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Brown Dog affair

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Brown Dog affair
A structure with a drinking fountain halfway up and a dog sitting at the top. Some writing is visible on the structure but not legible.
The original statue of the brown dog (above) was erected in Battersea in 1906, then dismantled and presumed destroyed in 1910. A new statue was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.
DateBegan 2 February 1903 (1903-02-02) with Bayliss's experiment on the brown dog; ended 10 March 1910 when Battersea Council removed its memorial statue
LocationLondon
Also known asBrown Dog riots
ParticipantsWilliam Bayliss, Louise Lind-af-Hageby, and the National Anti-Vivisection Society
OutcomeStreet battles in London on 10 December 1907 between 1,000 medical students, 400 police officers, and suffragettes and trade unionists

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.[1][2][3]

The controversy was triggered by allegations that, in February 1903, William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London had performed illegal dissection before an audience of 60 medical students on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team,[4] conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists.[5] The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful[6] by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones,[7] was outraged by the assault on his reputation. He sued for libel and won.[5]

Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque —"Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?"— leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers." On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots.[6][8]

In March 1910, tired of the constant controversy, Battersea Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly melted down by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour.[9] A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later,[10] and was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.[11] Peter Mason writes that all that is left of the old statue is a hump in the pavement in what is now the Latchmere Recreation Ground, the sign on a nearby fence reading, "No Dogs."[12]

Background

Vivisection

Claude Bernard, considered the father of physiology, wrote that "the science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen."[13]

Walter Gratzer, professor emeritus of biochemistry at King's College London, writes that a powerful opposition to vivisection arose in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, represented equally in the House of Commons and House of Lords.[14] At that time, the word "vivisection" was used to describe the dissection of live animals, either with or without anaesthesia, often in front of audiences of medical students. The term is now used more broadly to include other kinds of animal testing, particularly anything invasive.[15][16]

Well-known physiologists such as Claude Bernard and Charles Richet in France, and Michael Foster and Burdon Sanderson in England, were frequently pilloried for the work they did. Bernard was a particular target of violent abuse, even from members of his own family.[14] He appears to have shared their distaste, writing that "the science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen."[13] Gratzer reports that British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of Bernard's teacher, François Magendie, where animals were strapped down on boards to be dissected, with Magendie allegedly shouting to the dogs as they struggled: "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!" (Shut up, you poor beast!)[14]

Frances Power Cobbe founded the NAVS in 1875.

The British National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) was founded in December 1875 by Frances Power Cobbe, an early feminist and anti-vivisection activist, at a time when there were around 300 experiments on animals each year in the UK.[17] For comparison, in 1903, the year of the brown dog dissection, 19,084 animals were used in the UK,[18] and in 2005, the figure was over 2.8 million, counting vertebrate animals only.[19]

Cruelty to Animals Act 1876

The opposition to vivisection led the government to set up the First Royal Commission on Vivisection in July 1875, which recommended that legislation be enacted to control it; the Second Royal Commission was set up in 1906 because of the Brown Dog affair. The first led to the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 —criticized by NAVS as "infamous but well-named"— which legalized and attempted to set limits on the practice. The law remained in force for 110 years, until it was replaced by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, the subject of similar criticism from the modern animal rights movement.[17]

The 1876 Act stipulated that researchers could not be prosecuted for cruelty, but the animal must be anaesthetized, unless the anaesthesia would interfere with the point of the experiment. Each animal could be used only once, though several procedures regarded as part of the same experiment were permitted. And the animal had to be killed when the study is over, unless doing so would frustrate the object of the experiment.[20][21] Prosecutions under the Act could be made only with the approval of the Home Secretary, at the time Aretas Akers-Douglas, regarded as unsympathetic to the anti-vivisectionist cause.[22]

Ernest Starling and William Bayliss

File:ErnestStarling1.jpg
Physiologist Ernest Starling, who worked with William Bayliss

In the early twentieth century, Ernest Starling, Professor of Physiology at University College, London, and his brother-in-law, William Bayliss, were using vivisection on dogs to determine whether the nervous system controls pancreatic secretions, as postulated by Ivan Pavlov. They knew that the pancreas produces digestive juices in response to increased acidity in the duodenum and jejunum, because of the arrival of chyme there. By severing the duodenal and jejunal nerves in anaesthetized dogs, while leaving the blood vessels intact, and then introducing acid into the duodenum and jejunum, they discovered that the process is not mediated by a nervous response, but by a new type of chemical reflex. They named the chemical messenger secretin, because it is secreted by the intestinal lining into the bloodstream, stimulating the pancreas on circulation.[23]

In 1905, Starling coined the term "hormone"—from the Greek hormao ὁρµάω meaning "I arouse" or "I excite"—to describe chemicals such as secretin that are capable, in extremely small quantities, of stimulating organs from a distance.[24][25][26] Bayliss and Starling had also used vivisection on anaesthetized dogs to discover peristalsis in 1899.[27] Over their careers, they went on to discover a variety of other important physiological phenomena and principles, many of which were based on their experimental work involving animal vivisection.[6][28]

The brown dog

Vivisection of the dog

The court was shown this reconstruction of the brown dog's dissection. The image shows William Bayliss (standing at the front), Ernest Starling, and Henry Dale.

The brown dog was a mongrel of the terrier type, probably a former stray or pet, weighed 14 lb (6 kg), and had short rough hair.[21][29] Mason writes that the dog weighed 14 lbs, and Walter Gratzer confirms that Ernest Starling called the dog "small," but the two Swedish witnesses referred to him as "large." He was first used in a vivisection in December 1902 by Starling, who had cut open the dog's abdomen and ligated the pancreatic duct.[4] The dog lived in a cage for the next two months, reportedly upsetting people with his howling.[30]

He was brought back to the lecture theatre for another demonstration on 2 February 1903. During this second procedure, he was stretched on his back on an operating board, with his legs tied to the board, his head clamped into position, and his mouth muzzled to keep him quiet.[31] In front of the audience, Starling cut the dog open again to inspect the results of the previous surgery, after which he clamped the wound, then handed the dog over to Bayliss, who wanted to look at the salivary glands. Bayliss cut a new opening in the dog's neck to expose the glands. The dog was then stimulated with electricity to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure.[32] Bayliss was unable to show this, and gave up trying after half an hour.

File:Louise-Lind-Af-Hageby.jpg
Swedish feminist and animal rights activist Louise Lind-af-Hageby in 1963 with Lord Dowding

The dog was handed over to a student, Henry Dale, a future Nobel laureate, who removed the dog's pancreas, then killed him with a knife. Gratzer writes that the dog was anaesthetized during the procedure with a morphine injection, then with a mixture of chloroform, alcohol, and ether, which was delivered to a tube in the dog's trachea via a pipe hidden behind the bench the men were working on. He argues that, without anaesthesia, it would have been impossible for the researchers to perform the surgery. Other students present during the surgery said that the dog had not struggled, but had merely twitched.[4]

Infiltration by Swedish students

Unknown to Starling and Bayliss, their lectures had been infiltrated by two Swedish women activists. Louise "Lizzy" Lind-af-Hageby, a 24-year-old Swedish countess, and Leisa K. Schartau had visited the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1900 and were appalled by the use of animals there.[33] On their return to Sweden, they made contact with the Swedish Animal Protection League, and in December 1900 founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden. In 1902, they enrolled as students at the London School of Medicine for Women—a vivisection-free college that had visiting arrangements with other London colleges—partly to gain medical training, and partly as undercover anti-vivisectionists.[34]

The women attended lectures at King's and University College, keeping a diary that they published in 1903 as Eye-Witnesses, changing the title for the second edition to The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology. Richard Ryder writes that the book was a bombshell, receiving 200 reviews in four months.[33][35] Of the brown dog, the women wrote that he appeared conscious, and that there was no smell of anaesthesia:

A large dog, stretched on its back on an operation board, is carried into the lecture-room by the demonstrator and the laboratory attendant. Its legs are fixed to the board, its head is firmly held in the usual manner, and it is tightly muzzled. There is a large incision on the side of the neck, exposing the gland. The animal exhibits all the signs of intense suffering; in his struggles, he again and again lifts his body from the board, and makes powerful attempts to get free. The lecturer, attired in the blood-stained surplice of the priest of vivisection, has tucked up his sleeves and is now comfortably smoking a pipe, whilst with hands coloured crimson he arranges the electrical circuit for the stimulation that will follow. Now and then, he makes a funny remark, which is appreciated by those around him.[5]

Involvement of the National Anti-Vivisection Society

Lind-af-Hageby and Schartau decided to show their diary to the barrister Stephen Coleridge, secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS), and son of a former Lord Chief Justice of England. Coleridge's attention was drawn to the description of the brown dog experiments, because the Cruelty to Animals Act forbade the use of an animal in more than one experiment. Yet it appeared that the brown dog had been used by Starling to perform surgery on the pancreas, used again by him when he opened the dog to inspect the results of the previous surgery, and used for a third time by Bayliss to study the salivary glands.[32] The women said the dog had not been properly anaesthetized, and had been killed by Henry Dale, at the time an unlicensed research student. The women also alleged that the students had laughed during the procedure; there were "jokes and laughter everywhere" in the lecture hall while the dog was being dissected, according to Lind-af-Hageby, an allegation she published in her book under the chapter title "Fun".[36] These allegations were all regarded as prima facie violations of the Act.[21]

Stephen Coleridge gave an angry speech about the allegations, possibly intending to provoke a suit for libel.

Peter Mason writes that Coleridge decided there was no point in relying on a prosecution under the Act, which he regarded as deliberately obstructive. Instead, he gave an angry speech about the allegations to the annual meeting of the National Anti-Vivisection Society at St. James Hall in May 1903, probably with a view to inciting a suit for libel.[21][37] The speech included a statement from Lind-af-Hageby: "The dog struggled forcibly during the whole experiment and seemed to suffer extremely during the stimulation. No anaesthetic had been administered in my presence, and the lecturer said nothing about any attempts to anaesthetize the animal having previously been made." Coleridge accused the scientists of having tortured the animal. "If this is not torture, let Mr. Bayliss and his friends… tell us in Heaven's name what torture is."[38]

Mason writes that a verbatim report of the speech was published the next day by the radical Daily News—founded by Charles Dickens—and over the next three days by other national and regional papers. Questions were raised in the House of Commons, particularly by Sir Frederick Banbury, a Conservative MP and sponsor of a vivisection bill aimed at ending demonstrations of the kind conducted by Starling and Bayliss. On 8 May 1903, Coleridge challenged Bayliss in a letter to the Daily News: "As soon as Dr. Bayliss likes to test the bona fides and accuracy of my public declaration… he shall be confronted from the witness box by eyewitnesses I rely upon."[39]

Bayliss demanded a public apology, and when it failed to materialize, he issued a writ for libel. Starling decided not to sue. Even The Lancet, a medical journal that was no supporter of Coleridge, wrote that "it may be contended that Professor Starling… committed a technical infringement of the Act."[29]

Bayliss v. Coleridge

The trial began on 11 November 1903 before Lord Chief Justice Lord Alverstone at the Royal Courts of Justice and took place over four days, closing on 18 November. The British Medical Journal called it "a test case of the utmost gravity". The Morning Leader described the public gallery as packed and rowdy, with no spare seats or standing room, and queues 30 yards (30 metres) long forming outside the courthouse.[40]

William Bayliss testified that the dog had been anaesthetized. He said that any movement had been the result of chorea, and was not purposive.

Bayliss's counsel, Rufus Isaacs, called Starling as his first witness. Starling admitted that he had broken the law by using the dog twice, but said in his defence that he had done so to avoid sacrificing two dogs.[4] The court accepted Bayliss's statement that the brown dog had been anaesthetized with one-and-a-half grains of morphia and six ounces of alcohol, chloroform, and ether. Bayliss said the dog had been suffering from chorea, a disease involving involuntary spasm, meaning that any movement the women had witnessed was not purposive. In addition, Bayliss testified that a tracheotomy had been performed, and that it was therefore impossible for the women to have heard the dog crying and whining, as they had said.

Coleridge's defence called on the two Swedish women as witnesses. They testified that they were the first students to arrive at the lecture hall, and that they saw the dog being brought in. They were left alone with the dog for about two minutes, and examined him themselves. They observed scars from the previous operations, and saw an incision in the neck where two tubes had been placed. They did not smell any anaesthetic, and said they could not see any apparatus delivering anaesthesia or any tubing in the dog's trachea. They said the dog was arching its back and jerking its legs in what they regarded as an effort to escape. When the experiment began, they said, the dog continued to arch its back, "upheave its abdomen," and tremble. The women said they regarded the movement as "violent and purposeful."[41]

The publisher of The Shambles of Science withdrew the book, but an anti-vivisection group republished it, and by 1913 it had gone through five editions.

Bayliss's lawyer criticized Coleridge for having accepted the women's statements without seeking corroboration, and for speaking about the issue publicly without first approaching Bayliss, though he knew that doing so could lead to litigation. Coleridge replied that he hadn't sought verification because he knew the claims would be denied, and that he continued to regard the women's statement as true.[42][43]

Verdict

Lord Alverstone told the jury the case was an important one of national interest, and that they should not be swayed by arguments on the validity of vivisection. After retiring for 25 minutes, the jury unanimously found that Bayliss had been defamed, and on 18 November 1903 he was awarded £2,000 with £3,000 costs,[44][45] worth around £400,000 in 2008.[46] There are conflicting views as to how popular a decision this was. The Edinburgh Medical Journal wrote in 1904 that the ruling was greeted by applause in the court,[47] and Frances Power Cobbe fell into a depression because of the animus of the public. While The Times declared itself satisfied with the verdict, the Daily News called it a miscarriage of justice, and launched a fund to cover Coleridge's expenses, raising £5,735 within four months.[30] Bayliss donated his damages to UCL for use in research; Gratzer writes that the fund is probably still being used today to buy animals for research.[4]

On 25 November 1903, Ernest Bell of Covent Garden, publisher and printer of The Shambles of Science, apologized to Bayliss for having published the book, and pledged to withdraw it and hand over all remaining copies to Bayliss's solicitors.[48] The Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society, founded by Lind-af-Hageby in 1903, republished the book, printing a fifth edition by 1913.[49][50] The chapter "Fun", which had caused such offence, was replaced with one called "The Vivisections of the Brown Dog", describing the experiment and the trial.[30][51]

Brown Dog memorial

A postcard published in 1906 by the National Anti-Vivisection Society

After the trial, Lind-af-Hageby was approached by Anna Louisa Woodward, founder of the World League Against Vivisection, who suggested the idea of a public memorial.[50] Woodward raised a subscription, and commissioned from sculptor Joseph Whitehead a bronze statue of the dog on top of a granite memorial stone—7 ft 6 in (2.29 m) tall—containing a drinking fountain for human beings, and a lower trough for dogs and horses.[52]

The group turned to the borough of Battersea for a location for the memorial. The area was known as a hotbed of radicalism—proletarian, socialist, belching smoke, and full of slums—and was closely associated with the anti-vivisection movement. Battersea General Hospital refused to perform vivisection or employ doctors who engaged in it, and was known locally as the "Antiviv", or the "Old Anti".[53] The Battersea Dogs Home was well-known in London; its chairman, the Duke of Portland, rejected a request in 1907 that its lost dogs be sold to vivisectors as "not only horrible, but absurd."[54]

Battersea council agreed to provide a space for the statue on its newly completed Latchmere Estate, a housing estate for the working class offering terraced homes at seven and sixpence a week.[55] The statue was unveiled on 15 September 1906 in front of a large crowd—speakers included George Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Despard[56]—bearing an inscription described by The New York Times as the "hysterical language customary of anti-vivisectionists" and "a slander on the whole medical profession":[57]

In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured Vivisection extending over more than two months and having been handed from one Vivisector to another till Death came to his Release. Also in Memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England, how long shall these things be?[58]

Riots

Medical students at London's teaching hospitals were enraged by the plaque. The first year of the statue's existence was a quiet one, while University College explored whether they could take legal action over it, but from November 1907 onwards the students turned Battersea into the scene of frequent disruption.

The first action was on 20 November 1907, when a group of University College students, led by undergraduate William Howard Lister, crossed the Thames from the north over to Battersea with a crowbar and a sledgehammer, and tried to attack the statue.[59] Ten of them were arrested. The next day, others protested in Tottenham Court Road against the fines levied on the ten, and the day after that saw a demonstration of hundreds of students who marched holding effigies of the brown dog on sticks.[21] The Times reported that they marched down the Strand to burn an effigy of a magistrate, and when it failed to ignite threw it in the Thames.[60]

As we go walking after dark,
We turn our steps to Latchmere Park,
And there we see, to our surprise,
A little brown dog that stands and lies.

Ha, ha, ha! Hee, hee, hee!
Little brown dog how we hate thee.

—One of the songs the rioters sang as they marched down the Strand on 10 December 1907, this one to the tune of Little Brown Jug.[61]

The rioting reached its height on Tuesday, 10 December 1907, when 100 medical students tried to pull the memorial down. The previous protests had been spontaneous, but this one was organized to coincide with the annual Oxford-Cambridge rugby match at Queen's Club, West Kensington, the protesters hoping that some of the thousands of Oxbridge students due to attend would swell their numbers. Peter Mason writes that street vendors were selling handkerchiefs with the date of the protest printed on them, and the words "Brown dog's inscription is a lie, and the statuette an insult to the London University."[62]

Toward late afternoon, one group of protesters headed for Battersea, intending to uproot the statue and throw it in the Thames. Driven out of the Latchmere Estate by workers, they proceeded down Battersea Park Road, where they tried unsuccessfully to attack the anti-vivisection hospital. Workers again forced the students back, the Daily Chronicle reporting that, when one student fell from the top of a tram and was injured, the workers shouted: "That's the brown dog's revenge!"[63]

A second group headed for central London, waving more effigies of the brown dog, joined by a police escort and, briefly, a busker with bagpipes.[62] As the marchers reached Trafalgar Square, they were 1,000 strong, facing 400 police officers, some of them mounted. There are conflicting reports about the date that saw the main Trafalgar Square rioting. The Independent on Sunday says that 1,000 medical students marched down the Strand on 10 December 1907, clashing with 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square[dead link][64] Richard Ryder writes that it was the evening of 10 December that 100 medical students tried to pull the statue down in Battersea, and that the march along the Strand and the Trafalgar Square rioting took place two days later[2] The students gathered around Nelson's Column, the ringleaders climbing on to the base of it to make speeches. As students fought with police on the ground, mounted police charged the crowd, scattering them into smaller groups and arresting the stragglers, including one Cambridge undergraduate, Alexander Bowley, who was arrested for "barking like a dog." The fighting continued for hours before the police gained control of the crowd. One local doctor told the South Western Star that the students' failure to hold back the police for longer was a sign of the "utter degeneration" of junior doctors and the Anglo-Saxon race.[65]

Over the following days and weeks, more rioting broke out, with medical and veterinary students uniting. Women's suffrage meetings were routinely invaded by medical students barking like dogs, and shouting "Down with the Brown Dog!", though the students knew not all suffragettes were anti-vivisectionists.[66] A meeting organized by Millicent Fawcett was violently invaded on 5 December. Louise Lind-af-Hageby arranged a meeting of anti-vivisectionists at Acton Central Hall on 16 December, and though the meeting was protected by a large guard of Battersea workers, over 100 students managed to smuggle themselves in, and the event deteriorated into an exchange of chairs, fists, and smoke bombs.[67]

Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the cost of policing the statue. London's police commissioner wrote to Battersea Council to ask whether they would contribute to the cost, which had reached £700 a year. Councillor John Archer —the first person of African descent to be elected to public office in the UK and later elected Lord Mayor of Battersea— told the Daily Mail that he was amazed by the request, considering Battersea was already paying £22,000 a year in police rates. Other councillors, concerned about a hike in the rates, suggested the statue be encased in a steel cage and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The Canine Defence League wondered whether, if Battersea were to organize raids on laboratories to destroy vivisection instruments, the laboratories would be required to pay the police costs themselves.[68]

Strange relationships

Susan McHugh of the University of New England writes that the dog's mongrelly status reflected the extraordinary political coalition that rallied to the statue's defence. The riots saw socialists, trade unionists, Marxists, liberals, and suffragettes descend on Battersea to fight the medical students, even though the suffragettes, identified with the bourgeoisie, were not a group toward whom organized male workers felt any warmth—working-class men did not want to enfranchise the cheap labour of women. But the "Brown Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College" by the male scientific establishment united them.[69]

Coral Lansbury writes that the causes of feminism and women's suffrage became closely linked with the anti-vivisection movement. Three of the four vice-presidents of the Battersea General Hospital that refused to allow vivisection were women.[70] Lansbury argues that the Brown Dog affair became a matter of opposing symbols, the iconography of vivisection striking a chord with women. The vivisected dog muzzled and strapped to the operating board blurred into images of suffragettes on hunger strike restrained and force-fed in Brixton Prison; women strapped into the gynaecologist's chair by an all-powerful male medical establishment, forced to have their ovaries and uteruses removed as a cure for "mania", or strapped down for childbirth.[71] Richard Ryder writes that the dog represented the vulnerability of women; the medical students the machismo of science.[2]

Both sides saw themselves as heirs to the future. Hilda Kean writes that the Swedish protagonists were young and female, anti-establishment and progressive, while the accused scientists, older and male, were viewed as remnants of a previous age.[72] It was the Swedish women's hard-won access to higher education that had made the case possible in the first place, creating a new form of political agitation, a "new form of witnessing", according to Susan Hamilton of the University of Alberta.[73] Against this, Lansbury reports that the students saw the women and the trade unionists as representative of superstition and sentimentality, anti-science, anti-progress—"women of both sexes" defending a brutal, insanitary past—while the students and their teachers were the "New Priesthood."[74]

"Exit the 'Brown Dog'"

"Exit the 'Brown Dog'": a photograph in the Daily Graphic, 11 March 1910, shows the empty spot where the Brown Dog had stood.
The empty spot today

Battersea Council grew tired of the controversy. A new Conservative council was elected in November 1909 amid talk of removing the statue. There were protests in support of it, and the 500-strong Brown Dog memorial defence committee was established. Twenty thousand people signed a petition, and 1,500 attended a rally in February 1910 addressed by Irish suffragette and Sinn Féin activist Charlotte Despard, Liberal MP George Greenwood, and Louise Lind-af-Hageby.[75] There were demonstrations in central London and speeches in Hyde Park, with supporters wearing masks of dogs.[21]

The protests were to no avail. The statue was quietly removed before dawn on 10 March 1910 by four council workmen accompanied by 120 police officers. It was hidden in a bicycle shed, then believed to have been destroyed by a council blacksmith, who reportedly smashed it then melted it down.[9][11][76] Ten days later, 3,000 anti-vivisectionists gathered in Trafalgar Square to demand the return of the statue, but it was clear Battersea Council had turned its back on the affair. Peter Mason writes that all that is left of the old Brown Dog is a small hump on the pavement at the centre of Latchmere Recreation Ground, near the Latchmere Pub. The sign on a nearby fence reads "No Dogs."[12]

Memorial restored

The new Brown Dog by Nicola Hicks, erected in Battersea Park in 1985

The New York Times wrote in March 1910 that "it is not considered at all probable that the effigy will ever again be exhibited in a public place,"[57] but on 12 December 1985, a new memorial to the brown dog was erected just behind the Pump House in Battersea Park, commissioned by the National Anti-Vivisection Society and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and unveiled by actress Geraldine James.[77] The new statue, by sculptor Nicola Hicks, is mounted on top of a 5-foot-high (1.5 m) Portland stone plinth, the dog based on Hicks' own terrier and described by Mason as "a coquettish contrast to its down-to-earth predecessor."[78] It repeats the original inscription, and adds:

This monument replaces the original memorial of the brown dog erected by public subscription in Latchmere Recreation Ground, Battersea in 1906. The sufferings of the brown dog at the hands of the vivisectors generated much protest and mass demonstrations. It represented the revulsion of the people of London to vivisection and animal experimentation. This new monument is dedicated to the continuing struggle to end these practices. After much controversy the former monument was removed in the early hours of 10 March 1910. This was the result of a decision taken by the then Battersea Metropolitan Borough Council, the previous council having supported the erection of the memorial. Animal experimentation is one of the greatest moral issues of our time and should have no place in a civilized society. In 1903, 19,084 animals suffered and died in British laboratories. During 1984, 3,497,355 animals were burned, blinded, irradiated, poisoned and subjected to countless other horrifyingly cruel experiments in Great Britain.[79]

The new Brown Dog by Nicola Hicks is described as a "coquettish contrast to its down-to-earth predecessor."[78]

Echoing the fate of the previous memorial, the statue was moved into storage in 1992 by Battersea Park's owners, the Conservative Borough of Wandsworth, as part of a park renovation scheme, according to the council. Anti-vivisectionists, suspicious of the explanation, campaigned for its return. It was reinstated in the park's Woodland Walk in 1994, near the Old English Garden, a more secluded location than before.[80]

Hilda Kean has criticized the new statue. The old Brown Dog was upright and defiant, she writes, not begging for mercy, which made it a radical political statement. The new Brown Dog is a pet, the creator's own terrier, sited in the Old English Garden as "heritage". Quoting David Lowenthal, professor emeritus at UCL, Kean writes that "what heritage does not highlight, it hides." She writes that the new statue has been separated from its anti-vivisection message and from popular images of animal rights activism—the balaclavas of activists and the painful eyes of rabbits. The new Brown Dog is too safe, she argues. Unlike its controversial ancestor, it makes no one uncomfortable.[21]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Gratzer (2004), p. 225 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help).
  2. ^ a b c Ryder (2000), p. 136 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help).
  3. ^ Mason (1997), {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help).
  4. ^ a b c d e Gratzer (2004), p. 226 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help).
  5. ^ a b c Mann 2007, p. 40.
  6. ^ a b c Priddey (2003), "W Bayliss", Genealogy, United Kingdom: WLW Local History.
  7. ^ Henderson (2005), reprint (PDF), Endocrinology journals.
  8. ^ The Independent on Sunday, 26 October 2003, archived from the original on 2007-12-13.
  9. ^ a b Daily Graphic, 11 March 1910, in Kean (2003), pp. 353–73 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help).
  10. ^ Kean (1998), p. 153 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help).
  11. ^ a b Sutch (2002), Brown dog, Battersea Park.
  12. ^ a b Mason 1997, p. 5.
  13. ^ a b The Daily Telegraph, November 2003.
  14. ^ a b c Gratzer 2004, p. 224.
  15. ^ Croce 1999.
  16. ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica 2006.
  17. ^ a b The history of the NAVS, National Anti-Vivisection Society. Archived (Timestamp date length) at the Wayback Machine
  18. ^ Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Battersea Park, Public Monument and Sculpture Association's National Recording Project.
  19. ^ Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals, Great Britain, 2005 (PDF), Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2006-07-24.
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  37. ^ Mason 1997, pp. 10–1.
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  42. ^ Mason 1997, p. 17.
  43. ^ Ernst 1904, p. 103.
  44. ^ Vivisectionist exculpated, The New York Times, 19 November 1903.
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References

Further reading


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