Do you know that at the start of the Second World War, before a single bullet was fired, the British set out to kill hundreds of thousands of pets? Behind this event lies an extremely sad story. . .
The British pet slaughter is one of the strange tragedies of the Second World War. But it was destined to remain a lost footnote amid all the human devastation that followed. In 1939, the British government established the National Committee of Animals for Air Raid Precautions to decide what should happen to pets when war broke out. The reason for the fear was the argument that when the government is forced to share food, people will share their food with their pets and this can cause starvation. Or it was predicted that they would have to starve them, causing their death.
They believed that neither of these options was the ideal solution, and they decided on the next best thing: Encourage people to hastily exterminate their healthy pets.
A leaflet that was distributed to the public asked anyone with a pet to consider leaving them in the countryside, or to identify someone to look after the animals if something happened to them. If they could not do this, they suggested that they exterminate the pets.
Although the message clearly emphasized that they should first look for a new home for pets, it was an interesting detail that there was an advertisement for a bolt gun labeled “standard tool for humane destruction of pets” opposite the message.
Many pet owners have been known to exterminate their pets when war is declared. The founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals said at the time, “Our technicians, who were called to fulfill this unhappy task, will never forget the tragedy of those days.”
In a week, more than 400,000 dogs and cats, a quarter of London’s pets, have been killed. Queues in front of an animal sanctuary reached half a mile long, filled with people waiting to exterminate their animals, and crematoriums filled with corpses as they were unable to work at night due to the blackout. When suitable cemeteries ran out, half a million pets were buried under a meadow. In total, more than 750,000 pets were killed.
People thought they were doing the right thing at the time. But today, it is not difficult to see that what was done was a real massacre.
Fortunately, there were those who did not consider this suggestion for their pet. The animals that survived this frenzy mostly survived until the end of the war.
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