A new book offers a detailed history of human-animal relationships and how we got to where we are now.

Our pets have increasingly become family members but we often ignore the suffering of other species.

We’re responsible for the unseen consequences of our actions, not just the seen ones.

I've long been interested in the many ways in which nonhuman animals (animals) have been viewed during different periods of history. A few years ago I published an post titled Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement—Bergh, the founder of the ASPCA, was called "a traitor to his species" because of his views on the moral status of animals—but other commitments sitting on my desk got in my way of doing more research.

Because of my lingering interests in human-animal relationships and how these interactions have evolved over time, I was thrilled to learn of an outstanding book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, by Bill Wasik, who was recently named the new Science editor of the New York Times, and veterinarian Monica Murphy. In their deeply researched and fascinating historical account of the moral transition of human attitudes toward animals, they cover the contributions of many people, including Bergh.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Our Kindred Creatures?

Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy: Over the course of researching and writing our previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, we discovered that many of the attitudes towards animals which Americans currently take for granted formed during the late nineteenth century. Our abhorrence of cruelty and bloodsport, our fascination with animals in entertainment, our limited acknowledgement of what livestock go through, our concern about extinction of wildlife species, our ambivalence toward animals in research, our obsession with our pets—all of these arose during the same 30 years or so after the Civil War. For those of us who love animals, it’s disconcerting to realize that our predecessors didn’t always feel the way we do, but kind of thrilling to learn that there were specific people who championed and innovated a way of living with animals which is recognizable to us today.

The other thing we realized while working on Rabid was that this time period is just really, really fun to read and write about. The newspapers, magazines, and books of the era provide very detailed and colorful documentation of the events and personalities that so dramatically altered popular ways of thinking about the creatures that live amongst us.

MB: How does your book relate to your backgrounds and general areas of interest?

BW/MM: We are a married couple, a journalist (Bill) and a veterinarian (Monica). We love working on projects together that involve our shared interests of animals, history, and science.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

BW/MM: Everyone! This is foremost a book about the relationship between humans and non-human animals—a history of how we got to where we are now—but it’s also a study of an extremely successful social movement, a biography of several undersung American innovators, and an examination of how our culture collectively approaches thorny moral questions. Plus it’s got animal stories!

MB: What are some of the topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?

BW/MM: The main thread of Our Kindred Creatures is the story of the rise of the American animal welfare movement, which began in 1866 with the establishment of the ASPCA by Henry Bergh, but went on to very quickly win over American hearts and minds to the idea that animals are entitled to some degree of consideration and kindness. Along with Bergh in New York, George Angell in Boston, and Caroline Earle White in Philadelphia were instrumental in changing not only laws but fundamental attitudes about animals.

But accompanying the growing concern for welfare, there were other changes afoot. We write about the rise of science-based veterinary medicine, the growth of animals in entertainment like museums, zoos, and circuses, the early American wildlife conservation movements focused on birds and bison, the industrialization of food animal production and processing, and the unresolved arguments about the use of animals in scientific research. Along the way we meet fascinating, complicated people like the uncompromising French-American veterinarian Alexandre Liautard, the charismatic showman P.T Barnum, and such defenders of animal research as John Call Dalton and W.W. Keen.

Perhaps the biggest theme we land on is that while our present-day love and affection for animals has its origins in that era, it’s a very selective affection: Our pets have increasingly become members of the family, but we often turn a blind eye to the suffering of other species, whether it’s wildlife going extinct or, worst of all, meat animals languishing in factory farms. And you can explain that divergence in feelings in large part through a divergence in awareness: While our pets have never been more physically present in our lives, these other animals have never felt more distant. In the 19th century, humans lived cheek to jowl with their food animals, even in cities, but sweeping changes in the era we write about meant that increasingly the process of raising and slaughtering animals could happen hundreds or even thousands of miles away. In the end, we believe, our changing attitudes toward animals have been driven by changing patterns of how we live (or, more specifically, don’t live) among them.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about this history, they might develop more compassion about the nonhuman animals in their midst?

BW/MM: Yes, we can at least hope that. In the conclusion to our book, we raise the question of whether the kind of revolution that the rise of the anti-cruelty movement represented—in which people really did undergo a sea change in how they behaved toward the domestic animals around them—could happen today, to make people more mindful of the treatment of food animals and other suffering creatures that they don’t ever get to interact with. It would be a big shift, and one that would be somewhat analogous to the mental shifts that many of us need to make around climate change, another issue where human beings seem to find it hard to behave in moral ways when the impact of our actions is often indirect and hidden from us.

In general, systemic problems like that can be tricky to provoke change around. But so many of the worst challenges we face today are systemic in nature, and we’ll never solve them if we can’t retrain our moral sense to recognize that we’re responsible for the unseen consequences of our actions, not just the seen ones.

In conversation with Bill Wasik, who was recently named the new Science editor of the New York Times, and veterinarian and author Monica Murphy. Their previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, explored "four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies."

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