Our Kindred Creatures

How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals

By: Bill Wasik, Monica Murphy

Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau

A compassionate, sweeping history of the transformation in American attitudes toward animals by the best-selling authors of Rabid

Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, their suffering had rarely been discussed; horses pulling carriages and carts were routinely beaten in public view, and dogs were pitted against each other for entertainment and gambling. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst.

In Our Kindred Creatures, Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and veterinarian Monica Murphy offer a fascinating history of this crusade and the battles it sparked in American life. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians and conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own right: animal impresarios such as P.T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the nation’s rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about how animals should be treated.

In recounting this remarkable period of moral transition—which, by the turn of the twentieth century, would give birth to the attitudes we hold toward animals today—Wasik and Murphy challenge us to consider the obligations we still have to all our kindred creatures.

Cover painting: Peaceable Kingdom, 1834 (detail) by Edward Hicks. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

©2024 Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Our Kindred Creatures is the most elegantly written, rigorously researched, and morally nuanced portrait of America's early animal advocates I've ever read. More important, it's the story of how widespread social change happens. Anyone who cares about human-animal relationships should put this book at the very top of their reading list.”—Bronwen Dickey, author of Pit Bull

“[Our Kindred Creatures] is at once a model of historical recovery and a bracing takedown of our own attitudes toward those we caress and those we devour.”—Anne Matthews, The American Scholar

"Our Kindred Creatures chronicles one of the great shifts in perspective of the 19th century: the recognition that the suffering and well-being of animals belong to the sphere of human morality. Populated by a cast of mesmerizing characters (and creatures), the book gives us a thrilling secret history of the 19th century, helping us understand how a new, world-changing idea first takes flight."—Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map

Great perspective

Great ability to link humanity and humane behavior to animal welfare, climate change and evolving norms of ethical conduct.