Save from Suffering": Eugenics and Animal Euthanasia in the Early Twentieth - Century Humane Movement

Animals in the Law and Humanities Working Group

Presents:

Dr. Kat Poje

"Save from Suffering": Eugenics and Animal Euthanasia in the Early Twentieth - Century Humane Movement"

Tuesday September 17, 2024
4pm - 5pm EST
Virtual

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86121245448
Meeting ID: 861 2124 5448

Abstract: Taking the American humane movement and its conception of animal euthanasia as a case study, this article pushes for a more expansive understanding of the multi-species nature of eugenics as it was developed in the early twentieth-century United States. Not only did animals serve as experimental models for eugenic theories, their place in human society was indelibly shaped by eugenic thinking and its influence on the Progressive-era American humane movement. Reading together the child welfare and animal sheltering efforts of humane organizations, this article highlights how the family policing practices deployed by humane groups, from child removal to animal euthanasia, were rooted in a eugenicist commitment to supporting so-called fit families (usually white, middle-class, and American) and containing or even eliminating so-called unfit families (usually nonwhite, working-class, and immigrant). Attending to this history illuminates a much closer link between the science of eugenics and the practice of euthanasia in the United States than typically assumed in the historiography.

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