A chronicle of brutality

In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of geese. So fierce was the demand for quills that many were pulled from living birds, a process that was agonising and sometimes fatal. Travellers in rural England occasionally found denuded goose bodies lying quill-less at the side of the road where the quill robbers had left them shocked to death. Only the invention of the type-writer released the goose population of Britain from centuries of pain.

This enormous and dazzlingly encyclopaedic history of our relationship with animals over some 900 years is, largely, a tale of such barbarity and imposition. If we needed it, or wanted it, animals were made to provide it.