Cash Cows and Dogs with Dentures: Prostheses for Animals in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Abstract

Abstract This article shows how the history of prostheticized animals is much deeper and richer than one might think. Investigating the interest in fitting animals with prostheses throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, this article explores the emergence of animal prostheses in bovine agriculture through to their use in late Victorian pet keeping. The key concern of this piece is the varied responses to prostheticized animals in print culture. As this article shows through an analysis of magazine and newspaper contributions, reactions to animal prostheses varied from admiration and amazement to annoyance and disgust. By analysing this coverage, the article reveals how representations of animal prostheses brought into collision a surprising variety of important social discourses, including those related to economic productivity, prosthesis access, food adulteration, professional recognition, social norms, class hierarchies, and gender relations. Animal prostheses proved a novel yet apt image that distilled a wide variety of societal concerns. Redirecting the critical momentum established by recent scholarship that unites disability studies and critical animal studies, this article uses nineteenth-century animal prostheses as a case study to demonstrate how the concepts of disability, ableism, classism, and misogyny have been extended by humans across species boundaries and how our approaches to nonhuman care are impacted by them. It therefore establishes a new field of inquiry within Victorian studies for scholarship on the interface between discourses of disability and nonhuman animals.