S5E6 - Brown Dog

In this Animal Highlight, fellow Virginia Thomas talks about Brown Dog, a canine who in 1903 was subjected to vivisection at University College London. Two activists brought his plight to the attention of the International Antivivisection Society and what ensued was a series lengthy legal and social battles commonly referred to as "The Brown Dog Affair."

Recorded: 26 October 2023 

 Featured: 

• S6E6: Social Movement Mobilization and Feminism with Corey Lee Wrenn on The Animal Turn.
• S5E5: Animal Testing and its Alternatives with Thomas Hartung on The Animal Turn.
• The Brown Dog Affair by Virginia Thomas. 

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects
• Learn more about the team here. 

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Animals and Politics
• 0:51 Introduction to Brown Dog's Story
• 2:30 The Brown Dog Affair Unfolds
• 4:21 The Memorial Statue and Public Response
• 11:14 Modern Animal Experimentation Discussion
• 15:36 Final Thoughts and Credits

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 0:16

Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and politics. All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast, which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics. In this highlight, virginia talks about Brown Dog, a canine who, in 1903, was subjected to vivisection at University College London. Two activists brought his plight to the attention of the International Anti-Vivisection Society. What ensued was a series of lengthy legal and social battles, commonly referred to as the Brown Dog Affair. Virginia, I'm happy to have you back on the annual highlight. I'm looking forward to our conversation today because the chat with Corey was really so interesting kind of feminism and social movement mobilization. A lot of words, but really interesting. So what's in store for us?

Virginia Thomas: 1:13

Yeah, it's really good to be back, thank you, and I have got something really interesting to talk about. Today, or at least I think so. I talked about dogs for the first animal highlight of this season, and today I want to talk about one particular dog, brown Dog, who was the dog at the heart of the Brown Dog affair. There are two important things to say. The first and most important, and perhaps most obvious, is that this dog doesn't even seem to have had a name, or if he did, it wasn't used at the time of this story and it's now forgotten. So, like others, I'm calling him Brown Dog. The second is that even his story is somewhat forgotten, despite its importance. I've lived in England and work in human-animal relations, but I hadn't heard about the Brown Dog affair until you told me about it while you were working on this episode about social movements.

Virginia Thomas: 2:08

Brown dog was a small brown stray terrier who somehow found himself in hands of the medical school at the University College of London, where he was used for vivisection, which was still a common practice in 1903, when this story takes place, as physicians researched and taught anatomy and physiology. In some ways, brandl was no different from the many, many other animals who undergo vivisection. He suffered as a result of the experiments he endured, but so do many other animals. The difference is that his suffering was witnessed by people opposed to vivisection and brought to the attention of the National Anti-Vivisection Society. I'd really like to be able to tell you more about Brown Dog himself, but I couldn't find anything recorded about him. What is recorded is the difference that he and his story made. So to tell you his story, I need to tell you about the people who captured it in 1903, and it links really well to what Corey Rem was talking about in terms of social movements, in relation to animal rights and feminism.

Virginia Thomas: 3:17

Brown Dog's story was brought to light by Lisa Chartauer and Louise Lindaff Hagby. Chartauer and Hagby were anti-vivisectionists from Sweden who had enrolled at University College London to record vivisection practices there. Just to make clear, vivisection's the performance of surgery on live animals for the purposes of research, as opposed to dissection, which is the performance of surgery on animals after their death. They kept notes on what they saw, including the vivisection of Brown Dog, and they presented them to a man called Stephen Coleridge, who was secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society.

Virginia Thomas: 3:58

According to the National Anti-Vivisection Society, coleridge noticed from Chateau andby's notes that brown dogs vivisection was illegal. He'd been experimented on twice, although the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 stated that they could be experimented on only once, and he hadn't been killed directly after the experiments on him. Again, the Cruelty to Animal Act states that this has to happen, but because of the time which had already passed between Chartau and Hagby witnessing Brown Dog's vivisection and Coleridge becoming aware of it, he decided that a formal prosecution wouldn't be possible. Instead, he took what he thought was his only other option and publicly accused William Bayliss, the man who had carried out the vivisection, of breaking the law and of cruelty amounting to torture. So I just want to confirm that I understand exactly what's happening.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 4:51

So there were these two Swedish students who were at the Royal College of London and they were anti-vivisectionists, and they reported that this dog had been operated on alive twice. And then Coleridge was a lawyer?

Virginia Thomas: 5:06

Yeah, he was. Actually he was a barrister, but in this it's more in his role as secretary to the Anti-Vivisection Society.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 5:17

I see Okay, and then Baylis is the person who had done the operations, the vivisection. Okay, I'm with you, I'm with you.

Virginia Thomas: 5:36

I should say, is that vivisection was legal, but it was controlled, and even though vivisection is done on live animals, they are anesthetized or brown dog was certainly supposed to be anesthetized while the surgery or while the procedure was happening, but there were also questions about that. So it was a very complicated legal case. But the difficulty, partly for Coleridge, was that just too much time had gone by for him to be able to go through the formal legal channels. Anyone can make a public accusation if they have evidence, so that's essentially what he did. He did have evidence from the two Swedish students, so he used that to make an accusation. But what happened was, you know, when he made that public accusation, baylis essentially took it as defamation and sued Coleridge for defamation. So then this case, this defamation case, plays out in in a trial which attracts a huge amount of public attention, and ultimately, coleridge wasn't able to prove his accusations and Bayliss was awarded damages. By then, though, public opinion was firmly with Coleridge, and money was raised to cover the cost of the damages to Baylis that Coleridge would otherwise have had to pay himself. But even once the case was settled, the story doesn't end.

Virginia Thomas: 7:01

Because so much public sentiment had been aroused, the case wasn't easily forgotten and in 1906, three years after the trial, a statue was erected to Brown Dog with the following inscription. I'm going to read you the inscription 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 over 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? That inscription was on the statue and what's really important here is that Brown Dog was remembered, but also remembered with him are the other dogs who'd shared his fate the year before, and his story really galvanized the anti-vivisection movement in Britain. And it's also important to note that the story of and around Brown Dog really escalated from here and became about more than Brown Dog himself. So it turned into the sort of social movement that you've just been talking about.

Virginia Thomas: 8:19

So medical students from University College London objected to the fact that UCL was identified and singled out as performing vivisection, given that many other universities also did this at the time, and they repeated the attempt to vandalise Brown Dog's memorial to the point that police were appointed to guard it around the clock, and from this point, the debate formed along class and gender divides, with upper class medical students on one side and suffragettes who were closely aligned with anti-vivisectionists, trade unionists, working class people who lived near the statue and other groups forming an unlikely alliance on the other side, and protests and demonstrations for and against the statue and for and against the intersection, as well as other social movements, escalated and continued for years and eventually, since the statue was seen as a catalyst for and a focus of the protest, it was removed in 1910 and instead there's now a memorial to the original statue.

Virginia Thomas: 9:25

The new statue still has the original inscription, but it's in a different place and it's markedly different from the first statue, which commemorated Brown Dog. Brown Dog, though, is still remembered and, of course, the epics of using animals in medical experiments is still very much debated. You said the statue is different?

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 9:46

or is it just that it's been moved, so there's a new statue, so it wasn't just that the statue was removed or moved.

Virginia Thomas: 9:53

Yeah, so the statue was removed and was actually destroyed. Also, it was melted down and there is now a new statue, but it's not a replica. Is it still just of one dog? It is, and that's a bit controversial because the artist who created it modeled it on her own dog, which is lovely, but she's she's presented him in a pose which is kind of described as responsive. He seems to be reacting to some unseen character, whereas the original dog in the original statue was sitting very proudly, very, maybe stoically, staunchly. It's described as defiant.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 10:37

Yeah, the politics of statues, I think, is really really interesting because they act as memorials but they're often they're like, impassioned, with a lot of meaning. You know, I think in recent years we've seen how passionately people feel about statues and what they represent. But I really do enjoy the story because, you know, I, like my PhD, looked at forgotten histories and I think that this is quite interesting, because how do you tell the story of animals that aren't remembered right, that have no traces left of them? Are their stories insignificant? Are they unimportant?

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 11:10

I would say not, and I really love that that inscription included the numerous other dogs and that you know, brown dog is just one of many dogs who was made visible to history because of these two Swedish students who reported it. So it's really a fascinating example and, of course, it raises all of these questions about animals in laboratories what is experimentation for? I spoke to Thomas Harting in the previous season about alternatives to animal experimentation and it's really interesting, like the kind of stuff that's happening with artificial intelligence now as well as with God. I remember him talking to me about organoids and like there's just there's crazy stuff happening with data and AI and anyway. So maybe one day we'll have brown dog next to some other AI statue saying bye-bye experiments. Do you know if vivisection is still practiced today?

Virginia Thomas: 12:06

It is, and you know, talking of those other dogs that were remembered on the statue. The numbers are huge. I found them for the USA and for Britain. They are a little bit different in terms of the stats that are available. So, in 2021, there were 50,000 dogs in labs in the US and in slightly different statistic for the UK. But the year before, in 2020, there were 4,340 experiments conducted on dogs in the UK, but that might mean there were actually slightly fewer dogs. Some dogs might have had more than one experiment conducted on them, but the numbers are huge.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 12:55

The language here is really important, because experiments are one thing and research is another.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 13:00

So just because experiments are being done on some dogs, it doesn't mean that there aren't many other dogs being involved in research experiments right, because the language is quite fascinating to see how the populations of animals change depending on if you only look at experimentation versus experimentation and research. Another really fascinating thing about how dogs and I think one of the reasons why dogs became a kind of preferred species in laboratories is because there's this interesting connection between stray dogs being taken in by not sanctuaries, shelters, that's the word stray dogs being taken in by shelters and them not knowing what to do. And there was an economy, a direct economy between shelters and universities, and I found evidence of this actually happening at my own university. The histories of it are really quite interesting in terms of where do these dogs come from, how do they end up in the universities in 1903? And even today, how do dogs end up in labs today? And I think it's a lot more organized. I think specific dogs are bred for specific experiments, if I'm not mistaken.

Virginia Thomas: 14:05

I know beagles are particularly favored for experiments. If I'm not mistaken, I know beagles are particularly favoured for experiments because of their size and their temperament, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were specifically bred for experimentation.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 14:16

Yeah, definitely, beagles are up there as well. Not too long ago, I think it was one of the it's come up in the season already about a massive beagle kind of. Who was it that mentioned it? Yeah, no, it was in Hope Ferdowsian's book, where I'm getting sorry, wrong species. It was about chimps. It was a thousand chimps with. It was a few guys with chimps. Never mind scratch that.

Virginia Thomas: 14:42

You're right. I mean, although dogs are used, there are also a huge amount of primates used in laboratories and a huge amount of mice.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 14:51

Yeah, I mean next to mice, dogs and macaques and chimps. Their numbers are negligible, right, and it's not about just comparing numbers. All of these animals experience what they're going through. That's the scale at which mice and rats are included in laboratories is just absolutely staggering. And the ways in which they're bred to have specific diseases so that specific types of experiments can be done on them, the level of thinking and thought that goes into breeding very specific types.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 15:23

Again, this is where Thomas Harting I remember him saying we're not 70 kilogram rats, the idea that we can somehow emulate all of our health and ideas from what rats do. But then in every other situation we're like. No, humans are special, but when it comes to medicine we're like. You know, we're gonna test on rats because that's and the the transferal rates of how successful these experiments are for actually bringing about a medicine is dismal. It's ridiculously low. But anyway, brown dog has done it again and sparked up conversation about, about the importance and the the importance of having conversations about animal experimentation. So so thank you so much for that. Thank you so much to virginia thomas for being an incredible co-host and to rebecca shen for her work on the logo and all the artwork done with the animal highlight. The show was edited and produced by myself. This is the Animal Highlight with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.

Speaker 1: 16:41

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