Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal

4: Developing the Animal Welfare State

C h a p t e r 4 Developing the Animal Welfare State Susan J. Pearson and Kimberly K. Smith No subject has been more marginal to scholarship on American political development than animals. Indeed, Stephen Skowronek’s seminal study of statebuilding is perfectly silent on the topic in spite of the fact that one of his major case studies is the army, an organization centrally concerned throughout the nineteenth century with managing horses, draft animals, and other livestock.1 Yet animals are and long have been critical to human social and economic organization and their management has always been a critical function of American governments. It could hardly be otherwise in a society so heavily dependent on animal power. Recent research on the history of human-animal relations in the United States, however, has begun to document the role of animals in American development. As we shall demonstrate, the “animal welfare state” is highly contradictory. It seeks to balance different—sometimes competing—conceptions of animals as property, laborers, nuisances, threats to public health, objects of sentiment, and bearers of rights. Because the animal welfare state that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century built on, but did not challenge, the state’s traditional view of animals as property and subjects of police regulation, it sought to protect both animals from humans and humans from animals. Indeed, managing animal welfare often involved the state’s capacity to kill animals—a fact that underscores the complexity of the state’s animal welfare regime. Its contradictory origins and purposes notwithstanding, the development of the animal welfare state illustrates several important themes in American political development. Many developments in the state’s capacity to protect Developing the Animal Welfare State 119 animal welfare preceded and even constituted the model for later welfare regimes . Specifically, the state’s traditional authority over animals helped to create warrants for state intervention into the private domestic sphere, as well as fostering institutional innovations that extended the state’s capacity to protect children. Animal protection and regulation not only extended the role and reach of the state but it did so in ways that demonstrate a common pattern of American statebuilding: the extension of public power through “private” means.2 The animal protection functions of the state were created and enforced by nongovernmental organizations that articulated and then carried out new functions for government’s management of human-animal relations. And though the gender politics of the animal welfare movement was complicated by these organizations’ law enforcement responsibilities, women’s groups, working mostly at the local level, played a significant role in these developments—a pattern consistent with the findings of other chapters in this book. Development of Animal Administrative Apparatuses As sources of wealth and labor power, and as constituents of the public peace, domestic animals were subject to extensive communal control during the colonial and early republic periods. Wild animals, by contrast, were treated primarily as an unregulated resource or a threat to be eliminated. American colonists enjoyed considerable freedom from the restrictive hunting laws common to European polities.3 But domestic animals were well integrated into colonial social communities and a major concern of colonial governments . New Englanders exercised the greatest degree of communal control over animals; town governments were well organized and the settlers practiced mixed husbandry. Raising livestock and crops together in close proximity to human habitation required close control of animals, and local governments exercised considerable authority to manage animal/human relationships . In addition to requiring farmers to pay for damages caused by wandering livestock, town governments typically took responsibility for providing pasture, paying herders’ fees, and ensuring that cropland was adequately fenced. The New England colonies developed a complex set of land use practices designed to keep livestock separate from croplands and under strict control.4 Some towns even regulated livestock breeding, appointing officials to determine which bull calves would be allowed to breed.5 100.120] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 11:19 GMT) 120 Susan J. Pearson and Kimberly K. Smith Additionally, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Body of Liberties, the code of laws passed by the colony in 1641, made it a crime to “exercise any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man’s use.”6 Like regulations governing movement and breeding of livestock, the prohibition on “crueltie” stemmed from colonists’ understanding that animals comprised part of the social order, not from any recognition of rights held by animals. Allowing humans...