Killing with Kindness: Ethics, Technology, and the History of Animal Euthanasia in the United States, 19th Century-Present

Abstract

This dissertation historicizes the ethical, technological, and legal development of animal euthanasia in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Grounded in the archival study of humane society records and drawing from feminist STS, multispecies studies, and disability studies traditions of care theory, it addresses two main questions. First, how did killing become entangled with the very meaning of the humane in the United States? And, second, how did humane advocates attempt to materialize a form of suffering-free death for the animals they killed? It shows that killing became recognizable as an act of care among early twentieth century American humane activists through their construction of a multispecies, eugenicist notion of the 'fit' family. They saw the family as the building block of civilizational progress and disability as the root of social decline. To kill sick animals, aggressive animals, stray animals, and animals living in what were seen as inadequate conditions was, from the point of view of the humane movement, both to save those creatures from suffering and to build a healthier, stronger society: killing removed caretaking responsibilities from households unfit to fulfill them and eliminated animals unsuited to life in human society. In a world in which there were more animals than there were humans able to properly maintain them, euthanasia or a “good death” was positioned as the next best thing to a good life for surplus dogs and cats.

The humane movement's development of this concept of the good death, its links with eugenics and with racist, classicist, and ableist notions of the ideal American family, and the logical throughlines between the humane movement's work in animal protection and child welfare is the subject of the second chapter. Subsequent chapters examine how the primacy of euthanasia for the humane movement catalyzed technological innovation, as humane activists attempted to invent their way to a solution of the problem of killing efficiently and painlessly. They demonstrate that euthanasia technologies circulated between different projects for the management of human and animal life and death. The history of the electric cage was enmeshed with the development of the electric chair for capital punishment (the subject of the third chapter); the decompression chamber with military training in World War II (the subject of the fourth chapter); and the search for animal birth control as an alternative to euthanasia with neocolonial networks of reproductive science (the subject of the fifth chapter). In excavating these histories, the dissertation pushes the fields of the history of technology and animal studies to consider animal advocates as scientists and inventors, rather than simple opponents of scientific progress, expanding in the process our understanding of who produces scientific knowledge and technological innovation, and the stakes of that production. The conclusion takes up the contemporary legacy of animal euthanasia technologies for capital punishment, reflecting that techno-optimism, the dream that technology can solve social problems, is neither new nor without danger. Whether it is reformers seeking to make capital punishment less brutal by inventing a pain-free method of execution or activists attempting to solve inequities in living standards by controlling population growth, the dissertation shows that the technologies deployed rarely led to the hoped-for result: instead, human and animal suffering often only took on new forms.