Britain: The Legacy of Humanity Dick

British mod designers who made it big with miniskirts now seem to be straining for fresh sensations. London's latest sartorial smash is a camel's hair maxicoat for dogs. But when the new fashion was promoted in stores and newspapers last week, all of Britain seemed to bark back. Animal psychologists protested that dogs "object to being dressed up." The man at Harrods pet department rejected the coats as downright "impractical." The final word came from the venerable Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which sometimes seems to rival Parliament and Crown as a defender of the realm. "This is the kind of fashion," intoned a spokesman at the R.S.P.C.A.'s 100-year-old London headquarters, "in which the feelings of dogs are being ignored."

Such pronouncements are not taken lightly in the land where Tennyson once advised a recent bride that she could consider herself fortunate if her husband treated her as "something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse." Queen Victoria, an early champion of the society, declared that "no civilization can be complete which does not include the dumb and defenseless of God's creatures." By her standards, Britain has reached Utopia.

The Ultimate Penalty. More than 20 million Britons own pets, including 5,000,000 dogs and 5,000,000 cats, plus incalculable numbers of hamsters and hedgehogs, budgerigars and even baboons. Churchill used to disclose "secrets I could tell no man" to a favorite poodle. When an American visitor at a royal military review observed that Queen Elizabeth was bearing up nobly under a beastly sun, a British matron snapped back: "It's the horses must be really suffering."

Founded in 1824 by an M.P. named Richard ("Humanity Dick") Martin and several other animal-rights activists, the society is the oldest of its kind. With more than 4,000 branches in Britain and 19 Commonwealth countries, it maintains a powerful lobby in Parliament. Unlike mere bobbies, the R.S.P.C.A.'s 240 smartly uniformed inspectors carry sidearms (for shooting injured animals), though they have no legal status whatever. The society's annual budget of $2,800,000 is the envy of the much smaller N.S.P.C.C. (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), which combats Britain's severe child-beating problem. "We're not a particularly affectionate race," explains R.S.P.C.A. Chairman John Hobhouse. "Perhaps we fall back, then, on this affection for animals."

Recently, the society forced London stores to stop filling orders for lion cubs and other exotic pets by charging "cruel and inhuman treatment." Though it regards fox hunting as a "humane" way of keeping the vulpine population from overrunning Britain's farms, the society is waging war on other "blood sports." At R.S.P.C.A. urging, Prime Minister Harold Wilson last month inveighed in the Commons against setting greyhounds after a live hare as a "barbarous anachronism."