The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [32]
But the museum was a repository for dead wildlife only, whereas the elder Roosevelt—like young Theodore—also cared deeply about live animals. Wandering down the corridors of the museum lacked the domestic intimacy of mousing with a cat, let alone the thrill of hearing a cougar snort. So Theodore Sr., teaching his four children another lesson, brought the family into the animal protection movement.
CHAPTER TWO
ANIMAL RIGHTS AND EVOLUTION
I
Cruelty to animals infuriated Theodore Roosevelt even when he was a child. The mere sight of a horse being flogged or dog kicked made him sick at heart. Overcrowded poultry cages and bounties for shooting cats, for no clear-cut scientific reason bothered him. After the Civil War, companion animals like dogs and cats were seen by society at large as a quirk of sophisticates. Working-class people, worried about rabies and flea infestation, thought of such animals mainly as disease vectors.1 (Roosevelt himself, as a college student, shot a mad dog that was menacing his horse on Long Island.2) To the Roosevelt family, however, a domesticated dog or cat was part of the family. During the Victorian era one’s obligation to a pet included making sure it didn’t suffer undue pain. No less a person than Darwin decided not to be a physician (even though his father and grandfather were physicians) because he couldn’t stomach watching hideous premodern surgical procedures (such as amputations) performed without anesthetics. Morphine and ether would not come into medical practice until the 1850s. “When the concern about pain was combined with the changing understanding of similarities between humans and animals, it became obvious that animals were also capable of suffering and feeling pain,” the historian Stephen Zawistowski has explained in Companion Animals in Society. “Thinking on this had come full circle from the Cartesian assertion that animals were automations incapable of feeling pain.”3
The Darwinian naturalists—including young Roosevelt—believed all animals and birds could feel pain; therefore, its deliberate infliction had to be stopped. Wild turkeys, lizards in pet shops, passenger pigeons, overworked donkeys—all needed to be treated fairly, in a humane, pain-free way. Roosevelt even believed some animals had thought processes and emotional lives similar to those of humans. During his presidency, he wrote to Mark Sullivan, the editor of Collier’s, “I believe that the higher mammals and birds have reasoning powers, which differ in degree rather than kind from the lower reasoning powers of, for instance, the lower savages.”4
As for hunters, Roosevelt, like his father, insisted that they follow an ethical code that would protect “wild creatures” from “destruction” by “greed and wantonness.”5 True gentleman sportsmen, Roosevelt learned as a child, needed to seize the initiative in protecting both domestic and wild animals from abusive treatment. For example, gravely wounded animals, in all circumstances, had to be immediately put out of their misery by hunters. For his entire life Roosevelt disdained steel-jaw traps. Animal shelters and horse ambulance fleets, the Roosevelt family believed, needed to be established in major cities. A form of sterilization (spaying) was needed to stop dogs and cats from overbreeding. Drawing on British notions that cockfighting and bullbaiting were intolerable, the Roosevelt clan insisted that mercy be extended to all of God’s creatures.6
As young T.R. saw it, Darwin’s Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals broke down the egocentric notion that humans were godlike and all other creatures—even chimpanzees, baboons,