The Darkest Stain on American Civilization (1910)

AUTHOR: Fiske, Minnie Maddern

This short essay fiercely defends animal rights and promotes animal welfare, particularly with respect to vivisection, trapping, and livestock farming. Fiske begins her pamphlet by stating that while “[m]ans inhumanity to man often taxes one's incredulity,” his “almost complete inability to perceive or understand his duty towards the dumb beasts of the earth which are placed here at his mercy” is “still more monstrous” (3-4). Indeed, “[m]an's cruelty to animals transcends all his other crimes” (4). She particularly laments the lack of empathy of the wealthy (4-5).

She then lists and denounces in turn three types of cruelty towards animals, starting with vivisection of which she writes: “No prisons, no death cells, no obscure haunts of vice ever have sheltered beings who have so perfectly achieved the annihilation of the common sense of mercy as the vivisectors have achieved it” (5). Trapping is next on her list. Of the woman wearing furs, she says: “She is not wicked. She is only dull and stupid and half alive. She knows no what she does. There may be dead bodies of birds on her head. Mink tails may tangle about her. […] She is repulsive and she is pitiable” (6). Fiske then quotes an extensive passage detailing the horrors of trapping. Third on her list is livestock farming, which for Fiske amounts to the titular “darkest stain on our American civilization” (8). She again quotes several authors detailing the suffering of “the cattle on the plains” (8). Left neglected on the plains during winter, they suffer exceedingly from “starvation, thirst, and cold” (9), hundreds of thousands of them dying every year.

According to Fiske, in 1904, there were around 30,000,000 “range stock” on about “18,000,000 square miles” throughout the US (10). Ranchers expect “to lose from 5 to 15 per cent by starvation,” with “25 to 50 per cent” amounting to “a bad year” (11). She then claims that “[t]here is more suffering in one winter day among the thousands of dying – and starving but not dying – cattle of the ranges in the West then could be represented by any two years of suffering among factory and other operatives in the East” (11), emphatically restating her earlier verdict: “There is no blacker stain on the civilization of this nation than is represented by this deliberate and unfeeling sacrifice of stock in unnumbered quantities in a species of commercial gambling” (11-12).

To change this untenable condition, Fiske calls for both “the rousing of public feeling” and legislation (13). She closes the pamphlet by asking her readers to donate to the “humane society” in order to enable it “to carry on the investigations and give publicity to the facts” (13).