Canine Slaves & Dancing Bears

Canine Slaves & Dancing Bears: Compassion & Cruelty in 19th-Century Britain

To accompany our exhibition, 'Hidden Histories of Keats House', we are delighted to welcome Professor Helen Cowie to Keats House to offer an overview of human-animal interactions during the 19th century and consider how industrialisation, urbanisation and imperial expansion reconfigured cross-species relationships.

Animals were everywhere in Victorian Britain. Cattle and horses walked the streets. Dogs, cats, parrots and monkeys graced many Victorian homes. Elephants, hippos and anteaters could be seen in zoological gardens, while dogs, rabbits and frogs languished in laboratories. Victorians also consumed an increasingly global array of animal products, filling their stomachs with Argentine beef and New Zealand lamb, adorning their bodies with sealskin jackets, sleeping under eiderdown quilts and potting ivory billiard balls for entertainment.

Focusing on the emerging animal protection movement, Professor Cowie will chart the passing of the first laws to protect (some) animals from abuse and trace the changing priorities of humanitarians, whose concerns shifted from animal baiting in the 1820s to vivisection, performing animals and the fur and feather trades by the 1870s and 80s. She will ask why some animals (like the African elephant Jumbo) inspired outpourings of compassion, while the suffering of others went unnoticed; and also highlight the social biases of animal protectionists, who often targeted lower-class forms of cruelty while turning a blind eye to the abuses of the elite. Objecting to proposed legislation to ban bull-baiting, for instance, Home Secretary Robert Peel complained that it would allow a magistrate ‘after having dined upon crimped cod and…devoted the whole of his day to fox-hunting, to punish another man for baiting a bull’.

Helen Cowie is Professor of History at the University of York. Her research focuses on the history of animals and the history of natural history. She is author of 'Llama' (2017) and 'Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain' (2021) and 'Animals in World History (2025)'.