Video of a Brown Puppy Playing with a Ball

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection which raged in England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish feminists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre which divided the country.
The controversy was triggered by allegations that William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College London performed an illegal vivisection in February 1903 before an audience of 60 medical students on a brown terrier dog. The dog was adequately anaesthetized according to Bayliss and his team, but it was conscious and struggling according to the Swedish activists. The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Bayliss's research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, and he was outraged by the assault on his reputation. He sued for libel and won.
Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled on the Latchmere Recreation Ground in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provocative plaque: "Men and women of England, how long shall these Things be?" This led to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called anti-doggers. On 10 December 1907, 1,000 medical students marched through central London waving effigies of the brown dog on sticks and clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots.
Battersea Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness in March 1910, after which it was reportedly melted down by the council's blacksmith—despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour. A new statue of the brown dog was erected in Battersea Park in 1985, commissioned by anti-vivisection groups. According to Peter Mason in 1997, all that was left of the old statue was a hump in the pavement, the sign on a nearby fence reading "No Dogs".