Man’s best friends raised the bar for redefining humanity under rights law

What It Means To Be Human, Joanna Bourke

HER name was Mary Ellen Wilson, and she was found chained to a bedpost, carrying the signs of a brutal beating. That was in New York City in 1873. She was so malnourished — and had been, over a lengthy period of time — that her rescuers assumed she was aged about five. In fact, she was nine.

The woman who found and freed her tried to get the police to do something about the person who had so brutalised the child. They refused to take action against Mary Connolly, the woman to whom she had been indentured and who had brutalised her, because no law protecting children from cruelty allowed them to take such action. The woman who rescued her did a little lateral thinking and approached the president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, persuading him that Mary Ellen Wilson was “a little animal” deserving of action. He agreed, and a court found Mary Connolly guilty of felonious assault.