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Beautiful Joe was a dog from the town of Meaford, Ontario, whose story inspired the bestselling 1893 novel Beautiful Joe, which contributed to worldwide awareness of animal cruelty. The real Beautiful Joe was an Airedale-type dog. He was medium-sized, brown, and described as likely being part bull terrier and part fox terrier. He was also described as a mongrel, a cur, and a mutt. He was originall... More

Beautiful Joe was a dog from the town of Meaford, Ontario, whose story inspired the bestselling 1893 novel Beautiful Joe, which contributed to worldwide awareness of animal cruelty. The real Beautiful Joe was an Airedale-type dog. He was medium-sized, brown, and described as likely being part bull terrier and part fox terrier. He was also described as a mongrel, a cur, and a mutt. He was originally owned by a local Meaford man, who abused the dog to the point of near death, and even cut off his ears and tail. Walter Moore, father of Louise Moore, rescued the dog in 1890 from what likely would have been a violent death. In 1892, Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861-1947), first learned about Beautiful Joe when she visited her brother and his wife, Louise Moore. Saunders was so touched by Joe's story that she wrote a novel-length, fictionalized, autobiographical version of it, entitled Beautiful Joe. Margaret Saunders relocated the story to a small town in Maine and changed the family's name to Morris to win a literary contest sponsored by the American Humane Education Society. The book was first published in 1893. Both the book and its subject received worldwide attention. It was the first Canadian book in history to sell over a million copies, and by the late 1930s had sold over 7 million copies worldwide. Saunders did not avoid comparison of her work to the similarly-themed Black Beauty. Indeed, she makes reference to Black Beauty in the very first page of Beautiful Joe, not referring to it by name but writing [from Joe's viewpoint] "I have seen my mistress laughing and crying over a little book that she says is a story of a horse's life". Joe goes on to say that he will write the story of a dog's life, to similarly please his owner. Thus, within the context of the book at least, Beautiful Joe is directly inspired by Black Beauty.

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