Monica Murphy

Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer.

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The Gilded Age of Animal Advocacy: A Transformative Era for America’s Moral Compass

Nineteenth-century activists revolutionized attitudes toward nonhuman animals amid cultural, economic, and moral shifts in a rapidly changing nation.

By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy in Animals | Earth Food Life Project and Human Bridges Project | English | February 3, 2025

More about this author

Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer. She is the co-author, with Bill Wasik, of Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals (2024, Knopf Doubleday) and Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (2013, Penguin Random House), which is a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

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How the Civil War Spurred the Animal Welfare Movement

Co-authors: Barbara Spindel | Christian Science Monitor | June | 2024

Our Kindred Creatures tells the story of American abolitionists who, after Emancipation, pivoted from antislavery campaigns to animal welfare advocacy.

The Illogical Relationship Americans Have With Animals

Co-authors: Ben Goldfarb | Atlantic | April | 2024

Goldfarb uses the book by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, Our Kindred Creatures, as a springboard to a discussion of Americaʼs contradictory relationship with animals.

Publications by this author

Our Kindred Creatures

How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals

Co-authors: Bill Wasik | Alfred A. Knopf and Doubleday | April | 2024

A compassionate, sweeping history of the transformation in American attitudes toward animals by the best-selling authors of Rabid.

Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, animals’ suffering had rarely been discussed; horses pulling carriages and carts were routinely beaten in public view, and dogs were pitted against each other for entertainment and gambling. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst.

In Our Kindred Creatures, Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and veterinarian Monica Murphy offer a fascinating history of this crusade and the battles it sparked in American life. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians and conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own right: animal impresarios such as P. T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the nation’s rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about how animals should be treated.

In recounting this remarkable period of moral transition—which, by the turn of the twentieth century, would give birth to the attitudes we hold toward animals today—Wasik and Murphy challenge us to consider the obligations we still have to all our kindred creatures

Rabid

A Cultural History of the Worldʼs Most Diabolical Virus

Co-authors: Bil Wasik | Penguin Random House | June | 2013

The most fatal virus known to science, rabies—a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans—kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration from the authors of Our Kindred Creatures, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies.

From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind’s oldest and most fearsome foes.

Media by this author

Ask the Vet: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals with Dr. Monica Murphy

Interview | January | 2025

Dr. Ann Hohenhaus interviews Dr. Monica Murphy, a veterinarian and co-author of Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, a fascinating book that looks at how America’s attitudes toward animals were transformed in the late 19th century. Tune in as they discuss:

· Why Dr. Murphy found this particular time period intriguing

· The effectiveness of Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA, in advocating for animals

· The impact the book "Black Beauty" had on animal welfare

· Why an outbreak of horse flu in 1872 highlighted the need for veterinary care

· The role of veterinarians advocating for animal welfare

· How the cruel transport of sea turtles destined for New York dinner tables inspired Henry Bergh to advocate for the welfare of wildlife

· Why PT Barnum was a lightning rod for reformers

· Does the physical and emotional distance humans have from certain species impact animal welfare?

· Dr. Murphy's ideas for a new book