The New Yorker did a special issue on animals, with reprints going back decades. This is an interesting one about dogs.
Bark
The World According to Dogs
Stanley Coren believes that history has neglected dogs, but dogs appear not to mind
Dogs, like women before them, have been confined, illiterate and voiceless, to the domestic sphere, and so dog history, like women’s history, must be found in private places...
Eventually, dogs acquired rights. Henry Bergh, a wealthy American dilettante, took up the canine cause and in 1866 founded the A.S.P.C.A. One of his chief concerns was preventing the use of dogs to turn spits (although twice when he showed up at restaurants to make sure they were no longer using dogs for this purpose he discovered that they had started using black children instead). Dogs acquired rights, but they still had a respect problem. The notion of dogs thinking was considered ridiculous.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/03/bark
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