Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Winning the War on Rabies
How was rabies – a disease that still kills thousands worldwide every year – largely radicated from Victorian Britain?
On September 8th 2007, the Alliance for Rabies Control, supported by the Center for Disease Control in the United States, aims to raise awareness of the 50,000 human deaths each year from this preventable and treatable disease. World Rabies Day will promote dog controls and the necessity of providing preventive and therapeutic vaccines in poor countries.
Such appeals will strengthen the common perception in Britain that rabies is exotic and foreign; yet in the 19th century rabies, and its human form hydrophobia, were seen as ‘particularly English’ maladies. During the Mad Dog panic of the summer of 1830 it was reported that a ‘grim monster’ had the country ‘in its horrific sway’ and that hydrophobia was ‘inflicting the horrors and tortures of the damned on the people’.
Contemporary medical opinion held that rabies was spread by the inoculation of poisonous saliva from an infected animal, usually a dog, and could affect any mammal. In dogs, the poison or virus produced physical symptoms, such as thirst, a distinctive howl, and profuse salivation, but its main effects were mental, making dogs roam and become vicious, liable to bite anything in their path. There was dispute over whether all cases were ‘caught’, or whether some developed spontaneously, due to the influence of the seasons, heat, drought, diet, sexual frustration, or ill-treatment. Indeed, it was popularly supposed that the disease arose in the Dog Days, the period of high summer from early July when Sirius, the Dog Star, reappears in the night sky.
Hydrophobia in humans was frightening for many reasons, initially because the degree of infectiousness was unpredictable and the incubation period so variable, from weeks to possibly years. Symptoms – including spasms, delirium, fear of water, choking, and terrible hallucinations – could last for up to three days. In most cases the patient died exhausted. Witnesses to these horrors agreed that it was the worst of all possible deaths, giving hydrophobia a public profile out of all proportion to its level of mortality. Fears of the disease were exacerbated by reports that euthanasia was frequently practised on victims by asphyxiating them between feather mattresses to save themselves, their family and carers further suffering.
Medical experience showed that the risk of developing hydrophobia after a rabid dog bite was about one in twenty, but every victim felt vulnerable, leading to cases of spurious hydrophobia – a hysterical condition brought on by fear of the consequences. There were two forms of treatment – preventive and curative. The former, involving cauterization, excision and even amputation of a limb, aimed to stop the absorption of the virus. The latter aimed to counter the poison and manage symptoms. Preventive treatments were almost always effective, curative treatments always failed.
In the summer of 1830 there were calls for government action to end the menace. Some worried Londoners suggested that all urban dogs be slaughtered, others called for the rounding up of street curs and for all dogs on the street to be led and muzzled. A Manchester surgeon, Samuel Bardsley, found little support for his proposal to eradicate the disease by confining dogs for several months. A Parliamentary committee of enquiry failed to find a solution. On one side it was argued that allowing freedom to dogs and their owners had ‘reduced us to the state of a nation of fools, in standing with our hands tied behind us while subjected to the most appalling calamity that can befall a human being’; on the other, the muzzled dog symbolized that Britain was not a ‘free country’, and infringed the liberty of subjects. Such feelings explain why attempts to introduce controls failed in Parliament many times.
The incidence of rabies and hydrophobia remained low through the 1830s and 1840s, but animal welfare activists exploited fear of their resurgence in their campaigns against dog fighting, dogcarts and the cruel treatment of dogs by working-class owners. Reports of rabies rose again after mid-century, with a peak of deaths from hydrophobia in 1866. The police were given new powers to arrest and put down strays, and the government converted the dog tax, introduced by William Pitt in 1796 and assessed by breed, into a flat-rate dog licence, which it was hoped would be easier to enforce. After a short respite, rabies returned in the 1870s and hydrophobia deaths peaked in 1877.
Although there were never more than a hundred deaths in any year, around twenty times this number of people were bitten by suspect dogs, and there would have been many times more this number of mad dog incidents. Hence thousands of individuals, families and communities worried every time they ventured into the street. This situation led many to ask how real the threat of rabies really was. Animal World, the journal of the RSPCA, reported in 1877 that ‘Hydrophobia-Phobia’ was gripping the country, while the Pall Mall Gazette declared that, ‘Most of the deaths recently declared by frightened jurymen to be caused by “hydrophobia” were, it seems to us, really caused by superstitious terror; “died of fright” would have been a more appropriate verdict.’
In 1885 the French chemist Louis Pasteur announced he had found a cure for hydrophobia - a preventive vaccine that produced immunity during its long incubation period. Pasteur made his vaccine available free to anyone attending his clinic, and British dog-bite victims were soon travelling to Paris in large numbers. Surprisingly, a committee of leading scientists recommended against establishing a similar clinic in London, proposing instead that rabies should be stamped out through dog controls. Pasteur himself endorsed this approach, but the main reason for its adoption was die fear of opposition to any clinic or laboratory from the powerful antivivisectionist lobby.
The success of the anti-vivisectionists was pyrrhic as the new control measures introduced other forms of cruelty – muzzling, restrictions on movements, and the rounding up and killing of strays. Groups such as the Anti-Muzzle Association, the Dog Owners Protection Association and the Metropolitan Canine Defence and Benevolent Institute (later the Canine Defence League, now the Dogs Trust) sprang up to defend dog owners. An ideological fault line opened in the press and the courts: on one side were the anti-muzzlers, ‘the “dog maniacs” who refuse to believe that dogs go mad’; on the other were the ‘muzzle maniacs’ who wanted universal, nationwide muzzling for twelve months to ensure the complete eradication of rabies.
The government’s control measures seemed to be working, so much so that in 1892 they were relaxed. But 1895 was a particularly bad year for rabies outbreaks and hydrophobia deaths, and in April 1897, following the recommendation of a committee of inquiry, the president of the Board of Agriculture, Walter Long, took immediate steps to stamp it out, applying the usual controls to much larger areas than previously. He inflamed public opinion by exempting sporting dogs from the measures while insisting that they be applied to lap dogs, with the result that his dog orders were described as the ‘most despotic piece of legislation that has darkened the pages of English history since the days of King John’. The Ladies Kennel Gazette described them as ‘a tyranny – resourceful, vexatious, pettifogging and unmanly – which is visibly creeping and growing in the body politic, which emasculates the public spirit and which is a far great danger than any physical malady.’
Long seemed to relish the opposition, but was soon able to claim success as hydrophobia deaths fell from twenty in 1895, to eight the following year and six in 1897. A case of dog rabies near Llandovery, Carmarthenshire, in November 1902 was the last indigenous instance of the disease in Britain for exactly a century, when a naturalist in the Scottish Highlands died after being bitten by a bat in November 2002. Politicians and veterinarians celebrated the disease’s eradication, yet it was undoubtedly helped by changing attitudes to pet ownership over the Victorian era – the dog had become a sentimentalised creature of the home across all classes.
Although officially banished, mad dog incidents and the fear of rabies lingered on the street – for example, 49 allegedly rabid dogs were detained in London in 1904, and a scare in Essex in 1906 led to the destruction of 21,380 dogs. Tests on all these animals proved negative, which meant Britain’s rabies-free status remained untarnished. This ended in 1918 when rabies was reintroduced into the southern coastal counties of England, either by soldiers returning from France with infected pet dogs, or by the rich taking their pets in and out of France in their aeroplanes. Just before Easter 1919 a mad mastiff ran up Oxford Street ‘with foam dripping from its hanging tongue and its eyes rolling wildly’ before darting into an apartment, where it ‘held four police officers at bay for four hours’ before being lassoed and killed. Sporadic outbreaks continued until 1922, with most attributed to imported dogs. Quarantine laws were tightened and enforced with no exemptions, and rabies came increasingly to be regarded as an exotic disease, associated with the tropics, as in Noel Coward’s song ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.
After the Second World War, a rabies virus carried by foxes moved west out of Poland into most of mainland Europe. Public awareness of the spread of the disease grew in England after a terrier died in quarantine kennels at Camberley in Surrey in October 1969. After two more dogs from the same kennels became rabid, the government instigated an inquiry, and quarantines were extended, the penalties for smuggling pets increased, and propaganda at channel ports stepped up. A new Rabies Act was passed in 1974, and the Ministry of Agriculture drew up emergency plans for dealing with what seemed the inevitable arrival of the disease into Britain.
Government and public anxieties peaked in the summer of 1976, coincidentally the hottest on record, in many ways bringing a return to the fevered Dog Days of Victorian times. A civil servant at the Department of Health stated, ‘We certainly don’t want it over here ... it may sound like the Armada in history or an invasion of flying foxes in science fiction, but we are taking it seriously.’ Although a leading figure in the RSPCA warned that the government was running ‘a terror campaign to shock people’, adding that no one had died of rabies in France since 1924, the tabloids fed the public a mixture of the scary and the comic. Alongside stories of cats being shot in Edinburgh or Fred, an illegally imported mouse, being put down, they carried headlines such as ‘Guns ready in rabies battle’, and revealed that local authorities had ‘military-style plans for tackling every situation’. A new genre of rabies fiction emerged with novels like Saliva, Return of the Mad Dogs and Rage, in which foreigners were seen as the menace that brought the disease, while rabies featured in TV dramas like Doomwatch, The Survivors, and The Mad Death.
In the late 1970s new threats emerged – European integration and the Channel Tunnel. Rabies was repeatedly cited by the Eurosceptics to illustrate the folly of moves towards harmonization and the free movement of goods. Norman Tebbit wrote that ‘The blessing of insularity has long protected us against rabid dogs and foreign dictators alike.’ Regulations for the Channel Tunnel ensured that trains would be sealed, physical barriers and grids placed at entry points, and baited traps deployed in the tunnel and terminal areas. Rabies quarantines became a part of national identity – an island people, whose country was kept free of animal plagues by the obedience of its citizens and the superiority of its state apparatus. In fact, by the time the tunnel opened in 1994, rabies in France had been brought under control by a vaccination scheme begun by the European Commission in the late 1980s. Moreover, by this time it was impossible for ministers to lecture their European counterparts on Britain’s freedom from contagious animal diseases because of the BSE disaster.
Buoyed by the success of its rabies control programme, the EC began to look towards a Europe-wide post-eradication policy of vaccination, blood tests, and the free movement of pets. Such proposals were condemned in Britain by veterinary, medical and animal welfare organizations, the government and the House of Commons. Ministers warned that public opinion was behind quarantines and explained that only a change that gave even greater security would be contemplated. All the same, public opinion was changing. In 1994 Lady Mary Fretwell, the wife of a former French Ambassador, founded the lobby group ‘Passports for Pets’, and her campaign gathered momentum when Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong, offered support because of his worries about putting his two Norfolk terriers into quarantine after the handover of the colony. John Major was allegedly minded to review policy, though any suggestion of a change was omitted from the Conservative manifesto.
New Labour had caught the mounting tide of opinion, and within weeks of its coming to power in 1997 a review was under way. The Passport for Pets lobby was now joined by the RSPCA and other groups under the umbrella of the Quarantine Reform Campaign, which ran a high-profile media campaign involving celebrities and public events. When it was published in September 1998 the review recommended abandoning the iconic six-month quarantine for pets entering Britain from certain countries, provided they had a microchip identity tag and a certificate – a Pet Passport – confirming they had been vaccinated. Quarantines would still apply to unvaccinated animals and those imported from non-qualifying countries. The new Pets Travel Scheme (PETS) was introduced on February 28th, 2000. It was very New Labour, seemingly a response to pressure from the middle and upper classes with holiday homes abroad, to celebrity endorsements, and to the actions of political insiders like the Fretwells and Pattons. There was no demand from Labour’s heartlands, the trade unions or the wider public. Politically, PETS signalled a new attitude to Europe, where the distrust, suspicion and exceptionalism of the Tory years was abandoned.
In November 2005 the Department for Food and Rural Affairs announced a review of PETS. Since 2000 many more countries have been added to the scheme and compulsory quarantines only apply to regions where rabies is uncontrolled. The consultation ended in 2006, and in January, this year the minister, Ben Bradshaw, stated ‘our current controls may no longer be proportionate to the risk of rabies entering the UK and we may need to consider modernizing processes and regulation’. This probably means harmonizing with EU rules, and could involve shortening the vaccination and quarantine periods. However, it is unlikely that there will be any change of policy with regard to the high-risk countries that World Rabies Day will highlight. The problem there is political and cultural as much as medical – the willingness of states to prioritize the problem of stray dogs and to change attitudes to dog ownership. That such actions are essential to control rabies was, and is, the lesson of the British experience of rabies in the 19th century.