During the First World War, humans and animals became entangled in complex ways. According to the British Imperial War Museum, more than 16 million animals served in the First World War and were critical for the war effort. Naval cat mascots, messenger dogs, pack horses and more, all produced an emotional outpouring of soldier love, illustrated in a popular and famous poster, Fortunino Matania's ‘Goodbye Old Man’, currently owned by the Blue Cross. A wounded horse struggles on the ground as a soldier cradles the horse's head and kisses it. An animal's death was somewhat more distressing than a soldier's because animals could not understand what was happening and it was not their choice to go. As a signaller in the Royal Field Artillery explained:

Katherine Mansfield, whose beloved brother died from a faulty hand grenade during a training exercise in 1915, also understood that human violence extends to the animal and was troubled by animal death. Headless corpses of animals seemed to have haunted her. Her empathy for animals in her fiction parallels British society's growing empathy for animals, a direct result of First World War mass death.