This moment in history is always so depressing. NARPAC was put together because so many people were forced to abandon their pets in World War I that a big feral/stray pet population formed, and their recommendation for World War II was to arrange care and transport pets to the countryside if possible. Killing them humanely (my mistake - not euthanasia; families were recommended to use a gun) was presented as an alternative to simply abandoning them on the streets when families could no longer afford to feed them in the event of a bombing campaign. It's speculated that families leaped to kill their pets because they wanted to feel like they were contributing in some way, not out of any real necessity. For one thing, the predicted food shortages never materialized.
There wasn't a widespread parallel effort in the US, but if you read Albert Payson Terhune's books about Lad and other collies, you'll see a similar sentiment being discussed and rejected by the family at the center of the series.
My grandmother’s pets were all put down because they went mad with fear from the bombs. Think how many dogs are afraid of fireworks nowadays. And the fear isn’t just while theyre going off, they can be frantic for hours or days afterwards. Apparently their dog just lost it after the first wave, and would just pace and cry all day. Gran said loads of people put their pets down for this reason. I appreciate that’s just her account but it stayed with her all her life.
My dog was like that with fireworks. The fear progressively got worse. Fireworks, loud bangs, doors closing, pots clanging till eventually the click of the tv turning off. It was shortly after that we had to put him down as he could no longer cope in the world. He was such a good boy but no amount of behaviour therapy, training, drugs could help him. It was determined that his issues were the result of being at animal services in a noisy kennel with no way out for a year when he was just a puppy. He was a Husky/ Shepherd and he tried so incredibly hard to over come his problems.
I can only imagine poor animals trying to deal with war. Heartbreaking
They put their dog down because, and I quote, “no amount of behaviour therapy, training, or drugs could help him,” and he “could no longer cope in the world.”
No telling in any individual case, but it would be very common for children in this era to either have been told their pets "went mad with fear" or to have come up with this explanation ad hoc. Without some contemporaneous written account, I'd be very dubious.
She described seeing it, so if she said she did then she did. Not really cool to argue against someone’s lived experience. Absolutely mad you have the nerve to call my grandmother, who you’ve never met, a liar.
They weren't calling your Nan a liar, they were calling the adults around her a liar, and lying to her for what they deemed her own good.
Like telling a kid 'Fido was sent to a farm in the countryside where he could run around' instead of admitting he was killed because the family couldn't afford to feed him or were getting the stink eye from neighbours who thought them 'wasting valuable resources on an animal during a time of war'.
I believe her tbh. We're cat people but I see how fireworks affect the dogs I know and bombs are so much louder. I reckon a decent amount of my friends would euthanize their much beloved dogs if they were suddenly having that on a regular basis with no end in sight, at that point it's just not fair.
Just pointing out that using a gun is a valid method of euthanasia and (like all methods of euthanasia) is humane if done correctly, as the person I was replying to didn't seem aware.
There weren't food shortages, but there was heavy rationing and pets did not receive rations so if those animals hadn't been put down their food would have had to come from somewhere.
Pets are in this weird bucket that nobody really wants to think about. They're alive and we love them, but they're simultaneously completely dependent on humans, completely unable to ever safely stop being dependent on humans (feral pets can and do survive, but they're wildly destructive to wild species) and completely without functional purpose. They exist purely for human enjoyment and as much as can ever be said about a living thing they actually are a luxury.
So experts predict food shortages unless rationing is implemented. One of the consequences of that rationing would be difficulty in feeding pets along with the humans. So options were suggested to people and they took them as each to their means.
BUT food shortages never happened and that had nothing to do with rationing. Have I got that right?
Rations did not include pet food and the cost of feeding pets was never part of the calculus. Experts wanted to reduce the number of people who would give up their rations to feed their pets by recommending they evacuate their animals and arrange care for them in safe areas, and only recommended euthanasia as a backup measure if they had no other options. Once the pet culls started, the same experts issued calls for people to stop and that this was unnecessary.
Edit: Small correction, the recommendation to evacuate pets was not about food; it was to prevent people from leaving their pets behind in the event of evacuation, which happened in World War I and created a population of feral animals left to starve, fight, and die slowly. Memories of food shortages in World War I and a desire to prevent their pets from suffering led people to believe that death was the better option.
Given the memories of the animals suffering previously, if you genuinely think that's likely to happen again then I would think that killing them IS the kinder option. Obviously easy for me to say with my first world issues but I think in that situation id have done the same. Id much rather put my cats down than have them suffer horribly like that.
I don't know where you're getting that food shortages weren't a thing. They absolutely were. Rationing was simply meant to prevent extreme shortages.
For example, we rationed the amount of toilet paper people could buy during Covid panic buying, but shortages still occurred because even though more people were able to get toilet paper than if they hadn't rationed it, there was still only so much toilet paper to go around.
Were gun laws significantly different in the UK back then? Because today, the advice to use a gun for something is about as practical for the general public as to use a Lamborghini. Sure, they exist, but it's not like most people have access to one.
I get that the Firearms Act of 1968 repealed and supplanted the Firearms Act of 1937 but they're not that different in terms of public access, are they?
Edit: Great, I'm being downvoted for asking a question about history in /r/history. Reddit is weird. I'm not trying to be political or anything. I'm just legitimately curious about how this morbid thing worked. Having lived in London, I find it hard to believe that everyone had a gun in the 1940s and could just take Old Yeller out behind the shed. That's not the living scenario most people had. But it seems to be what NARPAC was advising. How did that resolve?
I remember reading the parts with the old man who had pet bulldogs in The Hiding Place- how he saved his ration cards so he could give them meat for their final meals. That man stays in my mind these days.
But like, for real though if some apocalyptic event happened I don't know that my cats would make it. They have basically no survival instincts and if things were really bad I'd probably be struggling to survive myself, let alone feed them. Best thing I could probably do for them in that scenario is let them outside and hope they managed to fend for themselves.
They're cats. They have survival instincts, probably more than dogs. Abandon them outside and they've be hunting pests and killing wildlife in no time.
Cats are like horses, both very hardy and very fragile. Some would indeed be fine. Many others would literally hide under a bush and be too weak to save themselves within days. They don’t have a lot of metabolic leeway for learning to hunt as an adult.
As an extreme example, my parents had a damaged rescue cat that snuck outside and got turned around—even though she was medically okay when they found her just a few days later, she was so traumatized she basically just willed herself to die and didn’t eat again.
This was illustrated recently by the case of the Lynx that were released in Scotland by someone hoping to speed up the process of rewilding there. It's the perfect habitat for them and lots of prey. But when eventually found one was almost dead from starvation. They'd been raised in captivity so although far from a 'pet' they did not have the refined hunting skills needed to survive.
They're doing well in a wildlife park now. It was an illegal release into the wild by someone hoping to force the hand of the authorities towards a proper reintroduction. There have been campaigns to reintroduce lynx into Scotland for decades, but the farming community is powerful and has opposed it.
You overestimate my cats but they'd be flattered to know you think so highly of them!
This is just these two cats specifically. I've had others who I'd believe would murder everything in a mile radius of the house and call it a dull morning.
I has a cat whose hunting method consisted of staring while purring and who would slide and fall on his back when trying to climb onto the table so, you know, not all cats.
As someone who volunteers at an animal shelter, cats definitely suffer when abandoned outside. They suffer injuries, become malnourished, get terrible parasitic infections and other diseases. Not to mention how many of them become food for other predators (often coyotes), become victims of animal cruelty, or get run over. These issues would probably be exacerbated in a war zone. Please don't dump your cats (or any pet animal) outside
Don't intend to undermine your statement, but really just reinforce it by saying that is the life of a wild animal. A huge percentage of predators in the wild have parasites and live difficultly between times of plenty and times of famine. Particularly for cats, there is a reason why they have chosen to adopt humans - a life of ease that they don't get in the wild!
Yup, life as a wild predator isn't easy. Cats who were born into feral cat colonies generally do better, but they were born into it and taught survival skills by their moms. They're also usually smaller than cats raised in human homes, probably because of an unreliable source of food (and in female cats, giving birth when they're only 6-9 months old themselves).
Cats that were raised in homes did not learn the survival skills necessary to easily adapt to outdoor life, and it's far crueler to dump them and sentence them to a slow, painful, terrifying death than it would be to just euthanize them. And much, much better to re-home them or take them to a shelter.
I also read an anecdote in a book about animal learning about two orphaned tiger cubs that didn't know how to eat wild prey. They managed to kill something, but then licked all the fur off of it instead of eating it, because they didn't know how to tear prey open to get to the meat. The rehabbers had to find a way to teach that skill to the cubs. So it's not just domesticated animals who struggle in such situations
This article describes how, in the week immediately following the UK's declaration of war against Germany, British pet owners killed their pets en masse. Nearly a quarter of the British pet population - 750,000 pets - were killed by their owners out of fear about food shortages. It's a horrifying piece of history, but one that's important to remember because of what it says about panic and its consequences.
Except, it really wasn't panic, it was very tough but rational decision.
The British public had faced rationing just a bit over 20 years before during WWI, so they had living memory of what had happened back then. Not so much panic, as prior experience and "we're going to do what we have to before it becomes absolutely necessary".
Food immediately became harder to get due to the U-boat menace, in the very early part of the war at least not because of the number of sinkings, but because of reluctance private shipping companies to risk their hulls.
Rather quickly, within a year or so, food imports dropped to half what they were before the war started. The kinds of foods that animals like dogs and cats needed, mainly meat, was rationed by 1942, with no allowances for pets. You got coupons that allowed you to buy a certain value of meat from the butcher you were registered with, and that's it.
So it makes a lot of sense, at least from an intellectual standpoint. Emotionally, yeah, it's a major drag, but the British public were walking into a war with open eyes against an opponent who had a greater capability to strike at the island nation than its predecessor.
It's not that it sucks. It's not even clear now, much less at the time, whether it was necessary, or whether it accomplished anything at all besides making Brits feel like they were doing their civic duty and triggering a chloroform shortage.
And at the very least, the pet cull was done long before the German bombers started putting pressure on the British food economy.
All of these pets had months left to live. Most had years.
This is untrue. Most modern academic coverage describes it as completely pointless. See eg here. There was no actual food shortage driving it.
> None of this was done out of any real necessity. Supplies were not yet scarce. The German blitzkrieg was not yet underway, and wouldn’t begin in earnest until September of the following year. Nor did the British government issue directives or instructions telling its citizens to kill their pets for the greater good of the Empire. Rather, it was a mass action that arose, apparently spontaneously, by a populace terrified by the new reality of war.
> Almost immediately, people realized what a mistake they had made. By November, the Times was lamenting that “there is daily evidence that large numbers of pet dogs are still being destroyed for no better reason than that it is inconvenient to keep them alive — which, of course, is no reason at all, but merely shows an owner’s inability to appreciate his obligations towards his animal.” The BBC’s first disc jockey, Christopher Stone, likewise railed against the massacre on his popular radio program that same month, arguing that “[t]o destroy a faithful friend when there is no need to do so, is yet another way of letting the war creep into your home.” By then, the wholesale killing of pets had abated, and many of the animals who survived those first four days would last through the war. But the damage had already been done.
> Using source material that includes advertisements, diaries, interviews, letters and editorials, Kean argues the massacre was not the result of a uniform domestic panic. She does point to the "black boredom" of the days after war was declared, and how mass euthanization was something citizens could do to prepare. But over all, Kean claims, perhaps too vaguely, that there was nothing "mass" about the thinking that led to this slew of pet deaths. Every decision to euthanize emerged from the context of a “particular prior existing relationship within a household." Equally specific relationships also led to each decision not to do away with the family cat or dog, a choice made for three-quarters of England's pet population. Kean says the singularity of these 400,000 decisions marks a key point in the history of Britons interacting with, and awarding agency to, animals.
It was about people wanting to feel like they were making a sacrifice for the war, not about any actual necessity.
Just because an article says it was a panicked decision doesn't make it so.
You may be unaware of this, but sometimes writers kind of "juice" stories up to gain readers. They don't outright *LIE*, but they shade the story to make it more dramatic.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Evidence would be something published in a peer-reviewed journal, but even that has its issues and isn't 100% reliable either, if it agrees with the biases of academia. See for example the Michael Bellesiles affair, where a paper, then a book, was published that agreed with the built in biases of academia and it was fully accepted by them, and the paper pass peer review, until people outside of academia started examining the claims and found them to be distorted or out right false.
So even if the research is basically honest, much of it is not repeatable or testable which means it's largely worthless. And something like is part and parcel of that.
What AI summary? I absolutely refuse to use AI. If you see something written by me, it's 100% me (errors and all) without any computer help.
This would be completely obvious if you actually knew me.
I prefer the primitive to the advanced. My favorite form of communication is Morse code, I use it nearly every day. My mornings are lit by candle light. Traditionally, I shoveled the snow out of my driveway by hand, and only bought a snowblower last year as a concession to my aging.
When I hunted, I used a bare wooden longbow, and wooden arrows I made myself for archery season, and a flintlock long rifle for gun season.
I was preparing to use arrowheads I knapped myself out of flint, but ended up throwing my arm out coaching little league which kept me from practicing for a year or two. You can't ethically hunt using instinctive archery without tons of practice, and I never really got back into the habit of hunting after that.
I still have a working manual typewriter. Some of my radios still have tubes.
Despite the fact that I write software for a public university, I don't use AI to assist me in the job. To me, "vibe coding" is an epithet, an admission of laziness, a lack of talent, or a lack of knowledge. Or all three.
So I have to ask this directly: Is AI the new "I can dismiss this out of hand because it's obviously X" argument? Because you're not helping your case by simply making stuff up out of thin air.
Um no not at all… this may be how you try to rationalize it in retrospect. In reality, even in the article here, it was about people feeling like “the government said we should” even though the government did NOT say that.
Then social pressure, the desire to feel like they’ve done something, and a horrible lemming-like follow the leader quality led to this.
You know, you think you're making a cleverly veiled political point, but do you want me to list all of the things about you know who that were said by his opponents that turned out to be falsehoods that were accepted lemming-like by his opponents?
It's quite a list.
You're no different, you're just on the other side.
The 1933 book "The Shape Of Things To Come" and the 1936 film "Things to Come" brought the "unstoppable bomber" theory into the public consciousness, depicting a country completely smashed and reverting to factionalism and barbarism.
Government preparations for air raids were entirely justified, given the blitz in 1940.
Preparations were justified. This specific piece of advice was stupid, and in particular a classic case of a government body considering only one side of a trade-off.
Eh more heartbreaking than angry. Britain was being bombed, people leaving to escape or shipped off to war, food shortages/rationing. British govt told people pre-emptive euthanasia was a kindness/mercy for pets because food needed to go to people not pets and people had to flee without them.
I vehemently disagree with that attitude but pets were viewed differently then vs now and we did not live through that period of absolute horror. The whole region was bombed to shit and existing on the brink of literal famine.
It's sort of the opposite. There seems to only be one person (Hilda Kean) who's done any research into the subject, but she writes that pets died because people viewed them as members of the family, not as possessions or livestock. NARPAC didn't provide instructions on how to evacuate them the way that they did for livestock animals, only that they should be, and that if it weren't possible then killing them would be more humane; this was also because people would use their meat rations to feed their pets, not themselves. There are letters from families during that time period that write about saving poison and planning to kill their children, to avoid subjecting them to wartime conditions, and Kean believes that the pets died because of that same impulse.
There were some historical pressures - food shortages during World War I, journalists presenting pets as luxury objects not animals, and abandoned pets roaming en masse - that pushed people in that direction, but Kean essentially puts forward the idea that people killed their pets out of panic and misguided mercy, not practicality.
I haven’t read the article, I can’t deal with that today. but if they report the history accurately, very. It wasn’t the pet parents panicking, the British government told them they had to and sent out instruction manuals.
In fairness, the government didn't tell them they had to so much as provided instructions for if they did have to. i know you didn't really want to read it but the article mentions that a lot of people asked the RSPCA and battersea both told people not to be too quick to do it, but that many people didn't really have anyone to help them with their pets because they were either being drafted and had to leave them behind, or had their houses destroyed by the blitz bombings and could no longer take care of them. Plus with rationing in place there already wasn't a lot of food around for people let alone their pets sadly.
My Dad was born in 1940 and was raised in a very poor part of the North East of England. He said that there were so many feral cats and dogs they had to kill them frequently. He has vague memories of having to drown cats in pillow cases and recalls standing in a line in front of a furnace door with folk throwing dead animals in. It was a brutal time.
In the canon of Britain at war, this story is barely touched upon. I'd wager that most people in Britain wouldn't be aware of it, despite repeated posting on Reddit.
It's not quite the Blitz spirit and "pack up your troubles in your old kit bag" kind of thing that people like to reminisce about.
I’m going to ask my husband’s 98 year old grandmother if she experienced this with any pets. She was in London during the war and still has a very good memory of it.
I have to question that "up to 750,000" number. I mean the UK, with extensive herds of food animals was only slaughtering about 50,000 total cattle, swine and goats a week in 1940.
No way i see an impromptue urban slaughter by city veterinary staff exceeding the entire industry slaughter of live stock by a factor of 15x!
For refernce a quick google shows the entirety of the UK had about 3500 registered veterinary staff in 1940 of which a significant number were full time dedicated to livestock. I just dont see such a small group being able to kill and dispose of that many animals in that short of time.
Its hard though to even look up info as the pet massacre of 1939 and or 1940 has slopped up search results.
That makes it even worse for those though, doesn't it? Being explicitly bred to be eaten/killed prematurely while not having that great of a life most of the time seems like a way worse fate than being the family's darling until they put it down.
generalvostok | 3 days ago
I think I must have missed the mass euthanasia episode of All Creatures Great and Small.
DaddyCatALSO | 3 days ago
1- exactly the kin d of thingt he'd leave out 2- not as big an issue in rural areas
missfishersmurder | 3 days ago
This moment in history is always so depressing. NARPAC was put together because so many people were forced to abandon their pets in World War I that a big feral/stray pet population formed, and their recommendation for World War II was to arrange care and transport pets to the countryside if possible. Killing them humanely (my mistake - not euthanasia; families were recommended to use a gun) was presented as an alternative to simply abandoning them on the streets when families could no longer afford to feed them in the event of a bombing campaign. It's speculated that families leaped to kill their pets because they wanted to feel like they were contributing in some way, not out of any real necessity. For one thing, the predicted food shortages never materialized.
There wasn't a widespread parallel effort in the US, but if you read Albert Payson Terhune's books about Lad and other collies, you'll see a similar sentiment being discussed and rejected by the family at the center of the series.
Edit: There's an LA Review article of a book written about this subject here - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-pets-war-on-hilda-keans-the-great-cat-and-dog-massacre/
friendlypetshark | 3 days ago
My grandmother’s pets were all put down because they went mad with fear from the bombs. Think how many dogs are afraid of fireworks nowadays. And the fear isn’t just while theyre going off, they can be frantic for hours or days afterwards. Apparently their dog just lost it after the first wave, and would just pace and cry all day. Gran said loads of people put their pets down for this reason. I appreciate that’s just her account but it stayed with her all her life.
geordiedog | 3 days ago
My dog was like that with fireworks. The fear progressively got worse. Fireworks, loud bangs, doors closing, pots clanging till eventually the click of the tv turning off. It was shortly after that we had to put him down as he could no longer cope in the world. He was such a good boy but no amount of behaviour therapy, training, drugs could help him. It was determined that his issues were the result of being at animal services in a noisy kennel with no way out for a year when he was just a puppy. He was a Husky/ Shepherd and he tried so incredibly hard to over come his problems.
I can only imagine poor animals trying to deal with war. Heartbreaking
relavie | 3 days ago
I’m sorry for your loss
Ulyks | 3 days ago
It's probably the dog equivalent of ptsd...
Being in a noisy kennel for a year is similar to some forms of torture. (sonic torture)
Could also be some form of Tinnitus
EroticPotato69 | 2 days ago
So... you put your dog down because he was extremely afraid of loud noises, am I reading this right?
Ainzlei839 | 2 days ago
They put their dog down because, and I quote, “no amount of behaviour therapy, training, or drugs could help him,” and he “could no longer cope in the world.”
Get some reading comprehension and some empathy.
JoLeTrembleur | 3 days ago
Food shortages never materialized because rationning was implemented.
marr75 | 3 days ago
No telling in any individual case, but it would be very common for children in this era to either have been told their pets "went mad with fear" or to have come up with this explanation ad hoc. Without some contemporaneous written account, I'd be very dubious.
friendlypetshark | 3 days ago
She described seeing it, so if she said she did then she did. Not really cool to argue against someone’s lived experience. Absolutely mad you have the nerve to call my grandmother, who you’ve never met, a liar.
DamnitGravity | 3 days ago
They weren't calling your Nan a liar, they were calling the adults around her a liar, and lying to her for what they deemed her own good.
Like telling a kid 'Fido was sent to a farm in the countryside where he could run around' instead of admitting he was killed because the family couldn't afford to feed him or were getting the stink eye from neighbours who thought them 'wasting valuable resources on an animal during a time of war'.
saturnbunny1 | 3 days ago
You must be an Olympic track star... cuz you leapt for that conclusion .
marr75 | 3 days ago
This is a wild reaction to what I said.
WildFlemima | 3 days ago
Upvotes are wild too. People love feeling righteous
Artimusjones88 | 3 days ago
Would, or could? What a bizarre thing to question.
TroublesomeFox | 3 days ago
I believe her tbh. We're cat people but I see how fireworks affect the dogs I know and bombs are so much louder. I reckon a decent amount of my friends would euthanize their much beloved dogs if they were suddenly having that on a regular basis with no end in sight, at that point it's just not fair.
Elegant-Mission-4470 | 3 days ago
Euthanasia with a gun can be very humane if done correctly.
missfishersmurder | 3 days ago
Yes, but it's silly to pretend that every pet owner who didn't take their animal to a clinic was able to kill their pets painlessly.
marr75 | 3 days ago
Sure, but it wasn't necessary in the first place in England.
Elegant-Mission-4470 | 3 days ago
Just pointing out that using a gun is a valid method of euthanasia and (like all methods of euthanasia) is humane if done correctly, as the person I was replying to didn't seem aware.
WildFlemima | 3 days ago
with the experience I had with my cat being put down, it would have been kinder to use a gun.
recycled_ideas | 3 days ago
It's impossible to say whether it was necessary.
There weren't food shortages, but there was heavy rationing and pets did not receive rations so if those animals hadn't been put down their food would have had to come from somewhere.
Pets are in this weird bucket that nobody really wants to think about. They're alive and we love them, but they're simultaneously completely dependent on humans, completely unable to ever safely stop being dependent on humans (feral pets can and do survive, but they're wildly destructive to wild species) and completely without functional purpose. They exist purely for human enjoyment and as much as can ever be said about a living thing they actually are a luxury.
ml20s | 3 days ago
Yes, doing it the modern way is mostly for our benefit. Whiskers and Fido don't know the difference.
radix2 | 3 days ago
So experts predict food shortages unless rationing is implemented. One of the consequences of that rationing would be difficulty in feeding pets along with the humans. So options were suggested to people and they took them as each to their means.
BUT food shortages never happened and that had nothing to do with rationing. Have I got that right?
missfishersmurder | 3 days ago
Rations did not include pet food and the cost of feeding pets was never part of the calculus. Experts wanted to reduce the number of people who would give up their rations to feed their pets by recommending they evacuate their animals and arrange care for them in safe areas, and only recommended euthanasia as a backup measure if they had no other options. Once the pet culls started, the same experts issued calls for people to stop and that this was unnecessary.
Edit: Small correction, the recommendation to evacuate pets was not about food; it was to prevent people from leaving their pets behind in the event of evacuation, which happened in World War I and created a population of feral animals left to starve, fight, and die slowly. Memories of food shortages in World War I and a desire to prevent their pets from suffering led people to believe that death was the better option.
TroublesomeFox | 3 days ago
Is it not?
Given the memories of the animals suffering previously, if you genuinely think that's likely to happen again then I would think that killing them IS the kinder option. Obviously easy for me to say with my first world issues but I think in that situation id have done the same. Id much rather put my cats down than have them suffer horribly like that.
DamnitGravity | 3 days ago
I don't know where you're getting that food shortages weren't a thing. They absolutely were. Rationing was simply meant to prevent extreme shortages.
For example, we rationed the amount of toilet paper people could buy during Covid panic buying, but shortages still occurred because even though more people were able to get toilet paper than if they hadn't rationed it, there was still only so much toilet paper to go around.
wkavinsky | 2 days ago
Also rationing in the UK didn't end until well into the 1950's.
There was absolutely massive, and strict rationing - it's just people didn't starve.
hiddentalent | 3 days ago
Were gun laws significantly different in the UK back then? Because today, the advice to use a gun for something is about as practical for the general public as to use a Lamborghini. Sure, they exist, but it's not like most people have access to one.
QP709 | 3 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_Act_1968
hiddentalent | 3 days ago
I get that the Firearms Act of 1968 repealed and supplanted the Firearms Act of 1937 but they're not that different in terms of public access, are they?
Edit: Great, I'm being downvoted for asking a question about history in /r/history. Reddit is weird. I'm not trying to be political or anything. I'm just legitimately curious about how this morbid thing worked. Having lived in London, I find it hard to believe that everyone had a gun in the 1940s and could just take Old Yeller out behind the shed. That's not the living scenario most people had. But it seems to be what NARPAC was advising. How did that resolve?
ModalScientist807 | 3 days ago
I remember reading the parts with the old man who had pet bulldogs in The Hiding Place- how he saved his ration cards so he could give them meat for their final meals. That man stays in my mind these days.
Lord0fHats | 3 days ago
Don't make me cry T_T
But like, for real though if some apocalyptic event happened I don't know that my cats would make it. They have basically no survival instincts and if things were really bad I'd probably be struggling to survive myself, let alone feed them. Best thing I could probably do for them in that scenario is let them outside and hope they managed to fend for themselves.
edgiepower | 3 days ago
They're cats. They have survival instincts, probably more than dogs. Abandon them outside and they've be hunting pests and killing wildlife in no time.
casualsubversive | 3 days ago
Cats are like horses, both very hardy and very fragile. Some would indeed be fine. Many others would literally hide under a bush and be too weak to save themselves within days. They don’t have a lot of metabolic leeway for learning to hunt as an adult.
As an extreme example, my parents had a damaged rescue cat that snuck outside and got turned around—even though she was medically okay when they found her just a few days later, she was so traumatized she basically just willed herself to die and didn’t eat again.
wildskipper | 3 days ago
This was illustrated recently by the case of the Lynx that were released in Scotland by someone hoping to speed up the process of rewilding there. It's the perfect habitat for them and lots of prey. But when eventually found one was almost dead from starvation. They'd been raised in captivity so although far from a 'pet' they did not have the refined hunting skills needed to survive.
Kanna1001 | 3 days ago
Oh damn. What happened to those poor lynx? Were they rescued? Did they try again?
wildskipper | 3 days ago
They're doing well in a wildlife park now. It was an illegal release into the wild by someone hoping to force the hand of the authorities towards a proper reintroduction. There have been campaigns to reintroduce lynx into Scotland for decades, but the farming community is powerful and has opposed it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2y1ygjmy2o
Kanna1001 | 2 days ago
Thank you!
Lord0fHats | 3 days ago
You overestimate my cats but they'd be flattered to know you think so highly of them!
This is just these two cats specifically. I've had others who I'd believe would murder everything in a mile radius of the house and call it a dull morning.
rickard_mormont | 3 days ago
I has a cat whose hunting method consisted of staring while purring and who would slide and fall on his back when trying to climb onto the table so, you know, not all cats.
Khizzara | 3 days ago
As someone who volunteers at an animal shelter, cats definitely suffer when abandoned outside. They suffer injuries, become malnourished, get terrible parasitic infections and other diseases. Not to mention how many of them become food for other predators (often coyotes), become victims of animal cruelty, or get run over. These issues would probably be exacerbated in a war zone. Please don't dump your cats (or any pet animal) outside
wildskipper | 3 days ago
Don't intend to undermine your statement, but really just reinforce it by saying that is the life of a wild animal. A huge percentage of predators in the wild have parasites and live difficultly between times of plenty and times of famine. Particularly for cats, there is a reason why they have chosen to adopt humans - a life of ease that they don't get in the wild!
Khizzara | 3 days ago
Yup, life as a wild predator isn't easy. Cats who were born into feral cat colonies generally do better, but they were born into it and taught survival skills by their moms. They're also usually smaller than cats raised in human homes, probably because of an unreliable source of food (and in female cats, giving birth when they're only 6-9 months old themselves).
Cats that were raised in homes did not learn the survival skills necessary to easily adapt to outdoor life, and it's far crueler to dump them and sentence them to a slow, painful, terrifying death than it would be to just euthanize them. And much, much better to re-home them or take them to a shelter.
I also read an anecdote in a book about animal learning about two orphaned tiger cubs that didn't know how to eat wild prey. They managed to kill something, but then licked all the fur off of it instead of eating it, because they didn't know how to tear prey open to get to the meat. The rehabbers had to find a way to teach that skill to the cubs. So it's not just domesticated animals who struggle in such situations
edgiepower | 3 days ago
Not in my country. Cats become an apex predator.
Wareve | 3 days ago
Which itself is basically just killing all the little local wildlife
[OP] Quouar | 3 days ago
This article describes how, in the week immediately following the UK's declaration of war against Germany, British pet owners killed their pets en masse. Nearly a quarter of the British pet population - 750,000 pets - were killed by their owners out of fear about food shortages. It's a horrifying piece of history, but one that's important to remember because of what it says about panic and its consequences.
dittybopper_05H | 3 days ago
Except, it really wasn't panic, it was very tough but rational decision.
The British public had faced rationing just a bit over 20 years before during WWI, so they had living memory of what had happened back then. Not so much panic, as prior experience and "we're going to do what we have to before it becomes absolutely necessary".
Food immediately became harder to get due to the U-boat menace, in the very early part of the war at least not because of the number of sinkings, but because of reluctance private shipping companies to risk their hulls.
Rather quickly, within a year or so, food imports dropped to half what they were before the war started. The kinds of foods that animals like dogs and cats needed, mainly meat, was rationed by 1942, with no allowances for pets. You got coupons that allowed you to buy a certain value of meat from the butcher you were registered with, and that's it.
So it makes a lot of sense, at least from an intellectual standpoint. Emotionally, yeah, it's a major drag, but the British public were walking into a war with open eyes against an opponent who had a greater capability to strike at the island nation than its predecessor.
JackOSevens | 3 days ago
Yeah, pretty much. Just because something sucks doesn't mean it was all panic and a mistake. Some few people judge history strangely.
LastStar007 | 3 days ago
It's not that it sucks. It's not even clear now, much less at the time, whether it was necessary, or whether it accomplished anything at all besides making Brits feel like they were doing their civic duty and triggering a chloroform shortage.
And at the very least, the pet cull was done long before the German bombers started putting pressure on the British food economy.
All of these pets had months left to live. Most had years.
dittybopper_05H | 3 days ago
>long before the German bombers started putting pressure on the British food economy.
It wasn't the bombers. The Luftwaffe wasn't bombing cabbages in the field, or strafing pig pens.
At least, not intentionally.
It was the U-boats that put pressure on the British food economy by sinking ships importing food into the UK.
Yglorba | 3 days ago
This is untrue. Most modern academic coverage describes it as completely pointless. See eg here. There was no actual food shortage driving it.
> None of this was done out of any real necessity. Supplies were not yet scarce. The German blitzkrieg was not yet underway, and wouldn’t begin in earnest until September of the following year. Nor did the British government issue directives or instructions telling its citizens to kill their pets for the greater good of the Empire. Rather, it was a mass action that arose, apparently spontaneously, by a populace terrified by the new reality of war.
> Almost immediately, people realized what a mistake they had made. By November, the Times was lamenting that “there is daily evidence that large numbers of pet dogs are still being destroyed for no better reason than that it is inconvenient to keep them alive — which, of course, is no reason at all, but merely shows an owner’s inability to appreciate his obligations towards his animal.” The BBC’s first disc jockey, Christopher Stone, likewise railed against the massacre on his popular radio program that same month, arguing that “[t]o destroy a faithful friend when there is no need to do so, is yet another way of letting the war creep into your home.” By then, the wholesale killing of pets had abated, and many of the animals who survived those first four days would last through the war. But the damage had already been done.
From here (another excerpt from the same book):
> Using source material that includes advertisements, diaries, interviews, letters and editorials, Kean argues the massacre was not the result of a uniform domestic panic. She does point to the "black boredom" of the days after war was declared, and how mass euthanization was something citizens could do to prepare. But over all, Kean claims, perhaps too vaguely, that there was nothing "mass" about the thinking that led to this slew of pet deaths. Every decision to euthanize emerged from the context of a “particular prior existing relationship within a household." Equally specific relationships also led to each decision not to do away with the family cat or dog, a choice made for three-quarters of England's pet population. Kean says the singularity of these 400,000 decisions marks a key point in the history of Britons interacting with, and awarding agency to, animals.
It was about people wanting to feel like they were making a sacrifice for the war, not about any actual necessity.
LastStar007 | 3 days ago
Did you read the article?
It was not a rational decision. It sounds like one, but it wasn't.
dittybopper_05H | 3 days ago
Just because an article says it was a panicked decision doesn't make it so.
You may be unaware of this, but sometimes writers kind of "juice" stories up to gain readers. They don't outright *LIE*, but they shade the story to make it more dramatic.
hammerforce9 | 3 days ago
“Just because your evidence shows I’m wrong, I’ve decided I’m not wrong “
dittybopper_05H | 3 days ago
It's not evidence. It's journalism.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Evidence would be something published in a peer-reviewed journal, but even that has its issues and isn't 100% reliable either, if it agrees with the biases of academia. See for example the Michael Bellesiles affair, where a paper, then a book, was published that agreed with the built in biases of academia and it was fully accepted by them, and the paper pass peer review, until people outside of academia started examining the claims and found them to be distorted or out right false.
On top of that, the social sciences are in the middle of a decades long replication crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
So even if the research is basically honest, much of it is not repeatable or testable which means it's largely worthless. And something like is part and parcel of that.
hammerforce9 | 3 days ago
“No im actually not wrong im completely right! Not because of evidence but because of this unrelated AI summary!”
dittybopper_05H | 2 days ago
What AI summary? I absolutely refuse to use AI. If you see something written by me, it's 100% me (errors and all) without any computer help.
This would be completely obvious if you actually knew me.
I prefer the primitive to the advanced. My favorite form of communication is Morse code, I use it nearly every day. My mornings are lit by candle light. Traditionally, I shoveled the snow out of my driveway by hand, and only bought a snowblower last year as a concession to my aging.
When I hunted, I used a bare wooden longbow, and wooden arrows I made myself for archery season, and a flintlock long rifle for gun season.
I was preparing to use arrowheads I knapped myself out of flint, but ended up throwing my arm out coaching little league which kept me from practicing for a year or two. You can't ethically hunt using instinctive archery without tons of practice, and I never really got back into the habit of hunting after that.
I still have a working manual typewriter. Some of my radios still have tubes.
Despite the fact that I write software for a public university, I don't use AI to assist me in the job. To me, "vibe coding" is an epithet, an admission of laziness, a lack of talent, or a lack of knowledge. Or all three.
So I have to ask this directly: Is AI the new "I can dismiss this out of hand because it's obviously X" argument? Because you're not helping your case by simply making stuff up out of thin air.
Suitable-Park-1402 | 3 days ago
cough cough Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany cough cough
hammerforce9 | 3 days ago
Um no not at all… this may be how you try to rationalize it in retrospect. In reality, even in the article here, it was about people feeling like “the government said we should” even though the government did NOT say that.
Then social pressure, the desire to feel like they’ve done something, and a horrible lemming-like follow the leader quality led to this.
America would NEVER.
dittybopper_05H | 3 days ago
You know, you think you're making a cleverly veiled political point, but do you want me to list all of the things about you know who that were said by his opponents that turned out to be falsehoods that were accepted lemming-like by his opponents?
It's quite a list.
You're no different, you're just on the other side.
hammerforce9 | 3 days ago
No clue what you’re on about but I wish you well with it
tomrichards8464 | 3 days ago
Government-inspired panic, in particular.
BathFullOfDucks | 3 days ago
... H G Wells.
The 1933 book "The Shape Of Things To Come" and the 1936 film "Things to Come" brought the "unstoppable bomber" theory into the public consciousness, depicting a country completely smashed and reverting to factionalism and barbarism.
Government preparations for air raids were entirely justified, given the blitz in 1940.
tomrichards8464 | 3 days ago
Preparations were justified. This specific piece of advice was stupid, and in particular a classic case of a government body considering only one side of a trade-off.
rotervogel1231 | 3 days ago
It's things like this that make people not trust the government.
manthello | 3 days ago
I have not yet opened the article. On a scale from completely asleep to Vesuvius erupting, how angry is the article going to make me?
ONeOfTheNerdHerd | 3 days ago
Eh more heartbreaking than angry. Britain was being bombed, people leaving to escape or shipped off to war, food shortages/rationing. British govt told people pre-emptive euthanasia was a kindness/mercy for pets because food needed to go to people not pets and people had to flee without them.
I vehemently disagree with that attitude but pets were viewed differently then vs now and we did not live through that period of absolute horror. The whole region was bombed to shit and existing on the brink of literal famine.
missfishersmurder | 3 days ago
It's sort of the opposite. There seems to only be one person (Hilda Kean) who's done any research into the subject, but she writes that pets died because people viewed them as members of the family, not as possessions or livestock. NARPAC didn't provide instructions on how to evacuate them the way that they did for livestock animals, only that they should be, and that if it weren't possible then killing them would be more humane; this was also because people would use their meat rations to feed their pets, not themselves. There are letters from families during that time period that write about saving poison and planning to kill their children, to avoid subjecting them to wartime conditions, and Kean believes that the pets died because of that same impulse.
There were some historical pressures - food shortages during World War I, journalists presenting pets as luxury objects not animals, and abandoned pets roaming en masse - that pushed people in that direction, but Kean essentially puts forward the idea that people killed their pets out of panic and misguided mercy, not practicality.
Angelgirl1517 | 3 days ago
I haven’t read the article, I can’t deal with that today. but if they report the history accurately, very. It wasn’t the pet parents panicking, the British government told them they had to and sent out instruction manuals.
CMDR_omnicognate | 3 days ago
In fairness, the government didn't tell them they had to so much as provided instructions for if they did have to. i know you didn't really want to read it but the article mentions that a lot of people asked the RSPCA and battersea both told people not to be too quick to do it, but that many people didn't really have anyone to help them with their pets because they were either being drafted and had to leave them behind, or had their houses destroyed by the blitz bombings and could no longer take care of them. Plus with rationing in place there already wasn't a lot of food around for people let alone their pets sadly.
riflow | 3 days ago
That's utterly heartbreaking, it does unfortunately explain why they're often not mentioned in this period though.
real_light_sleeper | 3 days ago
My Dad was born in 1940 and was raised in a very poor part of the North East of England. He said that there were so many feral cats and dogs they had to kill them frequently. He has vague memories of having to drown cats in pillow cases and recalls standing in a line in front of a furnace door with folk throwing dead animals in. It was a brutal time.
ForestRivers | 2 days ago
The UK before the 1960s sounds like it absolutely sucked in every aspect.
Jazzy76dk | 3 days ago
The little told story that is being reposted 10 times every year on Reddit.
vollol | 3 days ago
In the canon of Britain at war, this story is barely touched upon. I'd wager that most people in Britain wouldn't be aware of it, despite repeated posting on Reddit.
It's not quite the Blitz spirit and "pack up your troubles in your old kit bag" kind of thing that people like to reminisce about.
vormittag | 3 days ago
Did rats or mice flourish after so many cats were put down?
Glitter_Sparkle | 2 days ago
I’m going to ask my husband’s 98 year old grandmother if she experienced this with any pets. She was in London during the war and still has a very good memory of it.
MerelyMortalModeling | 3 days ago
I have to question that "up to 750,000" number. I mean the UK, with extensive herds of food animals was only slaughtering about 50,000 total cattle, swine and goats a week in 1940.
No way i see an impromptue urban slaughter by city veterinary staff exceeding the entire industry slaughter of live stock by a factor of 15x!
For refernce a quick google shows the entirety of the UK had about 3500 registered veterinary staff in 1940 of which a significant number were full time dedicated to livestock. I just dont see such a small group being able to kill and dispose of that many animals in that short of time.
Its hard though to even look up info as the pet massacre of 1939 and or 1940 has slopped up search results.
CruelMetatron | 3 days ago
And no one bats an eye about those 50k live stock animals, but god forbid pets are also killed. Both sucks, but the hypocrisy is just staggering.
Dimblo273 | 3 days ago
Because livestock exists explicitly to be eaten. Meanwhile these pets were killed and not eaten
CruelMetatron | 2 days ago
That makes it even worse for those though, doesn't it? Being explicitly bred to be eaten/killed prematurely while not having that great of a life most of the time seems like a way worse fate than being the family's darling until they put it down.
Dimblo273 | 3 days ago
The notion that every single death was carried out by a professional vet is such a sheltered 2026 thought process
riftnet | 3 days ago
This was posted 7 years ago, just saying
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/s/0erCvCKhHR
Dimblo273 | 3 days ago
So almost half a generation wasn't there to read it before
hiddentalent | 3 days ago
Damn, that was a hard read. I would invade Normandy for my dogs.