| Abstract: | In 1866, America's most widely circulating newspaper the New York Herald published an extended satire directed at Henry Bergh and his newly established American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the first animal protection organization to be established in the United States. This article takes the Herald authors' decision to satirize the animal protection movement by framing it in terms of animal ‘rights’ as an opportunity to consider the challenges associated with that frame. Weighing the ease with which the movement could be ridiculed through the concept of rights and the broader discursive landscape connected to the rights of blacks and of women in the wake of the Civil War, it argues that animal rights was far more useful as a framing strategy to the critics of the animal protection movement than it was to its proponents. In turn, the article suggests that the challenges associated with the concept of animal rights that are revealed in this satire help to explain the dominance for much of the movement's history of the animal welfare frame over that of animal rights. |
