Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Has Britain always been a nation of animal lovers? Well, according to Professor Helen Cey of the University of York, the answer to that

question is no. To mark 200 years since the founding of the RSPCA, David Musgrove spoke to Helen

about Victorian legislation and campaigning that sought to prevent cruelty to animals back

during the organisation's early days and how attitudes to animals have changed

since then. He began by asking when society first started to agitate for the protection

of animals against mistreatment. I suppose it starts in the Georgian era, so the late 18th century,

and historians tend to attribute it to a mix of both, I guess, new ideas,

changing attitudes and also changing social conditions. So on the one hand, you start to see,

in the late 18th century, a sort of gradual shift in perceptions of animals. And this grows in part

from new religious principles, particularly

coming from non-conformists groups like Quakers and Methodists. And they increasingly

stress that it's man's duty to actually care for God's creation, not just to kind of exploit

it and use it. At the same time, there's a more sort of secular emphasis on essentially the ideas that animals can feel pain,

and for that reason they're deserving of moral consideration.

This is perhaps best articulated by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham,

who claims that when we're thinking about, you know,

why should animals be treated with compassion and which animals?

The question isn't, you know,

can they reason? It isn't can they talk, but it's can they suffer. So that starts to become

quite significant. At the same time, you start to see sort of social changes. And the key ones here

in Britain are urbanisation and industrialisation. So urbanisation means that often more sort of middle class people are

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