Before a single shot was fired in the Second World War, the British began slaughtering hundreds of thousands of their own pets. The British pet massacre is one of WWII’s odd tragedies, a footnote buried in the midst of all the human carnage.
The British government in 1939 to consider what should happen to pets as the war began established the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee. The concern was that, when the government forced to ration food, individuals would either share their rations with their pets or abandon them to starve to death inhumanely.
They chose the next best thing, advising people to kill their healthy dogs as soon as possible because neither of these options appealed to them. They urged in a brochure given to the public that anyone with pets consider transferring them to the countryside (not a euphemism) or “having them destroyed if you cannot place them in the care of neighbors.”
Though the message made it obvious that they should look for a new home for the pets first, it was somewhat undermined by a full-page ad for a bolt gun called “the standard instrument for the compassionate annihilation of domestic animals” just opposite it. When the war was announced, pet owners lined up in the hundreds of thousands to have their cherished creatures killed.
The founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals noted at the time, “Our technical officers called upon to fulfill this awful job will never forget the tragedy of those days.” Over 400,000 dogs and cats, or a fifth of London’s pets, were euthanized in less than a week, People lined up for half a mile outside one animal shelter to kill their pets, while crematoriums became backed up with bodies since they couldn’t work at night owing to blackout orders. Suitable cemeteries became scarce, half a million pets interred in a single meadow. Over 750,000 pets were murdered in all.
People thought they were doing the right thing, but it soon became clear that, as The Times reported, “Large numbers of pet dogs are still being destroyed for no better reason than it is inconvenient to keep them alive – which, of course, is no reason at all, but merely demonstrates an owner’s inability to appreciate his obligations towards his animal.” Those who managed to avoid the first panic made it until the end of the conflict.
