Dennis Prager is having a discussion about the lack of distinction between human and animal life, occasioned by the drowning of a Japanese woman who tried to save her dog from a river. He claims that the animal rights movement is dominated by childless women, and that it's a relatively recent phenomenon. Well, he's probably right about the displacement, but there is, in fact, precedent. Orwell, in his famous essay "The English People," written in 1943, but not published until 1947:

Perhaps the most horrible spectacles in England are the Dogs' Cemeteries in Kensington Gardens, at Stoke Poges (it actually adjoins the churchyard where Gray wrote his famous "Elegy") and at various other places. But there were also the Animals' ARP (Air Raid Precautions) Centres, with miniature stretchers for cats, and in the first year of the war there was the spectacle of Animal Day being celebrated with all its usual pomp in the middle of the Dunkirk evacuation. Although its worst follies are committed by the upper-class women, the animal cult runs right through the nation and is probably bound up with the decay of agiculture and the dwindled birthrate. Several years of stringent rationing have failed to reduce the dog and cat population, and even in poor quarters of big towns the bird-fanciers' shops display canary seed at prices ranging up to twenty-five shillings a pint.