'Torture in England': campaigning for an end to male violence against women - and animals

Yesterday, my daughter’s rabbit - named Pocketrocket, or Pocket for short - died. Knowing the comfort that my little cat Jennie was bringing to me in the months after my husband’s death, I wanted my children to benefit from something similar, so back in April 2022 we brought three baby rabbits into our household. My nine-year-old daughter sat on the grass, and I placed Pocket onto her chest, like a newborn, and they stared into each other’s wide eyes and both palpably relaxed; the tension and worry exhaling from their bodies. Pocket was a lovely little bunny, and, to thank her for everything she brought to our family at such a difficult time, I’m publishing this extract from my work-in-progress. This piece is about women who see the connection between men who abuse women and men who abuse animals - and who fight to improve conditions for both women and animals.

Also: my creative writing course, for anyone who might be writing about women and/or feminism, launches on Monday 16 June. It is a six-session course, and you can enrol for all six sessions, or simply purchase individual workshops. The sessions are recorded, so you can participate in your own time. The first workshop, which will be made available on Monday, is about ‘overcoming the challenges of writing on women and feminism’. The six-session course costs £150, or, the workshops cost £30 each; and I’m offering a massive 50% discount for my lovely annual, founding and Sisterhood subscribers, meaning you can sign up to the course for £75 or each workshop for £15. More information, and sign-up links, are here:

I’m also VERY excited to be offering two in-person residential writing retreats later in 2025 and in early 2026. Both retreats will be themed around ‘Writing and Running’, and will take place in the beautiful spa town of Harrogate. One retreat (11-13 November 2025) will be female-only; one retreat (7-9 January 2026) will be open to everybody. More information, including the programme, costs, and sign-up links, will be coming next week.

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Extract from work-in-progress (references will be given in the full work):

The ACF Animal Rescue has operated from Pakistan’s capital city Karachi, since 2013. Bearing the initials of its founder, a young woman named Ayesha Chundrigar, the ACF Animal Rescue is the first in Pakistan to focus specifically on stray and working animals who have been abused by humans, rather than on abandoned pets. It runs a hotline for reporting cases of animal abuse, as well as an ambulance service and a sanctuary for treatment and rehabilitation, the latter of which is capable of caring for five hundred animals at a time. Further initiatives include overseeing mass programmes for neutering and rabies vaccinations among Pakistan’s stray dog population; running donkey camps through which free medical treatment is provided to working animals, and owners are educated in humane animal care; and ‘empathic education’. The latter has two strands: firstly, using the example of mistreated animals to educate schoolchildren in ‘true empathy and kindness’, and, secondly, providing a ‘holistic, non-judgemental setting for both animals and children to heal from trauma.’

Among many other qualified roles, Chundrigar is a trained psychotherapist, and she has worked extensively with acid burn survivors, of whom, in Pakistan, 80% are female and almost 70% are aged under eighteen, and whose attackers are almost always male. Among its many projects, the animal rescue’s empathetic education programme offers opportunities to women and girls who have suffered acid attacks to spend time with cats who have been similarly burned (also usually by male perpetrators). Chundrigar describes how spending time with animals who have themselves been traumatised can serve ‘a higher therapeutic purpose for all human beings. [The animals] are a source of inspiration with their resolute spirit and grit to learn to live again when given a second chance, without anything holding them back.’

Chundrigar suggests that the connection between abused women and abused animals is so strong because they are all victims of the same patriarchal system; a system which is characterised by ‘lack of empathy and the drive towards violence.’ Spending time with beings who have similar experiences of the world’s cruelty offers much-needed comfort to both women and animals. This is not a recent realisation. Women who have been abused by men have long felt connection with similarly abused animals, and, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the nature of that connection started to gain political momentum as campaigners for women’s rights joined together with campaigners for animal rights.

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One night in 1850, a woman is woken when she hears footsteps treading down the stairs and the front door opening and closing. She realises that her husband, who should be in bed, is not there. She wraps a gown around her nightdress, and follows the sounds, out, into the courtyard. There, he stands, his back to her, and he is talking in a low tone to two or three dark figures. He appears to nod and one man hands over a squirming bundle of sixteen, maybe twenty, legs, and four or five noses: a pile of puppies.

She knows what her husband will do with the animals. From the doorway, she runs at him, shouting, intercepting the exchange, snatching the creatures before they reach her husband’s arms. The puppies are writhing, arching their spines, kicking their back legs against her arms to propel themselves to the ground, but she is well-practised in manipulating recalcitrant babies and she tightly folds their flailing limbs into her chest. She glares at her husband and carries the dogs inside, to the attic, where she watches over them until morning. Then she takes them to a friend, and asks her to find safe homes for the beasts.

Over the following months, her campaign intensifies. She spends the nights black-clad, stalking the streets of Paris, hunting stray dogs and cats before her husband’s poaching network reaches them. During the daytimes, she and her young daughters watch him stride out of the house towards their local marché, where they know he will buy live frogs and rabbits. He angers at her interventions and threatens to ‘get rid of her’, perhaps with poison. She retorts that his behaviour is ‘that of a boor who treats his wife like a slave’. Eventually he leaves, taking her dowry money, and they formally separate. Afterwards he shows little interest in his daughters. When he dies, one of those daughters will spend her inheritance on establishing hospitals for dogs and cats ‘with the view of atoning for what she considered the crimes of vivisection which her parent had committed.’

The woman is Fanny Bernard, born Mary-Françoise Martin, and her husband is Claude Bernard, heralded by many, both in his own time and today, as ‘one of the greatest of all men of science.’ Claude’s most famous work was in the field of ‘experimental physiology’ and was underpinned by the idea that, in the body, there is no distinct force or substance which creates life. Instead, he believed that life results from a number of mechanistic processes, which we now call homeostasis, and which include how our bodies regulate temperature by sweating. Claude argued passionately that vivisection – meaning ‘the act of opening or dissecting living animals’ for reasons of experimentation rather than healing – was indispensable in illuminating these bodily processes. To find animals for his experiments, he took strays from the streets of Paris and even contemplated using his own family’s pet, and he stressed that, in order to do their work, vivisectionists must dissociate themselves from their emotions. ‘The physiologist,’ Claude wrote, ‘does not hear the cries of the animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea.’ He likened his methodology to that of an unrepentant rapist, describing the natural world as ‘a woman who must be forced to unveil herself when attacked by the experimenter and who must be put to the question and subdued.’