The Martin’s Act @ 200 audio documentary is a collaborative endeavor between Martin Rowe and the Culture & Animals Foundation and the writer Alex Lockwood. It is co-produced by Ryan Rhodes and Alex Lockwood; with the voice talent of Ryan Rhodes and Peter Egan; and with archival recordings of Rachel Carson, Jim Mason, Peter Singer, and Donald Watson, and especially recorded interviews with two dozen historians, activists, and theorists. Listen to the episodes below!
Episode One explores how Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin’s distinctive personality—impetuous, generous, dogged, and pugnacious—pursued his causes, both in parliament and outside it. In Episode Two, we meet a couple of other parliamentarians: Sir William Pulteney, who brought a bill against bull-baiting by dogs to the UK parliament two decades before Martin’s Act, and the charismatic orator Thomas, Lord Erskine. In Episode Three, we find that a piece of legislation is only as good as its enforcement, and, with no police force yet to call upon, Richard Martin took it upon himself to arrest individuals, prosecute them, and then take them to prison. We are also introduced to two giants of the era: Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and Frances Power Cobbe, who brought public attention to the issue of vivisection (live experimentation) of animals in laboratories.
In Episode Four, we analyze interrelated strands of animal activism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the “monstrous veganism” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the radical Quaker vision of Donald Watson, the co-founder of the Vegan Society (1944). Episode Five covers how the early 1960s and 1970s saw a major shift in environmental consciousness and animal awareness, led by pioneering women, and we profile them all! In Episode Six, we go back to the beginning and review how the passage of Martin’s Act both expanded and delimited the interests and rights of nonhuman animals. We examine ideas animating recent animal advocacy: transitional justice, racial reckoning, and the role of women in leadership. We look to the future: thinking about what is missing, and how we can create a just, inclusive, safe and effective animal movement as the model for the society we want to live in by (at least!) 2050.
The producers would like to thank for their commitment to thinking about animals, and their written insights and spoken contributions to the audio documentary, the following (in alphabetical order): Carol J. Adams, David Bilchitz, Charlotte Blattner, Sean Butler, Matthew Cole, Helen Cowie, Maneesha Deckha, Diana Donald, Christopher “Soul” Eubanks, Erica Fudge, Vanessa Gerritsen, Lorna Hackett, A. Breeze Harper, Philip Howell, Hilda Kean, Thomas Kelch, Anita Krajnc, Jim Mason, Steven McCullough, Tony Milligan, Paula Owen, Emilia Quinn, Mike Radford, Harriet Ritvo, Richard Ryder, Peter Singer, Paula Sparks, Kim Stallwood, Kate Stewart, Mariann Sullivan, Jane Tredgett, Steven Wise, Bernard Unti, and Kevin Yuill.
