Beautiful Joe

Beautiful Joe was a man's best friend from Meaford, Ontario, whose adventures roused the very successful 1893 book Beautiful Joe, which proffered to global enlightenment to the brutality of animals. Margaret Marshall Saunders CBE was a productive Canadian author of juvenile fiction and love stories, a professor and an animal rights proponent. Margaret was born in the town of Milton, Nova Scotia, although she was raised in Berwick, Nova Scotia where her father was a Baptist cleric. She is highly notable for her narrative Beautiful Joe. It is the real account of a hound from Meaford, Ontario that had his ears and tail cut off by a cruel owner as a puppy, fortunately, is saved by a Meaford family whom he afterward rescues. The tale is inscribed from the hound's own views, and is always in comparison with Black Beauty which was published some time earlier. The novelist passed Beautiful Joe to the American Humane Education Society Prize Competition "Kind and Cruel Treatment of Domestic Animals and Birds in the Northern States", and was awarded $200. When the novel was published in 1893, both the novel and its topic got international acclaim. It was the first Canadian novel to sell more than a million replications, and by the last years of 1930s had sold more than 7 million replications comprehensively. It was also interpreted into different dialects, such as Esperanto. With reference to Beautiful Joe, Marshall Saunders remarked, "I have had the honour of leading the old Ontario dog around the world on a chain of translations and rejoice in the report that he has become quite a propagandist for humanitarianism". Ensuing the popularity of Beautiful Joe, Margaret authored over 20 other novels, a lot of which determined societal analysis on matters including the nullification of child labor, redevelopment of town or city, and the renovation of recreation area provisions.