The Ada Cole Story

The Ada Cole Story

by | Sep 16, 2016 | History

 

O ne of the threads running through the Unbound Project is a celebration of women who have made a difference for animals in previous eras. So often their stories are forgotten over time, and we want to change that. We want to celebrate these women and share their stories with the world. We were absolutely thrilled when we received a grant from Brock University that allowed us to hire Brittany Brooks to make a short animated feature about Ada Cole, an English woman who fought against the cruelty of the live horse export industry in the early 20th century.

Ada Cole did not set out to be an activist, but once she came face-to-face with the cruelty of the live export industry she knew she had to do something about it. She was an ordinary citizen who took matters in to her own hands. She witnessed cruelty and refused to look away. Cole used photography and film to document what she saw and hoped that the resulting images would get others to join her campaign against these cruel practices. As one might expect, she did not receive a warm welcome from those working in the live export industry and her efforts to take pictures were often thwarted. Cole hired a painter named Kurt Peiser to go undercover dressed as a dock worker so that he could sketch and paint what he was seeing as horses were unloaded from the ships that had sailed from England to Belgium.

Given the prevalence of visual encounters (witnessing, photography, film, art) in this story, we knew that we wanted to tell it in a very visually appealing way. We think that Brittany’s work is a perfect fit for The Unbound Project!

Brittany created over 100 hand painted water colour pieces for this animation and those paintings were then animated in Adobe After Effects.

We asked Brittany to tell us a bit about her involvement with this project.

Was there something about Ada Cole’s story that really stood out for you when you were doing research for this project?

I was immediately drawn into Ada Cole’s story because of her ambition and determination. In a day and age when women did not even have the right to vote, Ada was driven to better the world for animals. I also found her story very inspiring because she used her camera as a tool of social justice. As a visual artist, it was exciting to see Ada use photographs and paintings to show the truth that people chose to ignore.

What did you learn by doing this project?

Before this project I had never heard of Ada Cole so I was very keen to begin researching her. Not only was I unfamiliar with her story, but I was also unaware of the way in which animals were being treated in the late 19th century. I learned how important activists like Ada were at this time who chose to question vivisection practices and were interested in animal welfare.

From a technical perspective, I learned many new animation techniques that I had never experimented with before. I used a process that required both analogue and digital methods. I began by using the research I had conducted to create a storyboard outlining the key points of Ada’s story. I then hand-painted all of the characters, backgrounds and scenery using gouache and scanned them into Photoshop where I separated each element from it’s background.

Using Adobe After Effects I was able to digitally animate the elements by layering and mapping their movement paths. Since I had never used a digital technique like this before I relied heavily on After Effects video tutorials and online forums. Combining my previous analogue animation experience and these new digital techniques I was able to create this work using an entirely new approach.

How important is art in connecting viewers with the past?

I think that art actualizes the past and is an invitation for viewers to look at a historical moment through a new lens. With Ada Cole’s story, information was not very easy to find and this required me to do some deep research. Hopefully this artwork will make Ada’s story more accessible and present viewers with a snapshot of her life and work in a via visuals and sounds.

What do you see as being the connection between art and activism/social justice?

Both artists and activists question boundaries and challenge cultural issues. Art becomes even more powerful when it is used as a tool of social justice as it acts as a vehicle that empowers individuals and communities. Art belongs to everyone and helps give a voice to those who want to share the truth and advocate for what they believe.

Why was this a project that you wanted to take on?

There were many reasons I signed up for this special project. It began by being very inspired by the mission of the Unbound Project and my desire to help celebrate these women who are interested in animal welfare.I listened to Jo-Anne McArthur give a lecture on her work and was absolutely taken by how powerful her photographs are. I also enjoyed that Unbound was a multimedia project and was open to using a variety of mediums and art forms to share these stories. I am so excited to be a part of Unbound, as it was a huge learning opportunity and a wonderful new challenge for me as an artist and activist.

Brittany BrooksBrittany Brooks is a multidisciplinary artist who splits her time between St. Catharines and Toronto, ON. Her practice includes, but is not limited to; visual art, performance and music.
Brittany recently earned her undergraduate degree from Brock University, majoring in Studio Art. She has participated in residencies at Spark Box Studios, White Rabbit Arts, and The Green Belt Gallery which cultivated her solo exhibition Rutabager and her original handmade layered projection show The Fireside Book of Fictitious Folk Songs. Her band Creature Speak released a full length album Shadow Songs, which has since drawn international praise from Bandcamp, Bitch-Media, Exclaim, Folk Radio UK and more. She is a Jr. Programmer for the In the Soil Arts Festival and is currently working at the Art Museum at The University of Toronto.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

by | Sep 10, 2016 | History

“Not a Drop to Wet Their Poor Parched Mouths”

 

Kindness to Sheep

A round 1870 Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, witnessed an act of compassion that deeply touched her. She had been on a train journey, and near Fitchburg her train pulled up alongside another train at a station stop. As she waited for her train to continue, Alcott passed the time by looking out her window at the sights — a beautiful waterfall caught her attention, but she also noticed that in the train next to hers were several cattle and sheep crammed in to rail cars.
It was a hot, sunny day and Alcott recognized that the animals must have been scared, uncomfortable, and thirsty. As she noted, “how they must have suffered in sight of water, with the cool dash of the fall tantalizing them, and not a drop to wet their poor parched mouths.” She was troubled by the very visible distress of the animals in the next train and was pondering how she might best help them when she noticed two young girls come up beside the train. The girls had been out picking berries and, upon noticing the animals in distress, one of the girls dumped out her berry pail, ran to the water’s edge and filled her bucket with water. She returned to the train and offered the water to the sheep “who stretched their hot tongues gratefully to meet it.” She repeated this numerous times while her companion picked grass and clover to feed to the animals. Alcott was touched by this kindness and wrote that she wished she “could have told those tender-hearted children how beautiful their compassion made that hot, noisy place.”

This story was repeated in a number of 19th century animal advocacy and humane education publications, often with the above image accompanying it. The actions of these two young girls became a lesson in kindness and compassion.

Over 140 years later a similar story is being told. Members of Toronto Pig Save, a grassroots organization that aims to bear witness to the suffering of animals who are raised and killed for food, have made headlines for giving water to pigs arriving at slaughterhouses on transport trucks. Their actions mimic those of the young girls that Alcott wrote about in 1870. This past summer, a heated exchange between one of the activists, Anita Krajnc, and the driver of one of the trucks has led to a criminal charge of mischief for Krajnc.

It is utterly absurd that we live in a world where kindness and compassion is criminalized. What, I wonder, would Louisa May Alcott have to say about this ridiculous charge?

*This post was also published on Dr. Cronin’s website.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

by | Sep 10, 2016 | History

The Mouse’s Petition

 

The Mouse's Petition

I n 1773 Anna Laetitia Barbauld published a poem called “The Mouse’s Petition.” The poem was written from the point of view of a mouse who had been captured in the home of Barbauld’s friend, the renowned natural philosopher Joseph Priestley. The mouse was placed in a cage in Priestley’s laboratory as he intended to use the animal in one of his experiments the next day. Barbauld’s poem was a plea for mercy, and she slipped in to Priestley’s lab to affix it to the cage so that he would see it prior to beginning his experiment on the mouse.
The poem begins with the following lines:

O hear a pensive prisoner’s prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the wretch’s cries!
For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry grate; And tremble at the’ approaching morn, Which brings impending fate.

Thomas Holloway, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1785)

Thomas Holloway, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1785)

Priestley reportedly released the mouse after reading Barbauld’s poem. Many of Barbauld’s contemporaries championed “The Mouse’s Petition” as an important contribution to the conversations about cruelty to animals that were taking place in the 18th century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, noted that “thanks to Mrs. Barbauld,… it has become universally fashionable to teach lessons of compassion towards animals.”* Barbauld later stated that this poem was actually meant to be a “petition of mercy against justice.”* In either case “The Mouse’s Petition” is an important early example of a creative work that prompted readers to empathize with nonhuman animals and to consider the often unjust ways they are treated.

*See Mary Ellen Bellanca, “Science, Animal Sympathy and Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition.’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 no. 1 (Fall 2003): 47-67; Julia Saunders, “‘The Mouse’s Petition’: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Scientific Revolution.” The Review of English Studies 53 no. 212 (November 2002): 500-516.
**This post was also published on Dr. Cronin’s website.

Maude Freshel

Maude Freshel

by | Sep 10, 2016 | History

“We Practice the Convictions of our Minds and Hearts”

 

Maude Freshel

A s the weather starts to turn colder, many of us are thinking about getting a new winter coat. I love that there are so many cruelty-free fashions to pick from! Imagine my delight, then, when during the course of my research I learned about a woman who was making cruelty-free alternatives to fur coats, silk scarves, and “kid” gloves over 100 years ago! Her name was Maude (“Emarel”) Freshel, and she was the co-founder of an organization known as the Millennium Guild. The Guild advocated for a lifestyle that included a vegetarian diet and hosted lavish meat-free Thanksgiving dinners in Boston in the early years of the 20th century. The sale of the cruelty-free outerwear that Freshel sewed helped to fund the activities of the Guild. A number of these fashions were featured in the Boston Sunday Post on November 17, 1912.

Freshel told reporter that members of the Millennium guild “have found splendid substitutes for furs, feather hat trimmings and kid gloves, and know we are better off without eating meat. We practice the convictions of our minds and hearts.”

Freshel was also the author of The Golden Rule Cookbook, a vegetarian cookbook promoting the abstention from meat eating for ethical reasons. Freshel defined a vegetarian (remember, the term “vegan” didn’t exist until 1944) as someone who “for one reason or another condemns the eating of flesh.” She saw this as occupying “a very different place in the world of ethics from one who is simply refraining from meat eating in an effort to cure bodily ills.” Freshel’s dog, a terrier named Sister, was also a vegetarian and reportedly enjoyed such foods as lentils, peas, apples, oatmeal, and buttered toast.

*This post was also published on Dr. Cronin’s website.

Fanny Martin

Fanny Martin

by | Sep 8, 2016 | History

Illustration of Fanny Martin by Brittany Brooks

Being an advocate for animals can be a challenging task. It is very difficult to so be acutely aware of the many ways in which animals are exploited and harmed in our contemporary world because we are surrounded by reminders of just how ubiquitous this cruelty is. Take, for example, a holiday meal with friends and family where a meat dish is the centrepiece–where others may see a tasty treat, an animal welfare/rights/liberation activist may see a visceral reminder of suffering and death. To be constantly faced with these material reminders of the ways in which animals are (mis)treated in our society can certainly take an emotional toll. Recently there have been a number of articles offering tips on how to avoid compassion fatigue, activist burnout and how to combat the depression that often goes hand-in-hand with caring deeply for those who are suffering.

As I read these articles I can not help but think of Marie-Françoise (“Fanny”) Bernard (née Martin) who was married to Claude Bernard, a 19th century French physiologist best known for his experiments on animals. Claude Bernard was often the focus of public anti-vivisection campaigns conducted by people like Frances Power Cobbe, but this tension also played out within his domestic life. Fanny Martin detested her husband’s experiments on animals, many of which he conducted at home. To add insult to injury, the dowry paid by her father at the time of the marriage in 1845 helped to fund many of Bernard’s experiments on animals.

Perhaps as a way to attempt to make amends for her husband’s treatment of animals in his laboratory, Fanny Martin and her two daughters established a “rescue home” for stray dogs and cats. They also attended anti-vivisection protests and volunteered with the Société protectrice des animaux. Finally, in 1870 the couple legally separated, no easy task for Catholics in 19th century France!

* Deborah Rudacille, The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000): 19.

* Deborah Rudacille, The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000): 19.

Fanny Martin’s empathy for animals must have made her life with Bernard nearly unbearable. I marvel at the courage it must have taken for a woman in the 19th century to stand up to her husband and to take their children to protests that directly opposed their father’s work. Her volunteer work and the efforts she put in to setting up an institution to care for neglected, stray, sick, and lost dogs and cats (many of whom would otherwise end up in vivisection laboratories) is an almost forgotten footnote in the history of animal advocacy. Indeed, very little has been written about Martin and what does exist is mostly gleaned from biographies of her famous husband, biographies that, as one writer noted, “dismiss her as an uneducated woman who made Bernard’s home life hell and deprived him of the company of his daughters.”*

I propose we change this dialogue and remember Fanny Martin for her courage, bravery, and her uncompromising empathy for animals. May she serve as an inspiration for those continuing to stand up against cruelty to animals.