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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
generalvostok | 5 hours ago
I think I must have missed the mass euthanasia episode of All Creatures Great and Small.
missfishersmurder | 4 hours 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 hours 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 | an hour 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
marr75 | 3 hours 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.
JoLeTrembleur | 28 minutes ago
Food shortages never materialized because rationning was implemented.
Elegant-Mission-4470 | 3 hours ago
Euthanasia with a gun can be very humane if done correctly.
missfishersmurder | 2 hours 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 hours ago
Sure, but it wasn't necessary in the first place in England.
Elegant-Mission-4470 | an hour 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.
ml20s | 3 hours ago
Yes, doing it the modern way is mostly for our benefit. Whiskers and Fido don't know the difference.
ModalScientist807 | 4 hours 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 | 5 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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.
Lord0fHats | 4 hours 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 | an hour 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.
Wareve | 4 hours ago
Which itself is basically just killing all the little local wildlife
[OP] Quouar | 6 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | an hour 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.
LastStar007 | 4 hours ago
Did you read the article?
It was not a rational decision. It sounds like one, but it wasn't.
dittybopper_05H | an hour 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.
Yglorba | 29 minutes 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.
tomrichards8464 | 5 hours ago
Government-inspired panic, in particular.
BathFullOfDucks | 5 hours 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 | 5 hours 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 | 2 hours ago
It's things like this that make people not trust the government.
manthello | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours 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 | 4 hours ago
That's utterly heartbreaking, it does unfortunately explain why they're often not mentioned in this period though.
MerelyMortalModeling | 4 hours 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 | an hour 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.
Jazzy76dk | 3 hours ago
The little told story that is being reposted 10 times every year on Reddit.
vollol | 2 hours 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.
real_light_sleeper | an hour 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.