Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 714 / September 1, 1877

In our youthful days in the early years of the present century, little consideration was given to a systematic kindness to animals. Horses were overwrought without mercy, when ill-fed and with wounds which should have excited compassion. If they sunk down in their misery, they were left to die, the chances being that, in their last hours, they were inhumanly pelted with stones by boys;—no one, not even magistrates or clergymen, giving any concern to the cruelties that were perpetrated. All that we have seen, without exciting a word of remonstrance. A wretch who habitually turned out his old, overwrought, and half-starved horses to die on the town-green, never incurred any check or reprobation. His proceedings were viewed with perfect indifference. People, while passing along in a demure sort of way to church, would see a crowd of boys pitching stones into the wounds of a dying horse, and not one of these decorous church-goers endeavoured to stop these horrid acts of inhumanity. Like the Pharisees of old, they passed on the other side. Such within recollection is a small sample of the unchecked atrocities of our young days. Cats were pelted to death. Birds' nests were robbed. Dogs had kettles tied to their tail, and were hounded to madness by howling multitudes. Oxen were overdriven to an infuriated condition, and their frantic and revengeful career formed an acceptable subject of public amusement.
Barbarous in a certain sense as these comparatively recent times were, there had already been shewn instances of a kind consideration for animals. The poet Cowper, it will be recollected, wrote touchingly of the hares which he had domesticated. Sir Walter Scott's tender regard for his dogs has been recently noticed in these pages. There was here and there a glimmering consciousness that animals had some sort of claims on the mercy of mankind. What strikes one as curious is that society had retrograded in this respect. The oldest laws in the world, found in the early books of the Old Testament, enjoin a kind treatment of animals. If we see an ass fall which belongs to some one with whom we have a cause of difference, we are to throw aside private feelings, and hasten to help the animal. We are not to take a bird when sitting on its eggs, or on its young; a most humane injunction. In various texts the Hebrews were enjoined to have due regard for the comfort of the ox, the ass, or any other animal which laboured for them. In these venerable records, mercy is enjoined towards all living creatures.