Fighting Animal Cruelty Through Fiction

I bet you have, or at least seen the movie. Only it was called. ‘Black Beauty.’ Autobiography of A Horse was it’s original name. 

Black Beauty did what no other book back then dared do; it brought attention to the commonplace practice of animal cruelty and called it out. 

Back then, horses weren’t just ‘pets’ the way they are now, but work animals. And like any ‘tool’, their welfare in life depended 100% on who they ended up with. 

There were few if any laws to protect animals back then, and horrible practices such as cutting through the bones of a horse’s tail or chopping off the soft cartilage flaps of a dog’s ear to make them ‘cute’ to society ruled even among more ‘enlightened’ people. 

When you added to that the practice of bearing rein, the check rein or other devices designed to keep a horse’s head so high it actually injured them in the name of beauty or the practice of ‘skinning’ knees to mark an ‘undesirable animal’ for life (even if it was the owner’s fault,) you can see it was not such a great time to be a horse. 

Or any animal really.

By showing how these practices affected the animals, (instead of trying to preach it) Anna Sewell’s book inspired activists to fight for animal rights. The activists got tose practices abolished and implemented animal cruelty laws. 

Black Beauty has been called the most influential anti-cruelty novel of all time by Bernard Unti, famed animal rights activist. 

It’s also a highly entertaining anti-cruelty novel, showing that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. 

How will your book change the world?

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