the townspeople
and their beloved matadors accept as business-as-usual and good. Simply
questioning the appropriateness of bullfighting proves to be an affront to
them. This is clear from Don Enrique’s warning to Dolittle before the
fight: “you are merely throwing your life away, for you will certainly be
killed. However, that is no more than you deserve for saying that bull-
fighting is an unworthy sport.”35 Lofting uses fiction to ask difficult ques-
tions, interrogate unexamined norms, and confront the status quo. Like
Abraham, he and other animal-friendly writers are iconoclastic. They are
defiant toward that which is––often blindly, unthinkingly––sacrosanct.
Some literary theorists of recent years also include a critical animal eth-
ics approach that disrupts habitual, anthropocentric ways of thinking.
Josephine Donovan uses the term animal-standpoint criticism for analy-
ses that deconstruct ideologies of exploitation and dominance.36 This
approach begins with the premise animals are subjects, not objects, “they
are individuals with stories/biographies of their own, not undifferenti-
ated masses; that they dislike pain, enjoy pleasures; that they want to live
and thrive; that in short they have identifiable desires and needs.”
Literature, as Katherine Applegate’s remarks about Ivan attests, has the
capacity to give animals a voice. The failure of authors to do so “is a cen-
tral concern of animal-standpoint criticism.”37 As Carol J. Adams puts it,
“Animal defense theory argues that we must consider the individual ani-
mals. We must not let the fate of individual animals become deflected by
concerns about species, or habitat, or the environment, or determined by
what some consider to be humans’ needs to eat and experiment upon
animals. It is as individuals that animals experience the consequences of
34
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 166. Italics added. Polynesia the parrot likens Dolittle
breaking the rules of bullfighting to his sailing methods (166–67; cf. 147). Though he breaks the
rules of navigation, he always gets where he wants to go.
35
Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 159.
36
Josephine Donovan, The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2016), 95–96.
37
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 99.
16 M. J. Gilmour
their oppression.”38 This approach, Donovan continues, identifies “autho-

rial and critical blindness that often accompanies animal representation,
questioning the absences and elisions, the lapses and lacunae in texts
where animals appear.”39 Is the suffering of animals represented in stories
taken into account? What about critical analyses of that literature?
Many of the stories considered here do. They challenge indifference by
bringing animals from the margins to the centre of fictional worlds. They
give them a voice and acknowledge their particular interests. They also
protest human-caused distress and so, to borrow Lisa Sainsbury’s term,
they are instances of “moral creativity.”40 Humane fiction allows animals
their subjectivity, considers their particularity, and recognizes their capac-
ity to suffer or flourish. Other stories discussed are not particularly con-
cerned with welfare themes but nonetheless surface issues warranting
ethical consideration. Hunting stories by their very nature, regardless of
authorial intent, are likely to turn some readers’ thoughts toward the
pursued animal’s experience. Ernest Hemingway writes of his great pas-
sion for bullfights and so stands in sharp contrast to the views reflected in
the Lofting story just described. However, his reflections on the fights are
as likely to repulse as impress, depending on the reader, and for this rea-
son potentially shape a reader’s opinions one way or the other.41
38
Carol J. Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994; London:
Bloomsbury, 2018), 34. In a similar spirit, cf. S. Louise Patteson’s Pussy Meow: The Autobiography
of a Cat (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901), 88–89: “pardon me if I mention something
that may seem very trivial to you, but which I consider of great importance. A cat should have a
name, because it adds to her dignity, and commands respect for her. Moreover, it enhances her
commercial value to be thus individualized, and lifted above the general mass of her kind.”
39
40
Lisa Sainsbury, Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Perspectives on Children’s
Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 167.
41
See e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932).
nimal Welfare and a Literature

A
of Compassion
Paralleling the rise of animal welfare movements in the nineteenth cen-
tury is the emergence of a body of writing sympathetic to the activism
and calls for reform coming from societies for the prevention of cruelty
to animals, anti-vivisection organizations, and the like. Mark Twain illus-
trates this alignment of artistry and activism well. “His identification
with the animal welfare movement motivated him to write various
polemical texts,” explains Hadas Marcus. She lists among them Twain’s
“Cruelty to Animals I” (1864), “Cruelty to Animals II” (1867), an 1899
letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society, and the novella A Horse’s
Tale (1907), which is a protest against bullfighting.42 Writers with an
aversion to cruelty, recognizing the potential of compelling stories to
educate and win sympathy, paired animal causes with fiction. My aim
here is to identify textual moments where views about the morality of
human-caused animal suffering and creativity meet. I focus on a rela-
tively few examples offering a kind of ethical discourse about animals very
different from the more abstract arguments of, say, philosophy or theol-
ogy. Storytelling, like myth, tells us much about our world and our inter-
actions with it, and for this reason is crucial for ethical formation.
The kinds of stories I examine are not all alike in the degree of empha-
sis placed on animal welfare efforts. Some, like Anna Sewell’s Black
Beauty, focus on it almost entirely whereas in others, like Anne Brontë’s
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), it is incidental. These two examples do
not explicitly mention any welfare organizations by name, but a number
of others do. A mystery surrounding a lost and suppressed will is a story-
line in Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. This will, it turns out, includes a
sizable bequest to an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals.43 The children’s book The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White
includes a brief episode affirming the work of the Audubon Society,
42
Hadas Marcus, “An Ecocritical Approach to Cruelty in the Laboratory,” Journal of Animal Ethics
6.2 (2016): 228.
43
Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 (1925;
New York: Aladdin, 2019), 228–29, 247–48.
18 M. J. Gilmour
founded in 1905. According to one character, the organization “‘is kind

to birds’” and he decides to give them money “‘to help birds’” because
some of them are “‘in real trouble. They face extinction.’”44 Here, in a fun
and lighthearted story, is an educational moment, a signal to readers to
consider a serious conservation issue. The adult speaker explains to a
child what extinction means: “‘[It] is what happens when … you don’t
exist anymore because there are no others like you. Like the passenger
pigeon and the eastern Heath Hen and the Dodo and the Dinosaur.’”
Young readers likely appreciate the lesson because immediately after these
words, another adds, “‘The Trumpeter Swan was almost extinct. … People
kept shooting them. … But now they are making a comeback.’”45 Since
this remark comes near the end of the story and after readers have come
to know and love Louis the trumpeter swan and his family, to learn the
species almost disappeared likely comes as a shock. That human action is
responsible for the near tragedy (“‘kept shooting them’”) is sobering and
puts an ethical dilemma before them. An author’s ability to encourage a
bond between reader and nonhuman characters in stories is crucial for
the promotion of sympathy and attention to welfare topics. As Donovan
notes, with reference to a Leo Tolstoy short story about a horse, “As the
reader has come to know Strider as a subject, his death necessarily evokes
feelings of sadness, compassion, and sympathy, as well as anger at human
indifference to the fate of this remarkable and admirable animal.”46
S. Louise Patteson tells us plainly she considers her children’s story
about cats an effort to promote the activities of an animal welfare organi-
zation. In the Preface to Pussy Meow: An Autobiography of a Cat (1901),
she explains its genesis:
In the fall of 1895, while the National Convention of the S. P. C. A. was in

session in Cleveland, a group of people stood in the assembly room one day
discussing “Black Beauty” and “Beautiful Joe.” One expressed the hope
44
E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan, illustrated by Edward Frascino (New York: Scholastic,
1970), 196–97.
45
White, Trumpet of the Swan, 197. Italics original. There is also a storyline about hunting to
extinction in Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee’s Maybe A Fox (New York: Atheneum, 2016). See
e.g., 169–70.
46
that as the horse and the dog had now secured a public hearing [in those
books], some one [sic] would be willing to undertake the same for the cat.47
Here the connection between a humane organization and creative writ-

ing is explicit, and the appeal for a story following the animal autobiog-
raphy template modelled by Sewell and Margaret Marshall Saunders
makes it clear these advocates valued storytelling’s power of persuasion.
“That same evening,” Patteson continues, “‘Pussy Meow’ began writing
her story,” and the impetus behind the work is unambiguously a wel-
fare agenda:
Its only object is to breathe out the joys, the sorrows and the longings of a
misunderstood and much maligned fellow-creature, and to secure for her
the consideration which humanity owes to the dumb.48
Patteson and those encouraging her efforts recognized a gap in protection

efforts. The status of cats in the nineteenth century (“much maligned”)
was rather ambiguous. They were, as Janet M. Davis puts it, “conspicu-
ously absent as a subject of sustained programmatic concern.”49 There are
various reasons for this exclusion, among them superstitions, the belief
they carried diseases, and most significantly the threat they posed to
songbirds. Davis reports the hostility against cats was such that “bird
protectionist members of the Pasadena Humane Society … proposed a
feline extermination program in 1903.”50 As for cats, admits one charac-
ter in Patteson’s novel, “‘I never before thought they were good for
47
Patteson, Pussy Meow, “Preface,” n.p. Within the story, the feline narrator echoes this concern for
overlooked species in remarks about Billy the pig: “When Billy was led back to his pen, he grunted
his thankfulness to his friends the best he knew how. As for me, I concluded to put Uncle Ellison’s
plan [for kind treatment of pigs] into my story; for who knows but some of the boys who read it
may be farmers someday, and will want to try it?” (45). Like Sewell’s Black Beauty and Margaret
Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, the basis for Patteson’s vision of animal compassion is Christian
piety. Guy and his mother, Meow’s “mistress,” enact the humane values inculcated throughout the
book. They also read the Bible and pray every day after breakfast (e.g., Pussy Meow, 64). There are
references to Sewell’s Black Beauty and Saunders’s Beautiful Joe in Patteson’s novel as well. Guy reads
them both (28, 29).
48
Patteson, Pussy Meow, “Preface,” frontmatter, unnumbered page.
49
Janet M. Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12.
50
Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 12–13.
20 M. J. Gilmour
anything, having been brought up to think of them as uncanny creatures,

something to be abhorred and dreaded.’”51
The alignment of the novel and organized efforts to protect animals
occurs again in Sarah K. Bolton’s “Introduction” to the book, which cites
remarks attributed to Queen Victoria at the jubilee meeting of the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: “‘No civilization is
complete which does not include the dumb and defenseless of God’s cre-
ation within the sphere of charity and mercy.’” Bolton refers to various
groups, connecting their welfare work to the story she introduces:
There are homes for cats in Dublin, in London, and other English cities, as
well as some in Egpyt [sic] and India. The Gifford Sheltering Home for
Animals, in Boston, is doing great work; also the Frances Power Cobbe
Refuge in Indianapolis, Indiana. We are teaching our children to be kind
to every living creature. May this story of “Pussy Meow” help forward the
good work.52
These remarks foreground the important role of organized animal protec-

tion from the outset and literature’s welcome contribution to it.
Some contemporary writers do the same, as a few examples show. In
Peg Kehret’s children’s book Ghost Dog Secrets (2010), a Humane Society
and its volunteers feature prominently. The teacher Mrs. Webster, herself
a volunteer with an animal rescue group, helps her sixth-grade students
who want “to do something to help those puppy mill dogs” they hear
about on the evening news. She organizes their efforts to raise money and
collect supplies.53 The book urges readers to do the same, to act on behalf
of animals. In a sense, Kehret breaks ‘the fourth wall.’ The term comes
from the theatre and indicates transgressions of the boundary separating
actor/stage/fiction from audience/gallery/reality. As used here, I mean
writers who break out of the confines of imagined spaces to engage read-
ers directly. They blur the lines between the story and daily experience,
51
Patteson, Pussy Meow, 87.
52
Sarah K. Bolton, “Introduction” to Saunders, Pussy Meow, 15. Italics added.
53
Peg Kehret, Ghost Dog Secrets (New York: Puffin, 2010), 12. Italics original. There are numerous
references to the Humane Society, Animal Control, and animal control officers throughout (e.g.,
73, 76, 130–135, 139, 142, 149, 165, 181, 186).
inviting readers to let the former intrude on the latter. Do not stay in
imagined spaces, they insist, but turn to the actual animals you see around
you. Black Beauty does this when he highlights one of the takeaways
from the story: “if any one [sic] wants to break in a young horse well, that
is the way.”54 The dog Beautiful Joe closes his autobiography with a direct
address, asking boys and girls to “‘be kind to dumb animals, not only
because you will lose nothing by it, but because you ought to; for they
were placed on the earth by the same Kind Hand that made all living
creatures.’”55
In Ghost Dog Secrets, Kehret’s clearest invitation for audience participa-
tion connects to Wendy, a girl who is enthusiastic about helping home-
less cats. She knits cat blankets for the Humane Society, even starting a
club to get others involved, and then delivers them to the shelter at the
close of the story. Just five pages later, in the back matter of the book,
Kehret supplies instructions for readers to make cat blankets themselves
for the same purpose: “Using two strands of 4-ply yarn, cast on 33
stitches. Knit every row for 66 rows,” and so on. The knitting instructions
are an invitation to continue the kindnesses modelled by Wendy, Rusty,
and their friends. This novel breaks out of the confines of an imaginary
world in other ways too. The backmatter includes website addresses for
the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals so readers know where to find fur-
ther information about animal cruelty laws (under the heading, “Learn
how to help”). In addition, the author’s biography on the inside back
cover notes Kehret is a past winner of “the Henry Bergh Award from the
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” and that she
“help[s] animal rescue groups.”56
Susan Hughes’s Wild Paws series also combines storytelling with a
humane education and mentions welfare organizations both real and
imagined. She bridges fiction with nonfiction most explicitly in her dedi-
cations. The books Lonely Wolf Pup (2003) and Bunnies in Trouble (2004),
54
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877. New York: Penguin, 2011), 13.
55
Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez (1893; Peterborough: Broadview,
2015), 270.
56
Kehret, Ghost Dog Secrets, backmatter, pages unnumbered.
22 M. J. Gilmour
to illustrate, include thanks to the staff of the Muskoka Wildlife Centre

for their assistance. In Cubs All Alone (2004), she acknowledges the Idaho
Black Bear Rehabilitation Center, and in Orphaned Beluga (2004), she
thanks a veterinarian named Sylvain De Guise of the University of
Connecticut who specializes in belugas.57 Her young protagonist Maxine
Kearney volunteers at the (fictional) Wild Paws and Claws Clinic and
Rehabilitation Centre, and each book relates the adventures she and her
friends undertake on behalf of a different species (bears, rabbits, a beluga
whale, a wolf, a bobcat). Other examples of animal stories incorporating
animal welfare organizations, real or imagined, include certain books by
British author Holly Webb, such as Harry the Homeless Puppy, which is
about, in part, “a home for unwanted dogs,” and The Shelter Puppy.58
Melissa Hart’s Avenging the Owl includes website addresses for various
organizations supporting wildlife, including Hawkwatch International,
“a nonprofit dedicated to preserving raptors and their habitat,” and The
Peregrine Fund, “a nonprofit working to conserve birds of prey.”59
The Animal-Friendly Writer and Ethics

Much of the literature discussed here reflects an attitude toward nature
that is not dominative but rather inclined toward ethical reflection: “The
mentality involved in an aesthetics of care is thus nonviolent, adaptive,
responsive, and attentive to the environment, perceiving other creatures
as subjects worthy of respect, whose different voices must be attended to,
and with whom one is emotionally engaged, interwoven in an ecological
and spiritual––subject-subject––continuum. Such a mentality may, it is
hoped, foster a moral and ecological sensitivity.”60 Philosophical and crit-
ical perspectives such as those found in the works of Josephine Donovan
57
Hughes further grounds the last-mentioned book in a real-world situation, noting, “This story is
based on [De Guise’s] real-life rescue of an upriver beluga whale in Canada” (Susan Hughes,
Orphaned Beluga, Wild Paws [Toronto: Scholastic, 2004], frontmatter, unnumbered page).
58
Holly Webb, Harry the Homeless Puppy (London: Little Tiger, 2015), 9; The Shelter Puppy
(London: Little Tiger, 2018).
59
Melissa Hart, Avenging the Owl (New York: Sky Pony, 2016), 214.
60
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 10, referring to Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).
and Carol J. Adams have a creative counterpart in a range of stories that

in various ways seek to educate readers about human-caused animal suf-
fering and to persuade them to choose nonviolence by promoting empa-
thy and envisioning new behaviors.
Certainly realizing this threefold objective is no easy feat but artists are
uniquely positioned to gain a hearing and hold their audiences’ attention.
Fiction is often deliberate in its efforts to win sympathy and promote
reform, with authors writing for animals and in response to cruelties. In
David Duchovny’s Holy Cow, the narrator Elsie the cow is understand-
ably horrified and angry when she discovers the awful truths about fac-
tory farming. She notes dairy and meat-producing operations contribute
to water shortages, force chickens, cows, and pigs to live in unimaginably
cramped conditions, and overuse antibiotics, which results in the appear-
ance of dangerous superbugs.61 But her angry tone is not all that helpful,
in the opinion of her editor: “‘You do realize you are insulting your entire
audience, i.e., the human race? Not what I’d call a winning strategy. Cows
don’t buy books.’” This editor urges a gentler approach, suggesting “‘A
spoonful of sugar helps the globe-warming, drought-inducing,
superresistant-bacteria-creating medicine go down. Don’t forget the
spoonful of sugar, sugar.’”62 Compassion-concerned animal literature
embraces this editor’s philosophy. The serious discourses of scientists and
philosophers have their place, but they do not reach or convince all audi-
ences. Cows and canaries have something to say as well, and poets and
novelists give them a voice to do so. Duchovny’s approach is clever. Most
don’t want to know where their cheap meat comes from or what goes on
in abattoirs. He is aware of this and gives readers what Elsie’s editor has
in mind. A little bit of sugar, humor in this case, earns a hearing.
But is the study of animal ethics through the lens of creative writing a
useful exercise? This is an important question and one returned to
throughout. At this point, I merely mark my agreement with Susan
McHugh’s observation back in 2009 regarding the broad disciplinary
neglect of animals generally: “Animals abound in literature across all ages
and cultures, but only rarely have they been the focal point of systematic
61
David Duchovny, Holy Cow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 56.
62
Duchovny, Holy Cow, 55, 57.
24 M. J. Gilmour
literary study.”63 Similarly, theologian and ethicist Andrew Linzey finds

the relative silence of English literature departments surprising:
For the most part … courses in literature have left animals to one side. This
is a rather puzzling omission. Puzzling because writers of all genres have
written extensively, perceptively, and almost always provocatively about
our relations with animals—and often to significant moral effect. None
have done so more forcefully than poets who have frequently anticipated
and championed a more peaceful and less exploitative relationship with
other creatures.64
A shift appears to be in the offing, however. Tzachi Zamir refers to the

gradual turn of Anglo-American moral philosophers toward literature as
they find “in its form, content, or experience important modes of thought
that are decisive for comprehensive moral reflection.” These philosophers
maintain “some sensitivities or aspects of moral reflection are significantly
deepened by engaging with literary works.” Zamir includes himself
among them, commenting on the experience of reading J. M. Coetzee’s
The Lives of Animals: “I do not think I would have written a book on
animal ethics without the push I had received from Coetzee’s work. …
something in [it] brought home to me the enormity of the animal issue
and why I should be concerned with it as a philosopher.”65 This deepen-
ing of moral sensitivities made possible by literature is not easily encapsu-
lated by definition or description (Zamir’s “something in [it]”) nor is it a
matter of simply identifying techniques in the writer’s toolbox. For this
reason, the approach largely employed below is to introduce a number of
writers, Coetzee among them, who urge (or at least attempt to urge––not
all succeed) readers to expand the circle of compassion beyond species
63
Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 487.
64
Andrew Linzey, “Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues,” in Other Nations: Animals in
Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), xvi.
This book is an anthology “designed to employ the power of fiction to illuminate our moral rela-
tionship with animals” (back cover). I discuss a number of stories found in this anthology.
65
Tzachi Zamir, “Literary Works and Animal Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed.
Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 932, 953. For his
more extensive discussion of morality and the nonhuman, see Zamir’s Ethics and the Beast: A
Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
lines. An immersion in these stories with relatively minimal commentary

seems a reasonable strategy for getting closer to that elusive “something.”
When selecting novels to illustrate animal welfare literature, or litera-
ture providing a basis to explore welfare themes, I chose examples repre-
senting some of the obvious forms of human-animal interaction: use of
animals for food (Chap. 3); use of animals for scientific research (Chap.
4); confinement and coexistence with nonhuman animals (Chap. 5); ani-
mals and religion (Chap. 6); and, overlapping with the section on food,
hunting (Chap. 7). The books discussed are not all ‘high’ literature nor
are they uniform in genre. I include children’s books alongside horror
alongside comedy, but most of them, in different ways, attempt to awaken
(or inadvertently awaken) compassion for the nonhuman or tell animal
stories that compel serious reflection on the morality of human actions
toward them. Most stories considered include at least one of the follow-
ing features.
First, they foreground individual animals. The use of story to win sup-
port for advocacy efforts often focuses on the plight of a particular repre-
sentative of the species in question. This is the case in various books
already mentioned, including Sewell’s horse Black Beauty, and Saunders’s
dog Beautiful Joe. The effectiveness of narratives centred on individuals is
evident in a form of storytelling often used by welfare organizations.
Shelters regularly solicit support or encourage adoption through stories
about the animals in their care (“she was abused before coming to us”),
sometimes even using the first-person (“Hello, my name is _____. I’m a
well-mannered lab-border collie mix looking for a loving home”).
Second, the stories considered go beyond use of animals as mere figures of
some human reality. When Gregor Samsa awakes from a troubled sleep to
discover himself “transformed into a monstrous vermin” at the opening
of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, he awakes not from a
nightmare but into one.66 But the story is not really about the other-than-
human creature Samsa becomes. Rather, it concerns a perceived loss of
dignity owing to the dehumanizing deprivations experienced in his
career. We see this, rather humorously, as his thoughts shift almost
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, ed. Jason Barker, trans.
66
Donna Freed (1915; New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 7.
26 M. J. Gilmour
immediately to this subject after becoming aware of his newfound state,

as though that subject were as troubling as his new, insect-like form:
“Oh God,” he thought, “what a grueling profession I picked! Traveling day

in, day out. It is much more aggravating work than the actual business
done at the home office, and then with the strain of constant travel as well:
the worry over train connections, the bad and irregular meals, the steady
stream of faces who never become anything closer than acquaintances. The
Devil take it all!”67
What is disturbing about this scene is the suggestion that the everyday,
monotonous responsibilities of modern life distort and destroy the indi-
vidual. Samsa dutifully provides for his family’s needs, doing what his
parents and sister, and his society expect of him. It is the drudgery of this,
the banality facing modern, urban people that transforms Samsa. The
possibility we might also wake up into such a nightmare is what makes
Kafka’s parable so distressing. But again, it is not really about the nonhu-
man in any real sense.
Instead, the animal books concerning us here are actually about ani-
mals, not humans disguised with feathers and fur and exoskeletons. In
addition, such writers who tend to be sensitive to welfare issues usually
resist diminishing the nonhuman through simile and metaphor. “Yeah,
we care about how we look,” says Elsie, “And we don’t appreciate it that
when you people think someone is fat you call them a cow. And pigs
aren’t very happy about the whole ‘pig’ or ‘swine’ thing, and chickens are
pissed too about the ‘chicken’ thing.”68 In the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle,
the titular character also bemoans the frequent use of animals in insults
directed at other people. Remarks like stubborn as a mule, stupid as an
ox, slimy as a snake and crafty as a fox, “really get my goat,” sings Rex
Harrison.69 Josephine Donovan argues such language is a form of fic-
tional violence against nonhumans:
67
Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 7–8.
68
Duchovny, Holy Cow, 5. On degrading animal imagery, see too Adams, Neither Man nor
Beast, xxxi.
69
The song is “Like Animals,” in Doctor Dolittle, directed by Richard Fleischer, music and lyrics by
Leslie Bricusse, Lionel Newman, and Alexander Courage (Twentieth Century Fox, 1967). My
…one of the most common devices that exploit animal pain for aesthetic
effect is the animal metaphor, or, more specifically, the animal ‘stand-in’ or
surrogate, where the animal acts as a substitute for a human and/or is
employed as an objectified vehicle through which to reveal or express
human feelings. Using animal death and agony to dramatize, symbolize, or
comment upon the emotional state of the human protagonists continues
to be a standard fictional device.70
She supports the claim with a long list of short stories by reputable writ-
ers in which “the moral reality of the animals’ own suffering is elided.”71
Third, and sometimes overlapping with the first criterium, the books
considered here depict in story form experiences facing actual animals as a
way to inform readers about real-world ethical concerns. Sometimes a
specific situation lies behind the story. One of the better-known examples
from children’s literature of recent years is Katherine Applegate’s Newbery
prize winning novel The One and Only Ivan, mentioned above. As she
explains in an author’s note, the inspiration for her fictional tale was a
true one. The real Ivan spent nearly thirty years in a Washington state,
circus-themed shopping mall.72 Thanks to the persistence of activists on
his behalf, Ivan’s circumstances improved dramatically when rehomed in
Zoo Atlanta. Applegate incorporates this example of public intervention
on behalf of a vulnerable animal as well. In the novel, concerned people
mobilize when they see pictures of the sharp-bladed “claw-stick” used to
train the baby elephant Ruby, and they call for the mall to be shut down.73
Inspectors begin to assess all the animals’ health and the conditions in
which they live,74 and eventually Ruby, Ivan, and the others move to the
more spacious environs of a proper zoo where they are able to live with
transcription. Though quite humorous, the lyrics are remarkably progressive, offering a sharp cri-
tique of human indifference to animals. For a rejoinder to the term “stupid chickens,” see Deb Olin
Unferth, Barn 8 (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2020), 203–204. The novel presents a picture of chickens
as complex beings, most directly in descriptions of the white leghorn hen Bwwaauk, who escapes
from an industrial egg operation (35, 170–72, 200–202, 248).
70
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 46. On this, see too 47, 48, 100–101.
71
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 47; cf. 46, 168.
72
Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, backmatter, unnumbered page.
73
Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 229–32, 235; cf. 151–52.
74
Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 234, 235.
28 M. J. Gilmour
others of their own kind. Julia and her father George, the protestors,
inspectors, and zoo personnel, all acting on the animals’ behalf and agi-
tating for better care, are central to the story. The elephant Stella fore-
shadows their efforts: “‘Humans can surprise you sometimes. An
unpredictable species, Homo sapiens.’”75 Though a highly imaginative
work, it yet remains grounded in identifiable situations (capture of exotic
wild animals, abandonment of dogs, harsh training methods used on per-
forming animals, zoos, etc.).
Fourth, many of the welfare-leaning books discussed employ religious or
otherworldly language and imagery. Authors introduce other-worldly
themes for a variety of reasons. For some, religion provides a source of
moral authority from which to condemn cruelty and promote kindness.
For other writers, the inclusion of ‘animal theologies’ or forms of ‘animal
spirituality’ illustrates the meaning-full existence of other sentient beings.
The species-specific origin narratives in Richard Adams’s Watership Down
and The Plague Dogs, for instance, afford a dignity to rabbits and dogs
respectively; they see themselves in these mythic tales. This is, of course,
analogous to the Hebrew Bible, which in the first creation story presents
humanity as made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and in the second
introduces Adam and Eve as its central characters. Adams’s stories do
something similar. Religious language thus provides a kind of ‘vocabu-
lary’ to elevate the perceived worth of animals. To be sure, religion is not
always friendly to animals and a number of authors identify it as part of
the problem, and ultimately at the root of a thoughtless, cruel, human
dominion of nonhuman life. In Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse, On
Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785” (pub-
lished 1786), which concerns a distressed animal suffering as the result of
an unwitting act, the poet invokes religion by his apologetic reference to
“Man’s dominion” over nature (cf. Genesis 1:28), which he admits has
“broken Nature’s social union, / An’ justifies that ill opinion, / Which
makes thee startle, / At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, / An’ fellow
mortal!” (ll.7–12).76
75
Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 104; cf. 173.
76
Robert Burns, “To a Mouse,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors,
9th ed. vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2013), 85–86. Unwitting harm
owing to human action is a topic addressed by other writers too. For instance, we read of “careless”
The analyses of selected works below lean toward what Josephine

Donovan refers to as “the emotional meaning” of creative writings. She
and others challenge the dominant Kantian approach to ethics with its
emphasis on decision-making “based on abstract universalizable princi-
ples disconnected from particular contexts and purged of emotional and
personal evaluation.”77 Whereas the formalist aesthetics in the Kantian
tradition privilege the quantifiable (“the framed, geometric properties of
art”), Donovan offers an alternative emphasis on “the nonphysical aspects
of the universe,” which is to say the spiritual, emotional, and psychic.78
Her work on aesthetics grows out of a feminist ethics of care, a theoretical
lens proving to be enormously consequential in contemporary writing
about animal compassion.
The theoretical lens provided by feminist care approaches to ethics and
aesthetics suits the present book because many early voices in the humane
movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spoke from
the margins. Marginalized people often have valid alternative perspec-
tives to the dominant views because they see painful realities firsthand in
ways others do not. Usually, these perspectives are “elided by controlling
ideologies, which are motivated to distort the truth to perpetuate the
status quo.” Women, therefore, “may be seen … as providing an alterna-
tive perspective––that codified in the ‘caring ethic,’ which is rooted … in
women’s historical social and economic practices.”79 To illustrate this,
consider Anna Sewell’s views about horses in Victorian society. As a
woman, as one not in the upper classes, and as an invalid, she offers a way
of looking at animals very much at odds with the social elites and business-
minded characters that populate Black Beauty. They see horses largely in
economic terms, and in some cases with attention to their appearance
alone. Old, injured, and ‘used up’ horses are unable to make money as
acts causing the death of animals in Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, among them, the plowing of fields
killing mice, in an echo of Burns, as well as the damming of rivers, which kills fish ([New York:
Balzer and Bray, 2016], 64–65).
77
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 1–2.
78
Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, viii.
79
Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of
Animals,” in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol
J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 189.
30 M. J. Gilmour
machines of transport, and/or do not look elegant enough to pull the

carriages of the fashion-conscious well-to-do. Sewell sees animals differ-
ently, in part because she too is powerless in some senses, and she too
understands physical pain, which is often discussed in the book. And of
course, as a voiceless (politically speaking), disabled woman, she con-
fronts the status quo by giving a voice to others who are voiceless. Black
Beauty is an animal’s autobiography. We see the world as experienced by
its equine narrator and his friends.
Empathy for suffering animals involves acknowledgement of common
experience, a recognition of a shared creatureliness. This means that some
literature simultaneously articulates concern for oppressed people.
Historian Janet M. Davis observes a connection between American aboli-
tion efforts in the nineteenth century and a form of storytelling urging
animal welfare reform. An emphasis on the bodily suffering of slaves
resulted in “a new genre, the cruelty narrative,” which “pulled their read-
ers into a sympathetic relationship with suffering slaves, based on the
recognition of humanity’s universal capacity to feel pain.”80 Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852)
proved to be crucial for the emergence of animal cruelty narratives, even
though its focus was human slavery. Davis credits this novel with rein-
forcing “the synergetic relationship between the treatment of animals,
human bondage, and moral character,” adding that animal cruelty
“helped define the violent, amoral universe of the slaveholder.” Stowe’s
“juxtaposition of kindness, bondage, and suffering helped shape a symbi-
otic movement language and an expansive field of reform.”81 Stowe her-
self “perceived many common threads between the institutionalized
oppression of a specific group of humans and the institutionalized oppres-
sion of nearly all nonhumans.”82 It is interesting to find Richard Adams,
one of the most widely read animal writers of the late twentieth century,
80
Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 40. Davis attributes the term cruelty narrative to Elizabeth E. Clark,
“‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in
Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82.2 (1995): 476–77. On connections between
early animal rights efforts and abolition, see too Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The
History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, Ohio: Swallow/Ohio
University Press, 2006), 24–28.
81
Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 42.
82
Beers, Prevention of Cruelty, 25.
Another random document with
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beginning at Constantinople and going on to the Mediterranean. He
visits, one after the other, Greece, Malta, Sicily, Spain, the South of
France; he even goes so far as Chambéry and Lyons. An
opportunity turns up, and off he sets for Paris.
“The innovations made by Joseph II., such as the
introduction of the Register and military conscription, caused
him to be employed as an engineer, and as a member of the
administrative body formed to carry out these different
schemes. His independent character instantly displayed itself
in a sphere where it was no longer repressed by that duty of
blind obedience which is the very being of the Army. He could
now venture to have an opinion and to express it, he could
criticise the root-idea on the form of an enterprise by
displaying its difficulties or foretelling its non-success
(forecasts, moreover, which time has proved to be sound); he
could speak of the violation of national justice, of a legitimate
resistance to arbitrary power. His experiences under fire, his
activity, and his oratorical talent gave him a position among
the malcontents which he had not sought in any way. In
consequence, he ventured on something more than mere
speaking and writing. His travels, his qualities, his
independent and decided character have won for him
friendships and acquaintanceships which have given him the
advantage of never finding himself out of place in any
important centre of affairs. To this he owes that knowledge of
the hereditary prejudices and the sudden caprices of
Cabinets, which when joined to an equal knowledge of the
character of their chiefs, ministers, constitutes diplomacy. To
assiduous study he attributes that understanding of the true
interests of Governments, and of their respective powers,
which constitutes international politics.”
Such was the personage to whom Lady Atkyns and Peltier
entrusted their enterprise. If they looked after him carefully, granted
him only a limited discretion, and took the fullest advantage of his
intelligence and his talents, they would probably make something of
the Hungarian nobleman. This was not the Baron’s first visit to Paris;
he knew the capital well. He had come there at the beginning of the
Revolution, in 1789, and, if we are to believe his own account, “he
saw the results of all these horrors, but was merely laughed at. If all
mankind could have been armed against the Revolution, he would
have armed them!” Moreover, he had kept up many connections in
Paris. By his own account, the Austrian Minister, Thugut, whom he
had formerly met at Naples, had taken him into his confidence. In
short, his friends in London could not have made a better choice, as
he wrote from Amiens to Peltier on the receipt of his proposal.
“I start for Paris at full speed at five o’clock to-morrow
morning. I need not tell you that from this moment I shall
devote myself to the business of which you have spoken to
me, nor need I add that this devotion is entirely disinterested.
If I had not already proved those two things to you, I should
not be the man you require. But, just because I feel that I
have the head and the heart necessary for your enterprise, I
tell you frankly that it can only be carried out at great
expense. The business of getting information—which is only a
preparatory measure—is made difficult, if not impossible,
unless a considerable sum of money can be spent.... I believe
myself authorized to speak to you in this way, because I have
the advantage—rare enough amongst men—of being above
suspicion with regard to my own interests.”[39]
On Wednesday, December 19, d’Auerweck entered Paris, and put
up at a hotel in the Rue Coq-Héron, where he gave his name as
Scheltheim. He instantly set to work to get the letters he had brought
with him delivered at their addresses, and to make certain of the co-
operation which was essential to him. But there was a
disappointment in store; Goguelat, upon whom so much depended,
was away from Paris, and, as it happened, in London. It was
necessary to act without him, and this was no easy matter. The
excitement caused by the trial of the King enforced upon the plotters
a redoubled caution. D’Auerweck got uneasy when he found no
letters coming from Peltier in answer to his own. He went more
frequently to Versailles, and to Saint-Germain, and kept on begging
for funds. On December 25, the day before M. de Sèze was to
present the King’s defence to the Convention, d’Auerweck wrote to
Peltier—
“The persons (you know whom I mean) do not care to
arrive here before Thursday, which is very natural, for there is
all sorts of talk as to what may happen to-morrow.... You
promised me to write by each post; but there can be no doubt
that you forgot me on Tuesday, the 18th, for otherwise I must
have had your letters by this time. One thing I cannot tell you
too often: it is that I consider it essential to take to you in
person any documents that I may be able to procure.”[40]
The documents in question were those which Peltier had alluded
to, some days before, in a letter to Lady Atkyns: “I heard to-day that
there was some one in Paris who had all the plans that you want in
the greatest detail;”[41] and at the end of the month he returned to
the subject—
“I am expecting, too, a most exact plan of the Temple
Prison, taken in November; and not only of the Temple, but
also of the caves that lie under the tower—caves that are not
generally known of, and which were used from time
immemorial for the burial of the ancient Templars. I know a
place where the wall is only eighteen inches thick, and
debouches on the next street.”
It becomes evident that Peltier and Lady Atkyns, almost
abandoning any hope of saving the King, whose situation appeared
to them to be desperate, now brought all their efforts to bear upon
the other prisoners of the Temple.
“If His Majesty persists in his reluctance to be rescued from
prison, at least we may still save his poor son from the
assassins’ knives. A well-informed man told me, the day
before yesterday, when we were talking of this deplorable
business, that people were to be found in Paris ready, for a
little money, to carry off the Dauphin. They would bring him
out of the Temple in a basket, or else disguised in some
way.... I believe that to save the son is to save the father also.
For, after all, this poor child cannot be made the pretext for
any sort of trial, and as the Crown belongs to him by law on
his father’s death, I believe that they would keep the latter
alive, if it were only to checkmate those who would rally round
the Dauphin. But, in the interval, things may have time to
alter, and circumstances may at last bring about a happy
change in this disastrous state of things.”
The month of December went by in this painful state of suspense.
What anxiety must have fretted the heart of the poor lady, as she
daily followed in the Gazette the course of the Royal Trial! On New
Year’s Day she had some further words of encouragement from her
friend in London. All was not lost; Louis XVI. could still reckon, even
in the heart of Paris, upon many brave fellows who would not desert
him; and besides, what about the fatal consequences that would
follow on the crime of regicide? The Members of Convention would
never dare—never....
Fifteen days later comes another missive; and this time but little
hope is left. The “Little Baron”—this was what they called
d’Auerweck—was not being idle. Peltier had made an opportunity for
him of seeing De Sèze, the King’s counsel.
“This latter ought to know for certain whether the King does
or does not intend to await his sentence or to expose himself
to the hazards of another flight; but there seems to be very
little chance of his consenting to it. Whatever happens”
(added Peltier), “your desires and your efforts, madam, will
not be wasted, either for yourself or for history. I possess, in
your correspondence, a monument of courage and devotion
which will endure longer than London Bridge.... A trusty
messenger who starts to-morrow for Paris affords me a
means of opening my mind to De Sèze for the third time.”
But it was too late. On January 15 the nominal appeal upon the
thirty-three questions presented to the Members of Convention had
been commenced; two days later the capital sentence was voted by
a majority of fifty-three.
On January 21, at the hour when the guillotine had just done its
work, the following laconic note reached Ketteringham to say that all
was over:—
“My honoured friend, all we can do now is to weep. The
crime is consummated. Judgment of death was pronounced
on Thursday evening. D’Orleans voted for it, and he is to be
made Protector. We have nothing now to look forward to but
revenge; and our revenge shall be terrible.”
Think of the look that must have fallen upon that date, “January
21!” The postmark of the letter still shows it quite clearly, on the
yellowed sheet.
Could they possibly have succeeded if the King had listened
favourably to their proposal? It is difficult to say. But it is certainly a
fact, that during the last six months of 1792 there had been on the
water, near Dieppe, a cruising vessel which kept up a constant
communication with the English coast. The truth was that, finding the
Rouen route too frequented, Peltier had judged the Dieppe one to be
infinitely preferable. It was that way that the fish merchants came to
Paris. If they had succeeded in getting the King outside the Temple
gates it is probable that his escape would have been consummated.
But the prison was heavily guarded at that time, and during the trial
these precautions were redoubled.
At any rate, there is no doubt that Louis knew of the attempts to
save him from death. Some time after the event of January 21, Clery,
speaking of the King to the Municipal, Goret, remarked—
“Alas! my dear good master could have been saved if he
had chosen. The windows in that place are only fifteen or
sixteen feet above the ground. Everything had been arranged
for a rescue, while he was still there, but he refused, because
they could not save his family with him.”
There can be no doubt that these words refer to the attempt of
Lady Atkyns and Peltier.[42] The assent of the King had alone been
wanting to its execution.
It is well known what a terrible and overwhelming effect was
produced in the European Courts by the news of the King’s
execution. In London it was received with consternation. Not merely
the émigrés (who had added to their numbers there since the
beginning of the Revolution) were thunderstruck by the blow, but the
Court of King George was stupefied at the audacity of the National
Assembly. The Court went instantly into mourning, and the King
ordered the French Ambassador, Chauvelin, to leave London on the
spot. Some days later war was officially declared against France.[43]
The King’s death caused the beginning of that struggle which was
to last so many years and be so implacably, ferociously waged on
both sides.
Any one but Lady Atkyns would have lost heart, but that heroic
woman did not allow herself to be cast down for an instant. Amid the
general mourning, she still cherished her hopes; moreover, those
who had been helping her had not abandoned her. The “Little Baron”
was still in Paris, awaiting orders, but the gravity of the situation had
obliged him to leave the Hotel Coq-Héron, where his life was no
longer in safety. Well, they had failed with the King; now they must
tempt fortune, and save the Queen and her children. The lady at
Ketteringham was quite sure of that.
“Nothing is yet decided about the Queen’s fate” (Peltier had
written to her at the end of January), “but it has been
proposed at the Commune of Paris to transfer her either to
the prison of La Force or of La Conciergerie.”
Then Lady Atkyns had an idea. Why should she not go in person
to Paris and try her chance? Probably the surveillance which had
been so rigorously kept over the King would be far less severe for
the Queen. And one might profit by the relative tranquillity, and
manage to get into the Temple, and then—who could tell what one
might not devise in the way of carrying the Queen off, or of
substituting some one else for her? She never thought of all the
dangers around her, and of the enormously increased difficulties in
the path for a foreign lady who knew only a little French. Peltier, to
whom she confided her plan, tried to dissuade her.
“You will hardly have arrived before innumerable
embarrassments will crop up; if you leave your hotel three
times in the day, or if you see the same person thrice, you will
become a suspect.”
But his friend’s persistence ended by half convincing him, and he
admitted that the moment was relatively favourable, and that it was
well to take advantage of it, if she wished to attempt anything.
Unluckily, things were moving terribly fast in Paris. There came the
days of May 31 and June 2, the efforts of the sections against the
Commune, civil war let loose. In the midst of this storm, Lady Atkyns
feared that the whole affair might come to nought; her arrangements,
moreover, were not completed. Money, which can do so much,
decide so much, and which had already proved so powerful—money,
perhaps, was not sufficiently forthcoming. Suddenly there is a
rumour that a conspiracy to favour the Queen’s escape has been
discovered. Two members of the Commune, Lepitre and Toulan, who
had been won over to the cause by a Royalist, the Chevalier de
Jarjays, had almost succeeded in carrying out their scheme, when
the irresolution of one of them had ruined everything; nevertheless,
they were denounced.[44] Public attention, which had been averted
for a moment, now was fixed again upon the Temple Prison.
And the days go by, and Lady Atkyns sees no chance of starting
on her enterprise.
We come here to an episode in her life which seems to be
enveloped in mystery. One fact is proved, namely, that Lady Atkyns
succeeded in reaching Marie Antoinette, disguised, and at the price
of a large sum of money. But when did this take place? Was the
Queen still at the Temple, or was it after she had been taken to the
Conciergerie? The most reliable witnesses we have—and they are
two of Lady Atkyns’ confidants—seem to contradict one another.[45]
A careful weighing of testimony and an attentive study of the letters
which Lady Atkyns received at this time lead us to conclude, with
much probability, that the attempt was made after the Queen had
been transferred to the Conciergerie; that is to say, after August 2,
1793.[46]
Some days before this Peltier had again brought her to give up her
resolve, assuring her that she was vainly exposing herself to risk—
“If you wish to be useful to that family, you can only be so
by directing operations from here (instead of going there to
get guillotined), and by making those sacrifices which you
have already resolved to make.”
It was of no use. The brave lady listened only to her heart’s
promptings, and set out for Paris. If we are to believe her friend, the
Countess MacNamara[47]—and her testimony is valuable—she
succeeded in winning over a municipal official, who consented to
open the doors of the Conciergerie for her, on the condition that no
word should be exchanged between her and the Royal prisoner.
Moreover, the foreign lady must wear the uniform of a National
Guard. It was Drury Lane over again! She promised everything, and
was to content herself with offering a bouquet to the Queen; but
under the stress of the intense emotion she experienced on meeting
once more the eyes of the lady whom she had not seen since the
days at Versailles, she let fall a note which she held, and which was
to have been put into the Queen’s hand with the bouquet. The
Municipal officer was about to take possession of it, but, more
prompt than he, Lady Atkyns rushed forward, picked it up, and
swallowed it. She was turned out brutally. Such was the result of the
interview. But the English lady did not stop there. By more and more
promises and proceedings, by literally strewing her path with gold,
she bought over fresh allies, and this time she obtained the privilege
of spending an hour alone with the Queen—at what a price may be
imagined! It is said that she had to pay a thousand louis for that
single hour. Her plan was this: to change clothes with the Queen,
who would then leave the Conciergerie instead of her. But she met
with an obstinate refusal. Marie-Antoinette would not, under any
pretext, sacrifice the life of another, and to abandon her imprisoned
children was equally impossible to her. But what emotion she must
have felt at the sight of such a love, so simple, so whole-hearted,
and so pure! She could but thank her friend with tearful eyes and
commend her son, the Dauphin, to that friends tender solicitude. She
also gave her some letters for her friends in England.[48]
On leaving the Conciergerie, one thought filled the mind of Lady
Atkyns: she would do for the son what she had not been able to do
for the mother—she would drag the little Dauphin out of the Temple
Prison.
Did she return to England immediately afterwards? Probably. For

one thing, she had not lost all hope, and, like the rest of her friends,
she did not as yet fear instant danger for the Queen’s life. This is
proved by a note from Peltier, written in the course of the month of
September, which reveals the existence of a fresh plan.
“They must set out on Thursday morning at latest; if they
delayed any longer, the approach of the Austrian troops, and
the movements which have taken place at Paris, might, we
fear, determine the members of the Convention to fly and take
with them the two hostages whom we want to save. One
day’s, two days’ delay may make all the difference. If they are
to start on Thursday morning, and go to Brighton and charter
a neutral vessel, they have only Monday, Tuesday, and
Wednesday to spend, day and night, in getting everything
ready. First of all, we must get some louis d’or, and sew them
in their belts. Then we must get some paper-money, if it’s only
for the journey along the coast to Paris, so that they may not
be suspected.... We must have time to prepare passports that
will do for the three persons who are to go. These passports
must be made to look like the letters that Mr. Dundas is
sending for the Jacobins who are being deported from
France. They are thus less likely to be suspected.... The
Temple affair is all arranged; but, as to the Conciergerie one,
nothing is known as yet; the last letters from the Paris agents
are dated July 26th. We are sure that the persons interested
have taken measures, but we do not know what they are. It
would not be a bad plan to have some money in reserve for
this purpose. It would be dreadful to think we had missed our
chance for the sake of two or three hundred louis, which
would make 1500 guineas. Therefore each man ought to
carry on his person about 450 louis, or 200 double-louis,
because about 50 louis would be spent in paper-money.
“There will also be a line of communication between France
and England, by means of M——, who resides near Dieppe,
on the coast, and who up to now has received and passed on
constant communications. We shall have to know of all the
movements either of the armies, or of the fleets, so as to
direct our operations accordingly.... Circumstances have
made it very dangerous to employ foreigners, since the
Decree of August 5 has banished them from France. But what
difference is there between doing a thing one’s self and
causing it to be done? The glory which one shares with others
is glory none the less so long as the great purpose is
attained.... How can I be sure if this plan does succeed, it will
not be displeasing to the lady who would have liked to carry
off her friends with her own hands, and then to lead them in
triumph, etc., etc.?... But as we are concerned, not with an
opera, but an operation, the best proof of affection will be to
sacrifice that glory and that joy. And, besides, that lady will not
then be running the risks which formerly made existence
hateful to me. If my friends perish in this affair, I shall at least
not have to listen to a son’s and a mother’s reproaches for the
loss of their Charlotte....”[49]
It is clear from these lines that the communications established
with the Temple and outside it were still kept in working order against
a favourable opportunity. The agents in question were probably
those who have been already mentioned, two of whom were the
bodyguards of the Queen. But Lady Atkyns’ money had also had its
effect, even among those “Incorruptibles” which the Revolution
created in such numbers; and the events which we shall now read of
can only be explained by the co-operation, not only of one or two
isolated persons, but of a quantity of willing helpers, cleverly won
over, and belonging to a circle in which it could scarcely have been
hoped that they were to be found.
In the midst of all this, the Baron d’Auerweck (whom we last saw in
Paris), judging, doubtless, that his presence there was unavailing,
went back to London. The situation in France was more than critical.
The formation of a fresh Committee of Public Safety, the activity of
the Revolutionary Tribunals, in a word, the Terror in full blast,
rendered any stay in Paris impossible for already suspected
foreigners, and our Baron made haste to bring to his friends all the
latest information.
Peltier, who was impatiently awaiting him, on communicating his
arrival to Lady Atkyns, wrote thus:—
“My heart is too full of it for me to speak to you of anything
but the arrival of my friend, the Baron d’Auerweck. He left
France two days ago, and is now here, after having run every
imaginable risk, and lost everything that could be lost.... We
have the Paris news from him up to the 23rd; the Queen was
still safe then. The Baron does not think she will be sacrificed.
Danton and the Cordeliers are for her, Robespierre and the
Jacobins against. Her fate will depend upon which of the two
parties triumphs. The Queen is being closely guarded—the
King, hardly at all. The Queen maintains a supernatural
strength and dignity.”[50]
It was in London itself, at the Royal Hotel, that Lady Atkyns
received these lines. She had hastened there so as to be better able
to make inquiries.
But the Decree issued by the Convention, on October 3, ordering
the indictment of the “Widow Capet,” give a curious contradiction to
the assurances given by d’Auerweck. After all, though, who could
dare to forecast the future, and the intentions of those who were now
in power? The ultra-jacobin politicians knew less than any one else
whither Destiny was to lead them. Had there not been some talk, a
few weeks earlier, of getting the Queen to enter into the plan of a
negotiation with Austria? So it was not surprising that illusions with
regard to her reigned in Paris as well as among the émigrés in
London.
Eleven days later Marie-Antoinette underwent a preliminary
examination at the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The suit was
heard quickly, and there were no delays. Of the seven witnesses
called, the last, Hébert, dared to bring the most infamous
accusations against her, to which the accused replied only by a
disdainful silence. Then came the official speeches of Chaveau-
Lagarde and of Tronson-Ducoudray—a mere matter of form, for the
“Austrian woman” was irrevocably doomed.
On the third day, October 16, at 4.30 a.m., in the smoky hall of the
Tribunal, by the vague light of dawn, the jury gave their verdict,
“Guilty”; and sentence of death was immediately pronounced. Just
on eleven o’clock the cart entered the courtyard of the Conciergerie
Prison, the Queen ascended, and, after the oft-described journey,
reached the Place de la Revolution. At a quarter past twelve the
knife fell upon her neck.
All was over this time—all the wondrous hopes, the last, long-
cherished illusions of Lady Atkyns. The poor lady heard of the
terrible ending from Peltier. Her friend’s letter was one cry of rage
and despair, more piercing even than that of January 21.
“It has killed me. I can see your anguish from here, and it
doubles my own. My anger consumes me. I have not even
the relief of tears; I cannot shed one. I abjure for ever the
name of Frenchman. I wish I could forget their language. I am
in despair; I know not what I do, or say, or write. O God! What
barbarity, what horror, what evils are with us, and what
miseries are still to come! I dare not go to you. Adieu, brave,
unhappy lady!”[51]
Many tears must have fallen on that treasured sheet. And still, to
this day, traced by Lady Atkyns’ hand, one can read on it these
words: “Written after the murder of the Queen of France.”
Were all her efforts, then, irremediably wasted? She refused to
believe it. And at that moment two fresh actors appeared on the
scene, whose help she could utilize. From the friendship of one, the
Chevalier de Frotté (who came to London just then), she could
confidently hope for devoted aid. The other, a stranger to her until
then, and only recently landed from the Continent, was destined to
become one of the principal actors in the game that was now to be
played.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Revolution Française, vol. ii. p.
382.
[30] Forneron, Histoire Générale des Émigrés, Paris, 1884, vol.
ii. p. 50.
[31] Abbé de Lubersac, Journal historique et réligieux, de
l’émigration et déportation du clergé de France en Angleterre,
dedicated to His Majesty the King of England, London, 1802, 8vo,
p. 12. (The author styles himself: Vicar-General of Narbonne,
Abbé of Noirlac and Royal Prior of St.-Martin de Brivé, French
émigré.)
[32] Count d’Haussonville, Souvenirs et Mélanges, Paris, 1878,
8vo.
[33] Gauthier de Brecy, Mémoires véridiques et ingenus de la
vie privée, morale et politique d’un homme de bien, written by
himself in the eighty-first year of his age, Paris, 1834, 8vo, p. 286.
[34] Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution Française, vol. iii. pp. 288,
289.
[35] On October 21, 1765, at Gonnord, Maine-et-Loire, Canton
of Touarcé, arrondissement of Angers.
[36] Letter from Peltier to Lady Atkyns, dated from London,
November 15, 1792.—Unpublished Papers of Lady Atkyns.
[37] “In case of our not being able to find M. Goguelat, I have
my eye upon a very useful man whom I have known for many
years, and who was, indeed, a collaborator in some of my political
works—he is the Baron d’Auerweck, a Transylvanian nobleman, a
Royalist like ourselves, of firm character, and very clever.”—Letter
from Peltier, Dec. 3, 1792.
[38] In two autobiographical memoirs, one written at Hamburg,
June, 1796, and annexed to a despatch from the French Minister
there, Reinhard (Archives of the Foreign Office, Hamburg, v. 109,
folio 367). The other was written at Paris, July 25, 1807 (National
Archives, F. 6445). Both naturally aim at presenting the author in
the most favourable light.
[39] Letter from Baron d’Auerweck, December 17, 1792. It is
addressed to Peltier under the name of Jonathan Williams.—
Unpublished Papers of Lady Atkyns.
[40] Letter from d’Auerweck to Peltier, Paris, Hotel Coq-Héron,
No. 16 December 25, 1792.—Unpublished Papers of Lady
Atkyns.
[41] Letter from Peltier to Lady Atkyns, London, December 7,
1792.—Ibid.
[42] Narrative of the Municipal, Charles Goret, in G. Lenôtre’s
book, La Captivité et la Mort de Marie-Antoinette, Paris, 1902,
8vo, p. 147.
[43] February 1, 1793.
[44] On this plot, see Paul Gaulot, Un Complot sous la Terreur,
Paris, 1902, duodecimo.
[45] These are the Chevalier de Frotté and the Countess
MacNamara.
[46] In the narrative of the Chevalier de Frotté, who mentions
the Temple Prison (published by L. de la Sicotière, Louis de Frotté
et les Insurrections Normandes, vol. i. p. 429), we consider that a
somewhat natural confusion has arisen. It is, in fact, very difficult
to assign any date earlier than August 6 for an attempt at the
Temple; for on that date there is a letter from Peltier addressed to
Lady Atkyns at Ketteringham, and there can be no doubt that if
the lady had already left England, Peltier would have been aware
of it. On the other hand, the letter published by V. Delaporte (p.
256), and given as written at the end of July, 1793, must be
subsequent to August 2. These phrases: “They will not promise
for more than the King and the two female prisoners of the
Temple; they will do what is possible for the Queen; but
everything is changed, and they cannot answer for anything, and,
as to the Queen, they can say nothing as yet, for they have tried
the Temple Prison only”—these phrases plainly show that the
Queen was no longer at the Temple then. Finally, since in his
letter at the beginning of August Peltier once more tried to
dissuade Lady Atkyns from coming to Paris, it seems rational to
conclude that the lady had not yet carried out her plan.
[47] The testimony of the Countess MacNamara was obtained
by Le Normant des Varannes, Histoire de Louis XVII., Orleans,
1890, 8vo, pp. 10-14, and he had it from the Viscount d’Orcet,
who had known the Countess. Although we cannot associate
ourselves with the writer’s conclusions, we must acknowledge
that whenever we have been able to examine comparatively the
statements of Viscount d’Orcet relating to Lady Atkyns we have
always found them verified by our documents.
[48] It has been sought to establish a connection between this
story and the conspiracy of the Municipal, Michouis (the “Affair of
the Carnation”), aided by the Chevalier de Pougevide, which
failed by the fault of one of the two gendarmes who guarded the
Queen. There may be some connection between the principal
actors in these simultaneous attempts, but we admit that we have
been unable to get any proof of it. It was necessary to take so
many precautions, to avoid as far as possible any written
allusions, and to veil so impenetrably the machinery of the plots,
that it is not surprising that the documents, curt and dry as they
are, reveal to us so few details.
[49] Note in Peltier’s handwriting.—Unpublished Papers of Lady
Atkyns.
[50] Undated letter from Peltier to Lady Atkyns.—Unpublished
Papers of Lady Atkyns.
[51] Unpublished Papers of Lady Atkyns.
CHAPTER III
THE ODYSSEY OF A BRETON MAGISTRATE
On December 8, 1740, in the Rue de Montfort, at Rennes, there

were great rejoicings in one of the finest houses of that provincial
capital. Monsieur Yves-Gilles Cormier, one of the rich citizens, had
become the father of an heir the night before; and this heir was to be
named Yves-Jean-François-Marie. The delighted father was getting
ready to go to the Church of Saint-Sauveur (about two steps from his
abode), there to present his son for the Sacrament of Holy Baptism.
He had invited to this solemnity his relative, Master (Messire)
Jean-François Cormier, Prior and Rector of Bazouges-du-Desert,[52]
and his neighbour, the Director of the Treasury in the States of
Brittany, M. de Saint-Cristan. Madame Françoise Lecomte, wife of
the Sieur Imbault, Chief Registrar of the Chamber of La Tournelle, in
the Parliament of Brittany, and Dame Marie-Anne Lardoul were also
among the guests, who enhanced by their presence the splendour of
the ceremony.[53] When the bells rang out the cortège was entering
the church porch; shortly afterwards it reissued thence, and went
towards the house attached to the Treasury of Brittany, where Mme.
Cormier (formerly au Egasse du Boulay) was impatiently awaiting
their return.
The Cormiers were a family highly respected at Rennes. By his
own labours, Yves Cormier had made a fine fortune, which placed
him and his above any kind of need. Four years later a second child,
a daughter this time, was born. She was given the names of
Françoise-Michelle-Marie.
Yves-François grew up, a worker like his father, a sage follower of
parental advice, and both intelligent end gifted. After leaving school
he entered the Law Schools at Rennes, and before he was twenty
he had got his degree and been entered (on August 18, 1760) as a
barrister. Less than a year later the position of Crown Counsel at
Rennes falling vacant, the young barrister applied for it, his youth
notwithstanding, and obtained it (by Lettres de provision) on August
10, 1761.
This was a rapid advance in his career, and his parents might
justly be proud of it; but fortune meant to lavish very special favours
on the young magistrate, for on October 27 in the following year,
another position falling vacant in the same department—that of
Crown Prosecutor—Yves Cormier, exchanging the sitting magistracy
for the standing, obtained the place. Crown Prosecutor at twenty-
two! This was a good beginning.
For fifteen years he practised at Rennes. That town was going
through troublous times. The arrival of the Duc d’Aiguillon as
Governor, and his conduct in that position, created an uproar in the
ancient city, jealous, as it had always been, of its liberties. The states
proclaimed themselves injured in their rights. Led by La Chalotais,
they obstinately fought against the claims of the King’s
representative, the Duke d’Aiguillon. And there ensued an
interminable paper-war—pamphlets, libels, insults—which did not
cease even with the imprisonment of La Chalotais and his followers.
Ancient quarrels against the Jesuits were mixed up with these
complaints of the encroachments of Royal; and the angry Chalotistes
ended by accusing them of being the cause of all their misfortunes.
It was naturally impossible for the Crown Prosecutor to escape
being mixed up in a business which caused such rivers of ink to flow,
and created such an endless succession of lawsuits. A police report
accused him “of having ‘done a job’ in the La Chalotais affair.” But he
had only played a very passive part in it. His name only figures
once[54] in the voluminous dossiers so meticulously rummaged
through of late years; and that is in a defamatory pamphlet (which,
moreover, was torn and burnt by parliamentary decree), denouncing
him as a participator in those Jesuit Assemblies, upon which the full
wrath of the Breton parliamentarians descended.[55] The utmost one
can say is that Cormier perhaps inclined towards the Duc
d’Aiguillon’s party, which, moreover, his position as Crown
Prosecutor more or less obliged him to do.
Was it at that time that he began to pay repeated visits to Paris?
Very likely. At all events, from 1776 Yves Cormier practised only
intermittently. His father was dead. He lived with his mother on the
second floor of the Rue de Montfort house. Tired of bachelor life, the
young magistrate, who was then entering his thirty-sixth year,
resolved to marry. He had met in Paris a young lady from Nantes,
who belonged to a family of rich landowners in Saint-Domingo. Her
name was Suzanne-Rosalie de Butler; she was a little younger than
he, and had rooms in the La Tour du Pin Hotel, Rue Vieille-du-
Temple.
On July 10, 1776, in presence of notaries of the Du Châtelet
district, M. Cormier and Mademoiselle de Butler signed their
marriage contract.[56] By a rather unusual clause, the future husband
and wife, “departing in this respect from the custom of Paris,”
declared that they didn’t intend to sign the usual communauté de
biens, but that each would retain as his and her own property
whatever they brought to the marriage.
The husband’s property consisted of his appointment as Crown
Prosecutor at Rennes, and, further, of different lands and estates
which his father had bequeathed to him, at and near Rennes, and,
finally, in “his furniture, linen, wearing-apparel, etc., which were
stored in his place of abode.” The magistrate’s wardrobe was
remarkably well stocked, to judge by the enumeration we give below.
[57] It must have been a difficult matter to choose between the
“winter, spring, autumn, and summer garments;” the breeches of
“velvet patterned with large flowers,” or with “little bouquets”; the
coats of purple cloth, grey cloth, embroidered gourgouran, black-
and-olive taffetas, or green musulmane! And then there were jewels,
and there were carriages for one person called désobligeantes, to
say nothing of hats, frills, and lace cuffs.
Nor did Mlle. de Butler fall in any way below this standard. Her
father, Count Jean-Baptiste Butler, deceased, had bequeathed her,
in joint tenancy with her brother, Patrice, a rich state in Saint-
Domingo, one of the most flourishing colonies at that time. This state
was the farm and dwelling-house of Bois-de-Lance in the parish of
Sainte-Anne de Limonade, “with the negroes, negresses, negro-boys
and negro-girls; pieces of furniture; utensils, riggings, horses, beasts,
and all other effects of any kind whatever, being on the said estate.”
This document recalls the state of slavery in which the Colony then
was. By a second marriage Comte de Butler had had a son, Jean-
Pantaléon, who was thus the half-brother of the future Mme.
Cormier, and who had also some liens on the property in question.
[58] Suzanne de Butler further brought her husband some estates in
France, arising from her father’s succession; and a very complete
array of household furniture, which was enriched by articles in
“mahogany, tulip-wood, and the wood peculiar to the island,” etc.
The marriage was celebrated some days later. Once settled at
Paris, it became difficult for the Crown Prosecutor to keep his
appointment at Rennes. Nevertheless, he did not resign it until
January 23, 1779. Two years earlier their first child had been born, a
boy, who was baptized at the Madeleine in Paris, and named Achille-
Marie. The parents were probably at that time living in the enormous
house which Mme. Cormier bought in the following year, No. 15 in
the Rue Basse-du-Rempart. It was a handsome house with a
courtyard and several entrances.
On March 10, 1779, arrived another son, who was called Patrice,
after his maternal uncle. His godmother was a sister of Mme.
Cormier, married to a former naval officer.
The management of his own estates, and, more particularly, those
of his wife, occupied the greater part of Cormier’s time in the years
preceding the Revolution. Of middle height, inclining to stoutness,
with greyish hair and an energetic type of face, the sometime Breton
magistrate was quite a personality, for he spoke remarkably well,
and, besides being most intelligent, had a real gift of persuasion. The
times that were now at hand seemed likely to provide him with a
prominent position on the revolutionary scene.
We know that, in view of the elections to the States-General, a
Royal Ordinance of April 13, 1789, had decreed the provisional
division of Paris into sixty districts.[59] A year later this mode of
division, being no longer useful, was replaced by a division into forty-
eight sections—those sections which, from August 10 onwards, were
to exercise so potent a political influence. Cormier was active from
the very first. The section of the Place Vendôme had scarcely been
formed before he occupied a prominent position therein. We see him
first as Commissary of the Section, then as President of its Civil
Committee. The General Assembly held its meetings in the old
Church of the Capuchins in the Place Vendôme; and Cormier, whose
home was close by, took part in the deliberations. He would have
played a more active part if other business had not taken up most of
his time.
Amongst the numerous monarchical clubs which then sprang up in
Paris, one had just been founded whose members, for the most part
rich planters from Saint-Domingo, used to meet in the Place des
Victoires, at the Hôtel Massiac. Their object was to counterbalance
what they held to be the pernicious influence exercised by a new
society originating in England. This was the Friends of the Blacks,
and had for its principal object the amelioration of the coloured race.
[60] The movement, begun by Wilberforce across the Channel, met
with many adherents in France, for it accorded well with the new
ideas of enfranchisement and liberty proclaimed by the National
Assembly. This very soon became clear to the landowners of the
Leeward Islands, who lived on the labour of their slaves, and whose
whole well-being depended on their continued existence as such.
Saint-Domingo was then in a state of astonishing prosperity. The
sugar plantations and the cultivation of indigo and cotton had made it
one of the chief colonies. If Wilberforce’s theories were to prevail
there, it was all over with the planters and the white people, who
formed the minority of the population.
Founded on August 20, 1789, the Hôtel Massiac Club intended to
oppose with all its strength the current of sympathy for the blacks,
which threatened to overflow the Assembly. Its members meant to
prevent at any cost the concession of rights to the mulattos
inhabiting the island, which would be the preliminary to granting

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Creative Compassion, Literature and

Animal Welfare 1st ed. Edition Michael

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-6672 ISSN 2634-6680 (electronic)

Cover illustraion: The Protected Art Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

we have witnessed the growth of academic courses, as well as university

The new Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics is the result of a

kind in the world. It aims to demonstrate rigorous intellectual enquiry

Oxford, UK Andrew Linzey

Sitting proudly on my bookshelf is an early edition of Anna Sewell’s 1877

Willows enriches my experience of the croaking toads I hear, Jesus’s par-

residents recognize, presents no threat. He alone, to borrow Schweitzer’s

Otterburne, MB, Canada Michael J. Gilmour

1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal

2 It’s a Bad World for Animals: Activism and Sentimental

3 Eating Meat, Eating Misery 77

4 Lessons on Animals and Science with Doctor Rat 99

5 St. Francis Visits Rabbit Hill: Visions of Coexistence123

6 A Sort of Temple: Religious Themes in Animal Literature157

7 The Mark of Cain: Human Hunters and Animal Predators191

8 Animals, Mourning, and Cat-lovin’ Bastards225

Michael J. Gilmour is Associate Professor of English and biblical litera-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

As she puts it elsewhere, “I learned from nature. … I also learned from

There is even evidence his tenderness toward animals extended beyond

The result of those wartime experiences was a fictional world depicting

As readers of these stories come to expect, the good Doctor comes up

dramatic techniques (the so-called ‘estrangement effect’) to render the

works of fiction do not exist independently of historical contexts.

Telling Their Own Stories

There is a substantial library of animal stories of the last two hundred

things as fashion as it concerns horse-drawn carriages, and economic

That initial question, which Abraham overhears, is an invitation for him

reject cruelty and invoke alternatives to entrenched self-interested behav-

of bullfighting.”34 Dolittle does not play by the rules though. He thinks

their oppression.”38 This approach, Donovan continues, identifies “autho-

 nimal Welfare and a Literature

founded in 1905. According to one character, the organization “‘is kind

In the fall of 1895, while the National Convention of the S. P. C. A. was in

Here the connection between a humane organization and creative writ-

Patteson and those encouraging her efforts recognized a gap in protection

anything, having been brought up to think of them as uncanny creatures,

These remarks foreground the important role of organized animal protec-

to illustrate, include thanks to the staff of the Muskoka Wildlife Centre

The Animal-Friendly Writer and Ethics

and Carol J. Adams have a creative counterpart in a range of stories that

literary study.”63 Similarly, theologian and ethicist Andrew Linzey finds

A shift appears to be in the offing, however. Tzachi Zamir refers to the

lines. An immersion in these stories with relatively minimal commentary

immediately to this subject after becoming aware of his newfound state,

“Oh God,” he thought, “what a grueling profession I picked! Traveling day

The analyses of selected works below lean toward what Josephine

machines of transport, and/or do not look elegant enough to pull the

Did she return to England immediately afterwards? Probably. For

On December 8, 1740, in the Rue de Montfort, at Rennes, there

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Otterburne, MB, Canada Michael J. Gilmour

1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal

2 It’s a Bad World for Animals: Activism and Sentimental

3 Eating Meat, Eating Misery 77

4 Lessons on Animals and Science with Doctor Rat 99

5 St. Francis Visits Rabbit Hill: Visions of Coexistence123

6 A Sort of Temple: Religious Themes in Animal Literature157

7 The Mark of Cain: Human Hunters and Animal Predators191

8 Animals, Mourning, and Cat-lovin’ Bastards225

Telling Their Own Stories

nimal Welfare and a Literature

The Animal-Friendly Writer and Ethics