Bonzo's War Read Free

monthly magazine,
The Animal World
, were published unbroken. The Society had an ambitious foreign policy promoting animal welfare schemes in Poland, Finland (which were short-lived) and the Soviet Union.
    Our Dumb Friends’ League (founded in 1897) was not nearly so grand, and was less interested in prosecuting the cruel than the active promotion of kindness. The League had launched the ‘Blue Cross Fund’ to assist military horses during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and found support for its continuation in the Great War. It faced down a pre-war mutiny led by a countess over the alleged ‘disgraceful condition’ of the North London Dogs Home.
    The plight of ‘old war horses’ sold on post-1918 to beastly locals in France, Belgium and Egypt proved a big fund-raiser right up to the eve of a new war (an equivalent German campaign in 1938 to give old horses ‘war comrade medals’ and ‘free oats for poor farmers’ found nine British Army horses that had fallen into German hands, still alive).
    Money flowed in. Two years into the war, a former dustman willed a huge amount to the League to look after his cat, but it had inconveniently disappeared. However, the League promised to track it down and make it comfortable till the end of its days.
    The League had drifted uncertainly to the radical wing of animal rights – with a ‘political committee’ which campaigned among other things for a rise in the legal status of cats (‘currently the same as a weasel’) and for the National Trust to ban fox hunting on its land. One activist watched by Special Branch was a member of the British Union of Fascists.
    There was a big row in 1938 with a mass defection of aristocratic patrons when the secretary, a Mr E. Keith Robinson, said: ‘We feel that people would get just as much fun from a drag hunt as they would from chasing a wretched little fox across the country.’ The League published annual reports throughout the war.
    The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor, founded by Mrs Maria Dickin in the East End of London in 1917, was a relative newcomer – offering free medical care for lowlier pets and working animals. Its relationship with the veterinary profession was turbulent. However, its dispensaries, mobile ‘caravans’ and volunteers would be at the forefront of animal rescue when British cities were bombed.
    In a mid-war publicity masterstroke, the PDSA founded both the Services Mascot Club and endowed the ‘Dickin Medal’ for gallantry, named for its founder. But it was for ‘service’ animals only. In fact most of the recipients were carrier pigeons of the National Pigeon Service. Winners of the Our Dumb Friends’ League’s ‘Blue Cross’ and the RSPCA’s ‘For Valour’ medallion for animal bravery are less well known.
    At the war’s end Mrs Dickin wrote a prospectus for an ‘Allied Forces Animals’ War Memorial Fund’ to remember those ‘animals and birds who have suffered and died on active service in our time of terrible need’. She wanted a ‘practical memorial in the shape of ten mobile dispensaries’.But the charity’s founder furthermore included what she called ‘those civilian animals who shared with us the horrors of the raids’. As she said:
    The P.D.S.A. Rescue Squads were eye-witnesses of their misery, and know how they suffered. Like their comrades on active service, these animals frequently ignored their own danger to stand by and help their owners; often they struggled to find and help them in blazing buildings, when they themselves could so easily have escaped to safety alone. Truly they were faithful unto death.
    It would be ‘a tribute to the Unknown Animals who gave their lives in service for us, or were innocent victims in our war, not theirs’. She even made an analogy with the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in