These lofty ambitions would be achieved through a blend of prosecution and prevention. First, to ensure that existing laws were enforced, the society began recruiting constables, paid for by subscriber donations. They were tasked with patrolling the streets, reporting instances of abuse, acting on tip-offs from informants and bringing offenders to justice.

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Where legal protection was lacking, campaigners lobbied to change the law, bringing new groups of animals under its remit. One of the SPCA’s first crusades was the abolition of bull and bear baiting. Animal baiting had a long history in Britain – dating back to at least the 12th century – and for hundreds of years went largely unchallenged. In around 1800, however, reformers began to raise objections to the practice on the grounds of both animal welfare and public morality. In 1835, after multiple failed attempts, a formal ban was secured.

Once the ban was in place, the SPCA mobilised swiftly to enforce it, prosecuting those who organised illegal baits. In 1839, activists succeeded in suppressing the annual bull-running in Stamford, Lincolnshire – a longstanding local custom that involved chasing a bull through the streets and pushing it off a bridge into the river Welland.

The RSPCA also sought to change public attitudes towards animals through education, running essay competitions for children and printing “tracts and sermons” to “change the moral feelings of those who had control of animals”.

From 1869, the charity published a monthly magazine, The Animal World, for circulation “in schools… clubs, reading-rooms, public houses, railway stations, hospitals, prisons, workhouses and all other places where it may lie on the table and be read”. Designed to spread the gospel of kindness to readers of all ages, the periodical mixed education with entertainment, interspersing exposés of cruel practices with quirky animal anecdotes. The May 1876 edition, for in- stance, included an article on training bloodhounds, a letter about a pet parrot and a piece about “a sheep fond of practical jokes”.

Dedicated constables

The RSPCA grew rapidly in the second half of the 19th century. By 1875 there were 77 branches across Britain, ranging from seaside resorts like Torquay to industrial cities such as Leeds – and the number of constables had risen from a paltry two in 1832 to 120 by 1897. Yet as the Victorian animal rights campaign evolved, so, too, did the nature of the challenge with which it was faced. As Britain became more urbanised, growing numbers of cows, sheep and pigs were driven through the streets to markets and slaughterhouses, while thousands of horses and donkeys laboured as beasts of burden.

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Campaigners worked to protect both groups of animals, going after drovers and cab drivers who beat or overworked their animals. In 1841, the RSPCA prosecuted London omnibus-driver Thomas Horsoy for working a horse with “a wound on the hip, another on the side, and a large wound on the chest”. In 1846, Thomas Poding, a razor-grinder from Herefordshire, was fined 10 shillings for having “furiously and cruelly driven a dog tackled to a machine for grinding razors, &c”.

Painful pursuits

In the first half of the 19th century, campaigners’ efforts had chiefly been focused on the abuse of animals in public places. As the century progressed, new avenues for animal abuse came to the fore. One such was animal experimentation. Vivisection first started to gain traction in Britain in the late 19th century, triggering concerns about the pain inflicted on animals in pursuit of physiological knowledge. Vivisection’s clandestine nature – and the fact that many of its victims were dogs and cats (in some cases, stolen) – only added to its unpopularity.

By the mid-1870s, the government was facing a growing wave of criticism. In response, it launched a public enquiry, culminating in the passing of the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. While this did not abolish vivisection, it did regulate its use, compelling vivisectors to apply for a licence before conducting experiments on animals and mandating the use of anaesthesia for painful operations (though the home secretary could grant special exemptions).

Victorian animal rights campaigners also became increasingly preoccupied with the plight of captive exotic animals. While the 1835 Cruelty to Animals Act protected domestic animals such as cows and sheep, it didn’t extend to caged bears, lions and tigers, allowing keepers to starve and beat perform- ing animals with near impunity.

Following a protracted campaign, however, the RSPCA managed to get the law extended to cover wild animals, making it an offence to “cruelly abuse, infuriate, tease or terrify” any menagerie inmate. With the new act on the statute books from 1900, RSPCA inspectors secured several convictions against animal tamers, often acting on tip-offs from the public. In May 1908, magistrates in Exeter fined lion tamer Richard Sedgewick 20s for “cruelly infuriating a lioness” by rattling the bars of her cage, firing a revolver and poking her with “a long stick”. The following November, magistrates at West London Police Court convicted elephant trainer William Schreida for “cruelly terrifying” an elephant by making it slide down a steep chute into a pool of water – a trick accomplished by digging “the pointed end of [an] elephant stick six times into the right cheek of the animal” and prodding “the hook into his back”.

A screaming parrot

Pets had initially been excluded from the RSPCA’s operations, since the law did not permit its officers to enter private property. Yet, as pet-keeping rose in popularity, cases of abused animals become depressingly familiar – and often ended up in the courts. In 1903, the RSPCA prosecuted “a brutal passer-by” for pulling the Dean of Peterborough’s pet peacock off a wall and “extract[ing] a number of its tail-feathers”. In 1906 “John Sutcliffe, 38, [of] Albert-road, Cleethorpes” faced prosecution for keeping “four greyhound dogs locked up in a coalhouse” without food. (The animals were so thin that Inspector Hill “could count every notch of the backbone and every rib in the body”.)

As with working animals, campaigners realised that education was the key to securing better treatment of Britain’s pets. A media campaign in the 1890s urged readers to provide for their cats when
they went on holiday, “instead of consigning them to a lingering death by starvation in empty houses”.

A special correspondence section in The Animal World answered readers’ questions about sick or unhappy pets and provided a forum where owners could share information and tips. One correspondent sought advice on “how to cure a parrot of screaming”. A second asked: “How it is possible to keep a white Persian kitten clean?” A third solicited treatment suggestions for a cockatoo who was “pulling out his new feathers directly they appear”. She was advised to feed the bird with lettuce leaves, watercress and ripe blackber- ries and to give it “a gentle shower-bath, softly administered with the garden hose”.

Wild animals also assumed a growing profile within RSPCA campaigns as rocketing market demand for animal body parts pushed multiple species towards extinction. The 1870s and 80s witnessed a craze for feathers on women’s hats, triggering the mass slaughter of egrets, hummingbirds and birds of paradise. The same decades saw a surge in demand for sealskin jackets, putting Alaska’s fur seal population under strain. The RSPCA denounced these abuses, lobbying the government for legal protection of wild animals (particularly birds) and publishing emotive articles about butchered seals and starving egret chicks.

Campaigners also spoke up on behalf of living animal commodities, calling for more humane treatment of animals during transit. In 1882, the RSPCA bemoaned the plight of tortoises, which were sent from Africa packed “like herrings in a barrel”, so that “silly people may amuse themselves with a plaything for a few days”.

The RSPCA was notably slower to attack hunting for sport. It criticised particularly gruesome or unsporting events, such as pigeon shooting and the hunting of carted deer, but refrained from a direct assault on fox-hunting – in which some of its members engaged. This elicited charges of hypocrisy from critics, who felt that working-class entertainments were being unfairly targeted. Speaking in 1913, after being convicted of “cruelly terrifying a lioness” in his travelling menagerie, showman Albert Mander re- marked snidely that “I suppose there is no cruelty in a lot of dogs running after a fox”.

An element of class-discrimination was also notable in other RSPCA campaigns. A ban on dog carts in 1854 put many poor traders out of work, while attacks on itinerant dancing bears in the 1870s and 80s targeted foreign showmen.

In fact, in an age of imperialism, advocates of animal protection could be accused of pursuing some kind of ‘civilising mission’, targeting traditional practices such as cockfighting or the consumption of dog meat while turning a blind eye to more ‘elite’ pursuits. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, in the 1870s the RSPCA advocated the culling of tigers in India, on the grounds that they “cannot be civilised, but on the contrary are destined to destroy human life”.

So the band of reformers and evangelists who founded the RSPCA 200 years ago weren’t, perhaps, always on the right side of history. However, there’s little doubt that, by standing up for the creatures great and small of Victorian Britain, they transformed attitudes to animal welfare across the 19th century.

Helen Cowie is a professor of history at the University of York. She is author of Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2021)

This article was first published in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine