A recent addition to the Stallwood Animal Rights Collection is a pamphlet, Trained Animal Performances, published by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The author is only identified as “E.G.F.” This is most likely Captain E. G. Fairholme, O.B.E., the society’s chief secretary in the first decades of the 1900s. He coauthored with Wellesley Pain a history of the RSPCA, A Century of Work for Animals, which was published in 1924 by John Murray Ltd. A full-page advertisement on the back of the pamphlet states several statistics on the society’s “vast and varied work. Among the items of its record for the past year are the following” and goes onto list the number of convictions (3,963), cautions given (19,388) and complaints investigated (11,552). Also, the pamphlet gives the society’s address as 105 Jermyn Street, London SW1, which was the society’s headquarters from 1869 to 1973, when it relocated to Horsham, Sussex. All this leads me to conclude that the pamphlet was published in the early 1900s. Further research at the RSCPA library should be able to date its publication to a particular year.
I found various references to Captain Fairholme in titles in my collection. He becomes an intriguing figure and I fantasize about what it would be like to meet him.
For example, A W Moss refers three times to Fairholme in his history of the RSPCA, Valiant Crusade, and the captain’s work for horses. Fairholme was a member of a “special delegation” who visited ports in Belgium to document the live export trade of British horses for slaughter.
In 1909 the scandalous trade continued. The horses were required to walk–crawl might be a better term–four and a half miles from the docks at Antwerp to the abattoirs. Whilst these ghastly processions were passing, many Belgians pulled down their blinds and closed their shutters as a protest against the iniquity.
The next year a special deputation went to the Continental ports, with a representative from the Daily Mail. Captain Fairholme, who was one of their number, was assaulted by three men, who tried to trip him into the dock and seized his camera. His life was further threatened by those interested in the trade and strong representations were made to the Belgian police by the British Consul, who demanded the arrest of the three thugs and protection for the British representatives. Two of the gang who had made the attack were eventually arrested by the police, brought to court and sentenced. The stolen camera was recovered. As a result of the publicity involved, Sir George Greenwood was able to introduce a Bill and it became the Diseases of Animals Act (1910). Unfortunately, the original draft of the measure was altered in its passage through Parliament and the utility of the Act impaired by the omission of a few words that would have recognized the cruelties which the horses endured after being disembarked. Many hundreds of convictions were still being recorded against dealers in this trade.
What a sad commentary on what passes for humanity in that 100 years later it is still necessary for Compassion In World Farming to lead the fight against the live export trade of British animals for slaughter on the European mainland.
This comparison of today’s animal rights campaigns with our past is further reflected in Captain Fairholme’s Trained Animal Performances. For example, he frames the case as an issue of the animal’s labor in contrast to the labor of people.
The human worker, articulate with real or fancied wrongs, takes the law into his own hands and “downs tools” to draw public attention to his just or unjust demands. It is, he claims, the only remedy, even though this action may dislocate life for the general public and bring suffering and hardships to countless thousands who have no voice in the matter. Would to heaven that the animals could pursue a like course! The world would then be a different and a better place, for we should have learnt how dependent on the animal kingdom we human beings are. Think, for instance, if all the draught animals who are systematically overdriven and overloaded refused to leave their stables until the laws of our country were properly enforced! Where would our commerce be? How would our food be carried from the railways to the distributing centres and from the shops to the homes? It would certainly be a difficult time–but what a glorious change would result! And, to my mind, the first class of animals that should strike–physically, too–are the animals who are victimised with slow and constant torture, so that empty-headed thoughtless human beings (I had almost said asses, but that would be a deep insult to that humble and plucky animal) might have an hour’s amusement. Being inarticulate they cannot strike, without being brutally struck in return, and so they are forced to perform unnatural and degrading antics in order that their alien owners may “earn a living.” And it is mostly aliens who resort to such, to my mind, dishonest methods of gaining their daily living. This is a point which, at this time especially, should be remembered, for if we had strong laws to keep the aliens from our shores we should also, to an enormous extent, purge our public entertainments of these degrading spectacles of “trained animal performances.”[emphasis in original]
This extract is striking not only for its comparison of human and animal labor but also for its emphasis on blaming the problem of performing animals primarily on foreigners. While recognizing animal cruelty within its own shores, the British have always been particularly outraged by what happens to “our” animals when they go abroad. I don’t know if Captain Fairholme wrote this pamphlet before or after his trip to Belgium but it would be interesting to find out. All of this is so reminiscent of the present and the Battle of Brightlingsea when this small town’s population protested the shipment of live farmed animals through its port in the mid-1990s.
In his conclusion, Captain Fairholme tract is as contemporary in style and rhetorical flourish as any one of us might say today.
Now that we have the knowledge let it not be said that we lack the courage to act up to our convictions. Let us learn the lesson of trade unionism and band ourselves together so that we become a power in the land, and can, by refusing to witness and therefore encourage this particular form of cruelty, “strike” for those who are not capable themselves of using this powerful argument to right their wrongs.
