Amazing animal rescues

A report in the Lichfield Mercury in May 1822 describes what is believed to be the last incident of bull baiting in the town. It tells how a bull was brought to “the Greenhill Wake”, tied to a stake and attacked by a dog.

The terrified animal broke loose, escaped to nearby Rotten Row before being recaptured and finally – after killing two other dogs that were let loose upon it – “put out of its misery”.

Bull and bear-baiting and other blood sports had been rampantly popular in Elizabethan times, but by the late 17th and early 18th centuries there were signs that people were tiring of these primitive pastimes.

The famous diarist Samual Pepys, for example, wrote in 1666 that he had attended a bull-baiting event at the ‘Beare-Garden’, which he hadn’t done for many years. While not without enjoyment, “it is a very rude and nasty pleasure,” he admitted.

Another account by John Evelyn from 1670 tells how he was forced to accompany friends to a day of blood sports. “I’m most heartily weary of this rude and dirty pastime,” he laments, a trifle hypocritically.

FOUNDING FATHERS

So when a group of men met in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St Martin’s Lane, near Leicester Square, on the evening of 16 June 1824 – almost exactly 200 years ago – to discuss how to ensure that an animal welfare act passed two years earlier could be enforced, they were beginning a new chapter in humanity’s relationship with our animal brethren.

The group included the MPs William Wilberforce and Richard Martin, but the key figure that day was the Reverend Arthur Broome, who wrote the minutes for that famous meeting; he also later went to a debtor’s prison on account of the newly formed society being £300 in debt.

Nevertheless, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (it didn’t get its royal title until 1840) was born with a mission – to inspect streets and slaughterhou