Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do about Animals

Join the UU co-authors of the 2024 New York Times reviewed book "Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do about Animals"! This book by Bill Wasik, editorial director of the "New York Times Magazine" & Monica Murphy, veterinarian, examines how the fight for humane treatment of animals (led by New York Unitarian Henry Bergh) was born of the same post-abolition progressivism as other social justice movements, including for women's suffrage & the rights of workers. The authors will highlight ideas that motivated America's founding generation of animal activists, including liberal religious faiths of the era. Before the Civil War, animals’ suffering was rarely discussed; horses were routinely beaten in public view, & organized dogfights were common sources of entertainment & gambling. But in 1866, activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, & by 1900 most Americans thought and felt differently about the animals in their midst. "Our Kindred Creatures" offers a fascinating history of this crusade & battles it sparked in American life. Leading reform: Unitarian Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments using live animals; George Angell, inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society & the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; & many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians & conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own right: animal impresarios such as Universalist P. T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about animals. In recounting this remarkable period of moral transition—which gave birth to today's attitudes toward animals—Wasik & Murphy challenge us to consider the obligations we have to all our kindred creatures today.