Brown Dog affair
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The Brown Dog affair was a controversy and cause célèbre for a brief period in Edwardian England, from 1903 to 1910, and revolved around vivisection and a statue erected in memory of a dog killed in the cause of medical research. The Brown Dog affair provoked riots the size of which were not repeated in the United Kingdom until the poll tax riot of March 1990.
The antecedents of the Brown Dog affair lay in a libel suit brought by Dr. William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London, against the Hon. Stephen Coleridge Honorary Secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Coleridge provoked the suit by claiming in a speech that Bayliss had broken two laws in his handling of a dog which was killed after vivisection in February 1903. Although Bayliss prevailed in the courts and was awarded damages of £2,000 to be paid by Coleridge (a six-figure sum in today's currency), the latter achieved his aims of widespread press coverage of the subject of vivisection, which led to the Daily News newspaper launching a fund to cover the damages, which raised £5,735 within four months.
Members of affiliated anti-vivisection organisations then took it on themselves to raise a subscription for a memorial to the dog at issue in the Bayliss versus Coleridge case. The group turned to the borough of Battersea, known as one of the more radical in London, for a location in which to install the memorial; the council provided a space near the newly completed Latchmere Estate. The memorial was in the form of a drinking fountain (for people and dogs) surmounted by a bronze of the dog in question.
The statue bore the following 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 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? |
Medical students at a number of London teaching hospitals were outraged at the inscription on the memorial, and organised protests and attempts to damage or destroy the statue. The memorial in effect became the fulcrum for a very heated public debate about the merits and demerits of vivisection, which from time to time led to mass protests, riots, and civic disobedience.
The Brown Dog was a symbol of the oppressed for writer Coral Lansbury, who draws attention to parallels with the plight of workers, women and animals and describes the social manifestation that was the riots.
"That cruelty can be extraordinarily satisfying cannot be denied, for cruelty is a magnifier of identity, a simplifier of social function, and the temporary resolution of insecurity and doubt… Cruelty relies on a rigid observance of the categorical distance between victim and oppressor." (Coral Lansbury, Old Brown Dog)
The statue was removed in the early hours of 10 March 1910, after local elections in the borough tipped its political balance, and is presumed destroyed. A new monument, minus water feature but bearing a reproduction of the inscription, was installed in Battersea Park during 1985, sculpted by Nicola Hicks; it was relocated in 1994.
[edit] References
- The Brown Dog Affair - Peter Mason, 1997, Two Sevens Publishing. ISBN 0-9529854-0-3
- The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England - Coral Lansbury, 1985, ISBN 0-299-10250-5
[edit] External links
- The little brown dog forming the major part of the history of the National Anti-Vivisection Society
- Why a brown dog and its descendants did not die in vain - Professor Steve Jones in the Daily Telegraph
- "The queen has been dreadfully shocked" - Aspects of teaching experimental physiology using animals in Britain, 1876–1986. Volume 19 : Number 1 – Advances In Physiology Education – June 1998. (PDF)
