At the outbreak of the Second World War, before a single shot was fired, the British began killing hundreds of thousands of their own pets. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The British pet massacre is one of the stranger tragedies of WWII, a footnote that gets lost amongst all the human devastation that followed. In 1939, the British government formed the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee to decide what should happen to pets as the war commenced. The fear was that as the government was forced to ration food, people would either share their rations with their pets or simply leave them to die, inhumanely, of hunger.

Believing neither of these options to be palatable, they decided on the next best thing: urgi

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