Brown Dog affair

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration by Swedish feminists of University of London medical lectures; pitched battles between medical students and the police; police protection for the statue of a dog; and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. In 1985, a new statue of the Brown Dog was erected in Battersea Park in 1985. The statue was later melted down by the council’s blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour.

About Brown Dog affair in brief

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration by Swedish feminists of University of London medical lectures; pitched battles between medical students and the police; police protection for the statue of a dog; a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice; and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that divided the country. In 1878 there were under 300 experiments on animals in the UK, a figure that had risen to 19,084 in 1903 when the brown dog was viv isected. In the early 20th century, Ernest Starling, Professor of Physiology at University College London, and his brother-in-law, Professor William Bayliss, were using dogs to determine whether nervous system controls were secret. At the time, this was unsympathetic to the anti-vivisected cause. Prosecutions could only take place with the approval of the Home Secretary, who was at the time Aretas Akers-Douglas, unsysympathy to the cause, was unhelpful. In 1985, a new statue of the Brown Dog was erected in Battersea Park in 1985. The statue was later melted down by the council’s blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. In March 1910, tired of the controversy, BatterSEA Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness, after which it was reportedly melted down.

There was significant opposition to viviisection in England, in both houses of Parliament, during the reign of Queen Victoria ; the Queen herself strongly opposed it. In 1875 Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe founded the National Anti-Viviservation Society in London and in 1898 the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. The former sought to restrict vibisection and the latter to abolish it. The General Medical Council and British Medical Journal objected, so additional protection was introduced instead. The result was the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, criticized by NAVS as \”infamous but well-named\”. The Act stipulated that researchers could not be prosecuted for cruelty, but that the animal must be anaesthetized, unless the animal would interfere with the point of the experiment. Each animal could be used only once, although several procedures of the same procedure were permitted. The Act was passed into law in 1876 and became known as the Animal Experiment Act of 1876. It was passed by the House of Lords in 1878 and became the Animal Experiments Act of 1880. The act banned experiments on dogs, cats, horses, donkeys and mules, and other animals that could be killed when the object of the study was frustrate the object. It also banned experiments that were only once regarded as part of the Experiment Act.

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