Just a heads up, this episode deals with historical violence towards animals, dogs specifically,

as part of Victorian medical practices. I'm a little bit screamish about that kind of thing,

and I thought some of you might be as well, so consider yourself warned. That said,

it's a fascinating story worth knowing about. So, on to the show.

Battersea Park covers 200 acres right along the Thames River in London.

And there are fountains and beautiful plants and a children's zoo in there.

But there's also a small, life-sized statue of a handsome, quirky

terrier. It's got a cute face and a surprisingly contentious history. The local people would

surround the statue and try to defend it. They'd have lots of fights. This would be called. And, you know, this was about principle.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas of Skira, A celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today, we're going to Battersea Park in London to hear the story of this charming statue of a dog

and about the riots that it inspired.

More after this.

Music More after this. Around the turn of the 20th century, doctors were trying to learn more and more about how the human body worked.

And one of the ways that they were learning was by experimenting on animals.

And what people were starting to do was cutting open animals to learn about physiology and how the body works.

That's Jan Creamer. She's the president of Animal Defenders International. And dissections and

autopsies are incredible useful tools for doctors and scientists. But in this case, she's not describing an autopsy.

She is talking about something called vivisection. The name itself means live cutting.

It was the practice of dissecting a living animal normally while under anesthesia to understand or teach how its body functioned.

During the late 1800s, animal vivisection became a popular teaching method in the UK.

It started off small and then just grew quite quickly and increased year on year.

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