Author: Sandra Kyle

A remarkable early vegan dedicated her life to ending vivisection, as well as the protection and rights of animals

Emilie Augusta Louise “Lizzy” Lind af Hageby (20 September 1878 – 26 December 1963) was a Swedish-born British feminist and animal advocate who became a prominent anti-vivisectionist in England in the early twentieth century.

Born into a wealthy and noble Swedish family, Lind af Hageby was the granddaughter of the chamberlain to the King of Sweden, and the daughter of Emil Lind af Hageby, a prominent lawyer. Fortunate to have a private income, her education and financial independence enabled her to pursue her political activism.  She wrote books and tracts, and travelled the world to deliver lectures when most women of her class were expected to stay at home embroidering.

After attending Cheltenham Ladies College in England, in 1900 Lind af Hageby went to Paris, where she and a Swedish friend, Leisa Katherine Schartau, visited the celebrated Pasteur Institute.  They were distressed by the vivisection they saw there, and when they returned to Sweden joined the Nordic Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1902 the women decided to enrol at the London School of Medicine for Women to gain the medical education they needed to train themselves as anti-vivisection activists.  They infiltrated School of Medicine lectures to document the vivisection that was taking place there, and in 1903 they witnessed a procedure carried out by one Professor Starling.  Professor Starling had previously performed an operation on a brown terrier dog two months prior, depriving it of the use of its pancreas. In the intervening time the dog had been living in a cage, upsetting many with its howls and whines.

On the day they were there, the young women watched as Professor Starling opened up the dog’s abdomen to inspect the result of the first operation.  He then clamped the wound and handed the animal over to a Dr. Bayliss, who made a completely new wound in the neck for the purpose of another lecture. After another half hour, the animal, conscious and apparently suffering greatly, was given to an unlicensed research student who killed it.

That same year Lind and Schartau published a book that included the distressing incident they had witnessed, called ‘Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology’.  They wrote up the operation on the brown dog in a chapter called  ‘Fun’, describing how he had been dissected without anaesthesia in front of an audience of laughing medical students.   The book became an instant hit, sparking a nationwide discussion about vivisection and resulting in a Court case against the doctors, who, in not sufficiently anaesthetising the dog, acted illegally.  Bayliss testified that the dog had been anaesthetized and was suffering from chorea, a disease that caused involuntary spasms.  The jury accepted Bayliss’s account, and the book was withdrawn only to be re-published by Lind af Hageby without the controversial chapter,  and with a new chapter about the trial.  The protracted scandal that became known as ‘The Brown Dog Affair’ went on for years, caused riots, and divided the country.

The first statue of the brown dog by Joseph Whitehead was presumed destroyed in 1910.

A new statue by Nicola Hicks was erected in Battersea Park in 1985 to remember all the animals who have suffered and died in laboratories. 

In 1906 Lind af Hageby co-founded the Animal Defense and Anti Vivisection Society (ADAVS) with the Duchess of Hamilton. As part of the society’s work, Lind af Hageby drafted a petition in or around 1906, called ‘Anti-Vivisection Declaration’, which was distributed around the world, and translated into several languages. In July 1909 she organized the first international anti-vivisection conference in London.

‘She is a woman of marvellous power’.

Lind af Hageby became known as an extraordinary speaker, particularly after a second libel trial in 1913, when she sued Dr. Caleb Saleeby and the Pall Mall Gazette over two articles by Saleeby accusing her of ‘a systematic campaign of falsehood’.   She represented herself during the trial, and her opening statement lasted nine-and-a-half hours, her evidence nine hours, her cross-examination eight-and-a-half hours, and her closing statement three-and-a-half hours!   The trial judge, Mr Justice Bugnell later said: “Her final speech was a very fine one… She is a woman of marvellous power.”

Lind af Hageby lost the case, but it attracted publicity for her mission.  A vegetarian dinner was held in her honour after the trial.

During World War I Lind af Hageby joined the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, set up veterinary hospitals for horses hurt on the battlefield and with the co-operation of the French government created the Purple Cross Service for wounded horses.   She also opened a sanatorium in France for wounded soldiers, and wrote anti-war pamphlets.  After the war she became involved in protesting against blood sports, and opposed the sale of old horses to slaughterhouses.

She continued throughout her life to advocate social reform and economic equality living as a vegan and becoming a board member of the London Vegetarian Society. She was also active in the Humanitarian League.   An admirer of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, she saw it as essential to the cause of animals, because it

“brought about the decay of the old anthropocentric idea of man … It taught that if there is this kinship physically between all living creatures, surely a responsibility rests upon us to see that these creatures, who have nerves as we have, who are made of the same flesh and blood as we are, who have minds differing from ours not in kind but in degree, should be protected …”

In 1950, at the age of 73, she attended The Hague World Congress for the Protection of Animals.   From 1954 she ran a 237-acre animal sanctuary near Shaftesbury in Dorset, an estate left to the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society by the Duchess of Hamilton.

Lind af Hageby died at her home in London at 7 St Edmunds Terrace, St John’s Wood on 26 December 1963. The society’s assets were transferred to the Animal Defence Trust, which continues to this day to offer grants for animal-protection issues.

See also:

The Little Brown Dog

End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH reflects on our lack of connectedness with other animals, and how we can turn it around

The notion of intimacy, the feeling of closeness and connection, is linked to a sense of belonging. When we connect with others, we feel ourselves as not just a separate being but as one who has a meaningful place among others. Humans are deeply social beings, fragile and vulnerable to being cast adrift. Without each other we are like Tom Hanks on the movie Castaway, slowly going insane, creating a friend out of a volleyball just to feel a sense of connection.

Tom Hanks as The Castaway, and his friend ‘Wilson’ the Volleyball

With the exception of few hermits, who have somehow managed to completely detach from every other living being, most of us need each other. And it’s not just humans we seek to connect with. Many people gain an important sense of connection from the non-human animals that share their lives. And many non-human animals such as dogs are reciprocally connected to us, having co-evolved ‘around the campfire’.

Dogs and humans have been evolving together for 32,000 years

Animal species are similar in this regard.   They often live in herds or colonies with varying levels of complexity. They may also associate with animals of other species if it is mutually beneficial. Some species may have a predatory relationship with other species – but as Mathew Ricard (author of ‘A Plea for the Animals’)  says, the vast majority of animals will largely ignore other species. Mostly non-human animals will exist peacefully together.

Interdependence refers to the way all animals, including humans, have evolved together in a vast and intricate ecological web. I can’t pretend to be an ecologist, and I will leave the deep knowledge around the systems in the biosphere to them, but when thinking about our place on Earth one thing remains clear. We not only need humans, but also non-human animals to not only survive, but to thrive.

Yet our current relationship with nonhuman animals is deeply malevolent. We trash their homes with the ease of erasing a picture from a blackboard; cutting down rainforests, draining wetlands, burning scrub lands and damning rivers, mining the Earth and the sea beds.  At times we even reverse the course of a river’s flow for human advantage, such is our sense of entitlement. We pollute the homes of animals with plastics and other rubbish, as well as industrial waste.

A young seabird with the contents of its stomach

And then when it all gets too much, when we have had enough shopping in malls,  we go into nature to reconnect!   Intuitively we know how far we have come from ourselves, from our kinship with those around us. The sense of intimacy we need with nature is as important to us as our relationship with other humans.

A recent study has shown that humans make up 0.01% of all life, but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals… 60% of all mammals on Earth are now farmed.

It is hard to deny that we have lost our way as a species. A recent study has shown that humans make up 0.01% of all life, but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals. Conversely, domesticated farm animals kept by humans such as cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and so on abound. The same study demonstrated that 60% of all mammals on Earth are now farmed.

The relationship between the farmer and the farmed animal is one of exploitation and betrayal from the outset.

To make matters worse, farmed animals are the most abused on Earth. Kept in varying degrees of captivity they have become completely reliant on the people who farm them. However, the relationship between the farmer and the farmed animal is one of exploitation and betrayal from the outset. Despite declaring a love for the animals in their care, farmers ultimately send them to be killed at a mere fraction of their lives.

Farmers raise cattle who come to depend on them, then they send them to slaughter

Our dependence as a species on the flesh and secretions of our kin (nonhuman animals) is frankly disturbing. The integrity of the nonhuman animal kept on farms is considered at best in welfare terms. They are given no agency and limited freedom (in a narrow sense of the word). Policy speak and legal requirements for their welfare can serve to obscure the hell they live in. Despite increasing access to video footage from farms showing the exploitative and cruel conditions farm animals are subject to, many humans continue to seek justification for farming and eating animals and their products.

In general, we don’t like to identify with the side of the oppressor. Yet sometimes it is hard to see, hard to accept, that we are the oppressor simply by participating in the malevolent order that has been created. By eating meat, for example, we are saying that it is acceptable to farm a sentient being for their flesh. We are saying we are fine with being the 0.01 % of Earth that chooses to incarcerate and exploit all other nonhuman animals.

It is time to rethink our relationship with nonhuman animals and see them in terms of kinship rather than ‘the other’. Only then will we feel the true sense of intimacy with animals, one based on love and compassion. Only then will we have a life worth living.