The Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA)

The Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA)

SPA: who was General Grammont, the first animal defender? Charles of Saint-Sauveur.

The Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA), founded in 1845, opens the doors of its shelters (62 in France) this weekend. The opportunity to start campaigning against abandonment, on the rise this summer: from June to August, the SPA recorded + 10% of dogs and cats abandoned by their masters, that is to say 11 731 animals against 10 725 at the same time in 2018. And to return to the history of this institution, which is more than a century and a half old.

"Hell does not exist for animals, they are already there ..." Victor Hugo will not write this sentence until years later, but the writer, elected to the chamber in 1848, supports with all its celebrity the first a law that tries to "soften the condition of animals, precious instruments of our existence". In this March 15, 1850, he makes a dog's day at the Palais Bourbon. A deluge of barking, interspersed with meowing and sordid neighing, punctuates the debates in the parliamentary backyard.

At 54, General Jacques de Grammont saw others on the battlefield. Human butcheries, but also for horses, brutalized, mutilated, too often stupidly sacrificed. The fate of the poor canassons used to pull omnibuses or work in the mines is hardly more enviable in his eyes. "To prevent ill-treatment," says the cavalry officer, "is to work for the moral improvement of men. Clearly, it's less about protecting animals than about sparing the sentience of humans. But for his opponents, it's already too much.

In 1850, when he showed his interest in the welfare of animals, General Grammont was mockingly mocked. DR

He may well face the gusts of mockery, but the deputy of the Loire, the bearer of this law, must fall back against the stormy resistance of his opponents. In this very conservative room, many fear the effects of a text that calls into question the right of owners to "use and abuse" of their property, as pointed the deputy of Vendée, Modeste Defontaine. He managed to slip an amendment to the law, finally voted on July 2 after a boning in good standing: "Will be punished with a fine of five to fifteen francs, and may be one to five days in prison, those who have publicly and abusively abused domestic animals ". It is no longer a question of repressing "any act of cruelty", as Grammont wanted, but of sanctioning only acts committed in public. Sheltered from the walls, justice promises to remain blind.

Even incomplete, but it's a win for Grammont. If the coachmen now hold their blows against their mounts, the law will not have been useless. He is not the first to warn about the fate of animals. In England, it is a cause more and more shared since the first half of the nineteenth century, but it has a hard time crossing the English Channel. From 1843, things finally moved thanks to the Paris police chief, Gabriel Delessert, who signs the first decree prohibiting drivers of cabs from hitting their horses with the handle of their whip. By this bold decision, which contrasts with the indifference of the time, it opens a breach where rush some friends of the animals, progressive minds that believe that everything has to win by stroking rather than slapping.

One of the many maps published by the SPA to raise awareness of the fate of horses. Kharbine-Tapabor Collection

Among them, Pierre Dumont de Monteux, a doctor who had attended a few months later a painful scene in the heart of the capital: an irascible carter bumping his horse that had just collapsed, overcome by exhaustion. "Where is justice, where is pity? He had indignantly. Two years later, in 1845, he founded with étienne Pariset the Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA). It is with these pioneers that General Grammont will draw his arguments to defend his text. To defend the integrity of the animals is to attack the violence that is plaguing the society that then begins its industrial revolution.

Shortly after the vote, the new herald of the animal cause is appointed at the head of the SPA. Let's be honest, it does not shine particularly, but the Society is recognized public utility in 1860 by the Emperor Napoleon III. As for the law, it is timidly applied, mainly in Paris and in the North where so many rooster fights spread. In 1851, a gazette (quoted by the site Retronews) evokes a ball of Mardi Gras 1851, near Lille, where some brutes had fun to "hang live ducks to long poles". The commissioner, applying the text, had them detached "and ordered them to be put to death immediately. The general, who died in 1862, will not see his struggles progressively win over the hearts of the French, and then extend to hunting horses or bullfights.

In 1881, it is the consecration. Jules Ferry accepts the distribution of 30,000 posters of the SPA at the expense of the Ministry of Education, in all public schools in the country. What would these students understand from those that can be read by their distant descendants in this month of October 2019? On their screens, a dog, a cat or a horse. And this slogan: "Do more than like, adopt! "

Pins:

September 7, 1959: the decree Michelet (Minister of Justice De Gaulle) repeals the Grammont Act to expand the repression of abuse in the private domain. The animals become protected for themselves.

November 12, 1963: A law creates the offense of cruelty to animals, exposing perpetrators to much more severe penalties.

July 10, 1976: the law explicitly recognizes that the animal (having an owner) is "a sensitive being", and "must be placed by its owner in conditions compatible with the biological imperatives of his species".

January 6, 1999: the law increases the penalties for serious abuse of animals, punishable by 2 years in prison and 30,000 euros fine (instead of 6 months and 15,000 euros). Penalty applicable for the abandonment of a domestic animal.

February 16, 2015: the Civil Code considers the animal "as a living being endowed with sensitivity" and no longer, at best, as a "movable property"

Source Info: Le Parisien