George T. Angell, 1846 The Friend of Animals

A telegram from President Dickey to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals affirmed the College's pride in founder George Thorndike Angell, Class of 1846, at that organization's centennial celebration in Boston on March 23.

The influence of this alumnus on the treatment of animals reaches far beyond the Bay State, however. He was also responsible for the American Humane Education Society which pioneered the teaching of kindness to animals among the nation's children in an era when cruelty was the rule. This spread of compassion encouraged American publication of Ann Sewell's BlackBeauty, a story which remains a classic even in this machine age and which has caused millions of tearful young readers to consider the rights of animals.

Mr. Angell's life, which began in Southbrodge, Mass., in 1823, was in the Horatio Alger tradition. His minister father died when he was only nine and in order to help his school-teacher mother, the boy alterately worked in a dry goods store and on the farms of several relatives. As a chore boy he acquired the love and understanding of animals which years later roused him as a successful lawyer to enlist prominent Bostonians in an all-out attack on the cruelty he witnessed.

Application to his somewhat itinerant education brought Mr. Angell to Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, N. H., and later to Dartmouth where he was elected to Alpha Delta Phi Honor Society and marked as a leader. Next steps were reading law nights in a Boston law office, teaching in a Boston grammar school, and studying at Harvard Law School. He became a member of the bar in 1851 and a partner in a law firm with a large practice.

As early as 1864 the now-prosperous lawyer had willed a large share of his estate to be used in instructing children to be kind to animals. But it was the Boston Daily Advertiser for February 22, 1868 that spurred him to more immediate action. That issue reported a 40-mile race between two of Massachusetts' finest horses. Each carried two men over rough roads and each horse died from strain. George Angell protested in a letter to the Advertiser and received responses from six prominent citizens who formed the nucleus of the Massachusetts SPCA, incorporated March 23 in the General Court of the Commonwealth. The first official meeting was held the next day and a week later Mr. Angell was unanimously elected society president.

In May of that same year, the General Cruelty Law, drafted by Mr. Angell and endorsed by the Massachusetts SPCA, was enacted into law. And in June there appeared the first issue of Our Dumb Animals, now in its 100th year of publication.

Humanitarian Angell would have perhaps been proudest of an accomplishment he did not live to see - the opening in 1915 of Boston's famed Angell Memorial Animal Hospital.