ABSTRACT
Growing fears regarding violent and unpredictable behavior fed a powerful stereotype which became a constant preoccupation of animal welfare activists, namely that brutal treatment of animals inevitably leads to the brutal treatment of human beings; accustoming oneself to violent behavior toward animal is equivalent to preparing oneself to perpetrate criminal acts on fellow human beings. As early as 1751, the English painter William Hogarth published a series of engravings entitled The Four Stages of Crue lty which enjoyed great popularity and a lasting influence. Each engraving represents a stage in the life of the fictional Tom Nero. The first print, showing one of the poorest quarters of London, depicts him as a child torturing a dog. In the second plate Tom Nero, now an adult, is a hackney coachman and is shown beating a horse which has collapsed to the ground. In the third plate he is being arrested for the brutal murder of his mistress, and in the fourth, The Reward of Cruelty , the body of Tom Nero, who does not deserve to be given a proper Christian burial, is cut up and dissected in an anatomical theater. A passing dog devours Nero‘s heart, which is lying on the floor among his entrails. The success and very wide distribution of these prints, which sold for a shilling a piece, contributed greatly to propagating the idea that children who are cruel to animals grow up to become violent criminals (Turner, 1980; Lansbury, 1985a). In 1782, The German pastor Christian-Gotthilf Salzmann mentions the instructive story of Tom Nero in Elements of Morality for the Use of Children , a book which enjoyed a great deal of success in Great Britain. By the 1820s, around the time the RSPCA was founded, the idea that cruelty to animals, particularly when perpetrated by children, would be a prelude to cruelty directed toward human beings was therefore by no means a novel notion (Grier, 1999). In 1876, the SPA bulletin commented at great length on The Four Stages of Cruelty, so remarkably described by Hogarth, and paid tribute to the way the work made a vital contribution to the spread of awareness of animal welfare issues in Britain: “the reproductions of these drawings were distributed throughout England and made a deep impression on the people who saw them” (BSPA, 1876, p. 78).
