On this day … 30 June 1877

Two items in the editorial columns of the Preston Chronicle shed light on that paper’s attitude to animal welfare, and presumably that of many of its readers.

The first ridiculed a ‘virtuously insane society’ which was advocating veganism. The second had a brutal solution for the problem of stray dogs, ‘Five out of every ten do not need confining but extinguishing – ought to be either drowned as evils or taxed out of existence as superfluities.’

Writing about the first, the author, possibly the paper’s editor Anthony Hewitson, wrote as follows:

‘There is a virtuously insane society in London called “The Order of Danielites”; and their chief dogma appears to be antagonism to everything in the shape of animal produce as food. Not only do they object to eat flesh meat, but they apparently refuse to either eat or drink the produce thereof. Recently, at one of their banquets, they had a custard, “made without eggs, milk, or any other animal produce.” Why didn’t they go in for a custard made of nothing?’

The author then turned his attention to stray dogs (in Preston, for some reason, owners could let their dogs stray in the winter months, but not the summer):

‘Our Corporation instructed the Town Clerk, on Thursday, to issue his usual summer notice for the confinement of dogs; so that now, for sundry months, members of the local canine confraternity will have to “hide their diminished heads” in kennels, back yards, cellars and such like quarters, wondering all the while what is to do – yelling periodically, barking repeatedly, whining often, as a sort of protest — and utterly unable to appreciate the chains which hold them, the cords which bind them, or the corporate consideration bestowed upon their general rank and file.

‘We are not quite sure whether this fastening-up business is attended with all the benefits theoretically accorded to it; physically speaking, that confinement is not a very healthy sort of thing at any time; and as dogs go mad in cold as well as in hot weather, we fail to see much advantage in mere summer enshacklement.

‘If half of the dogs which usually roam about the streets were put right out of existence, or if the dog tax were so increased as to preclude the keeping of animals by all whose circumstances or necessities fail to justify their possession, much more good would be done. Society suffers not so much through the miscellaneous rambling about of dogs in summer, as from a general, all-the-year-round plethora of them. They constitute a perennial nuisance. The streets should not only be kept clear of the bulk of dogs in summer, but every day, from January to December.

‘Five out of every ten do not need confining but extinguishing – ought to be either drowned as evils or taxed out of existence as superfluities. Extra taxation would be quite as effectual as extra hemp and extra water.’