The Liverpool Society for Preventing Wanton Cruelty to Brute Animals was a British animal welfare organisation founded in Liverpool on 25 October 1809. Alun Howkins and Linda Merricks describe it as the first animal-protection movement, while Chien-hui Li identifies it as the earliest traceable society of its kind.
The Society sought to prevent cruelty through enforcement of existing law, investigation and public exposure of cruelty, withdrawal of trade from people who mistreated animals, and education. Its early concerns included the overloading of working horses and the treatment of animals by carters and butchers. The organisation appears to have been short-lived.
History Earlier in 1809, Lord Erskine had introduced a bill in Parliament intended to prevent malicious and wanton cruelty to animals. It passed the House of Lords but was defeated in the House of Commons. Later that year the Liverpool Society was instituted on 25 October.
The Society's own account states that it originated with a group who met on 25 October 1809 and agreed to date the organisation's commencement from that day, which was being observed as a public jubilee for George III. Its founding resolutions described animals as part of "sentient creation" dependent on human protection and identified the overloading and ill-treatment of cart horses and other draught animals as a prominent local abuse.
A committee appointed at the founding meeting was re-elected at a general meeting on 7 November and instructed to prepare a statement of the Society's objects and plans. Its report was presented at a further public meeting on 28 November, after which a new committee was appointed and the report was published for circulation in Liverpool.
According to the history maintained by the modern RSPCA Liverpool Branch, the Society was formed at the Crown and Anchor Coffee House in Bold Street, Liverpool, at 7 pm on 25 October 1809. The branch also states that reports of the Society's activities appeared in Billinge's Liverpool Advertiser and Marine Intelligence, and that hostility from some hauliers and carters eventually led members to hold meetings in secret.
The Society's report was published as Report of the Society for Preventing Wanton Cruelty to Brute Animals: Instituted at Liverpool, October 25, 1809. A substantial account of it was reproduced the following year by Samuel Jackson Pratt in the notes to his poem The Lower World.
Aims and methods
The Society stated that its object was "to meliorate the state of brute animals, by preventing those sufferings which they unnecessarily experience at the hand of man". It proposed two principal means of pursuing this object: coercion of people responsible for cruelty and the diffusion of principles and attitudes opposed to cruelty.
The committee divided coercion into three forms: enforcement of the law, public shame and what it called "individual discountenance". It regarded enforcement of existing law as the appropriate response to the overloading of carters' horses and proposed obtaining legal advice to determine which other forms of cruelty were covered by existing legislation.
The Society proposed appointing a committee to investigate reported cases of cruelty and publish substantiated accounts in newspapers. It recommended publishing offenders' names only in particularly serious cases and suggested that, where practicable, an account should be communicated to the person concerned before publication. Members were also encouraged to withhold their custom from tradespeople who mistreated animals and to explain why they had done so.
The report identified abuses by carters and butchers as requiring particular attention in Liverpool. It described the treatment of animals being driven into or through the town, including a sheep whose horn had been torn from its socket and the practice of cutting sheep's heel tendons to make them easier to drive through the streets. The committee recommended withholding trade from people who perpetrated or authorised such practices. Hannah Velten has described the Society as targeting brutality by cattle drovers.
Education formed another part of the Society's programme. The committee proposed publishing inexpensive books intended to encourage gentleness towards animals, particularly among children. It also suggested that prizes might later be offered for essays on subjects connected with animal treatment, giving "the best mode of securing honey without destroying the bees" as an example.
The committee stated that criticism of cruelty should not be confined to poorer people, arguing that duties towards animals applied to people of every social rank. It rejected deceptive methods of obtaining information and urged members to remove from their own households practices in which animals were made to suffer for amusement or luxury.
The report concluded with five practical proposals. These called for members to make weekly rounds of Liverpool's docks and other commercial districts to identify carters who overloaded horses; the printing and distribution of the town's bylaws relating to carters; legal advice on the application of existing law to cruelty towards animals; a committee to investigate and publicise cruelty cases; and another committee to prepare or select publications promoting kindness towards animals.
Later history Li states that the Society "did not seem to have lasted long". Its date of dissolution is not known. The modern RSPCA Liverpool Branch traces its history to the 1809 organisation, although its historical account states that the Liverpool branch of the RSPCA was established in 1841.
Howkins and Merricks place the Society at the beginning of the nineteenth-century growth of organised animal protection in Britain, followed by the SPCA in 1824.
See also Association for Promoting Rational Humanity towards the Animal Creation Animals' Friend Society History of animal rights History of Liverpool
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