Animal Welfare Archives · The Natural Farmer

Beginning in the 1870s, animal protectionists saw the safeguarding of children and animals as equally important, as both were vulnerable creatures in need of protection.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

American animal protectionists from earlier centuries might seem unrecognizable today. Most ate meat. They believed in euthanasia as a humane end to creaturely suffering. They justified humanity’s kinship with animals through biblical ideas of gentle stewardship. They accepted animal la-bor as a compulsory burden of human need. Their sites of activism included urban streets, Sunday schools, church pulpits, classrooms, temperance meetings, and the transnational missionary field. Committed to animal welfare, they strove to prevent pain and suffering. Contemporary animal rights activists, by contrast, believe that animals possess the right to exist free from human use and consumption. Consequently, current activists and their scholarly associates often miss the historical significance of earlier eras of activism. A growing historiography, however, demonstrates the centrality of animal protection to major American transformations such as Protestant revivalism and reform, the growth of science and tech-nology, the rise of modern liberalism, child protectionism, and the development of American ideologies of benevolence.
[Read more…] about The History of Animal Protection in the United States

Glynwood pond and farm is a lovley sight seen from a farm field

From a farmer’s point of view, soils in southeastern New York abutting Connecticut are sadly lacking in the limestones, shales, and sandstone which make central and western New York such excellent farm country. Metamorphized rather than sedimentary rock often translates into stony fields with the occasional massive boulder. This is the case in much of Putnam County, east of the Hudson River and just over 50 miles from Manhattan.

Agriculture never took off there as well as it did further north and west. Instead, commerce along the Hudson and manufacturing were important. Geological deposits throughout the river valley contain veins of magnetite iron ore. Access to these deposits, as well as trees for charcoal and steam, and water power to drive machinery, meant that from colonial times into the 19th century iron works were established along both sides of the Hudson River.
[Read more…] about Glynwood:

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