NY Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 9, 2020
The Man Who Made Us Feel for the Animals
By Victoria Johnson
A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES
Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement
By Ernest Freeberg
336 pp. Basic Books. $30.
In March 2019, drivers near Yankee Stadium were startled to find
themselves sharing the expressway with a reddish-brown calf. Police
officers trussed and tranquilized the terrified animal in front of
rolling cameras, and the scene went viral on social media. The calf had
escaped from a nearby slaughterhouse. Its bid for freedom reminded city
dwellers that tens of thousands of animals die in New York each year.
It was once utterly impossible to ignore this fact. In 19th-century New
York, cattle were driven through the streets to the stockyard on 40th
Street, stray dogs were drowned by the hundreds in wire cages in the
East River and trolley horses fell dead in their tracks. P. T. Barnum’s
menagerie on Broadway burned to the ground three times, killing hyenas,
big cats and hundreds of other animals. The trapped creatures screamed
in a “horrible chorus” of “mortal agony,” The Times reported.
One man did more than any other to change the way New Yorkers — and
Americans overall — treated their animals. In his vivid and often
wrenching new book, “A Traitor to His Species,” the historian Ernest
Freeberg tells the story of Henry Bergh, a wealthy New Yorker who braved
ridicule, assault and death threats for over two decades as he sounded
the alarm about animal suffering. Among Bergh’s many achievements, the
most consequential was the founding in 1866 of the American Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
“A Traitor to His Species” is not a conventional biography, intriguing
as its central figure is. The book is above all a compassionate, highly
readable account of the 19th-century plight of animals, especially urban
animals — and of those who tried to come to their rescue.
Bergh began his crusade late in life. In his 50s, he was posted as a
diplomat by the Lincoln administration to Russia, where he was horrified
by the cruelty he saw carriage drivers inflicting on their horses. One
day he chided a violent driver, who ceased his abuse. Heartened by this
episode, Bergh began to cast about for a way to draw attention to the
suffering of animals in an age when many people thought that they
couldn’t feel emotion or even pain. Back in New York, Bergh assembled a
group of fellow elites and secured a charter from the State of New York
to create the A.S.P.C.A. Remarkably, Bergh and his A.S.P.C.A. agents
were empowered to make arrests when they witnessed animal cruelty.
Bergh flexed his new muscles immediately, marching onto a docked
schooner and arresting the captain. His hold was stacked with starving
and thirsty green turtles. They were immobilized on their backs, their
flippers bleeding from the ropes threaded through them. Turtle flesh was
highly prized on dinner tables, in taverns and at “turtle clubs” devoted
to this delicacy.
The ensuing court case drew national attention, just as Bergh had hoped.
“Notoriety is wanted,” he insisted — and he got it. He was ridiculed for
trying to protect lowly turtles, but he had made his point. Every
creature, Bergh believed, deserved humane treatment. In the end, the
schooner captain was declared innocent. Yet Bergh had made himself and
his cause instantly famous. Americans who had never thought about the
question before were suddenly debating whether animals had rights.
Bergh’s crusading compassion aligned him with the great reform movements
of his age. All around him, men and women were creating institutions
meant to improve child welfare, education, hospitals, prisons and the
plight of the formerly enslaved. Bergh found allies as well as
inspiration in these efforts. If people had learned to stop thinking of
human beings as property, couldn’t they be taught to stop thinking of
animals as property, too? Bergh pointedly called animals “our speechless
slaves.” No less a figure than Frederick Douglass put the same argument
to an audience in 1873. Farmers should be kind to their horses, he said,
because even though they can’t speak, they have senses and can feel
affection: “A horse is in many respects like a man.”
But how to change minds and behavior? Animal advocates disagreed on the
best strategy. Some of Bergh’s milder allies sought to encourage respect
for animals not through the strong arm of the law but through
sentimental education. Adults organized essay contests for
schoolchildren on the subject of “Kindness to Animals.” A prominent
Bostonian named George Angell arranged for the American publication of
Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty,” introducing readers to the novel idea that
a horse could both suffer and rejoice. Louisa May Alcott contributed to
the genre as well, writing a short story in which an abused horse told
her own sad tale — mentioning Bergh along the way.
Bergh’s own approach was fiercer; he had less faith in human nature. He
thought the fear of arrest was a stronger deterrent than moral suasion.
He strode like an avenging angel through the streets of Manhattan, on
the hunt for suffering animals and harsh masters. Freeberg’s writing is
at its liveliest when he is following Bergh on these daily rounds. One
mesmerizing scene has Bergh climbing with a policeman to the roof of a
bloody dogfighting den run by a Five Points gang leader. The policeman
lowers himself through the skylight, catching the perpetrators in the act.
Bergh’s passion for animals thickened his own hide. Whenever he
encountered a mistreated trolley horse, he swooped onto the tracks in
front of the horsecar, halting traffic for blocks as he rescued the
animal. He pioneered an ambulance in which to transport sick horses — an
innovation soon adapted, Freeberg writes, for the transport of sick New
Yorkers. Bergh made enemies of the horsecar drivers and their powerful
bosses. He hectored one of the latter, the formidable Cornelius
Vanderbilt, about his bloody profits, made from “the cruel sufferings of
a dumb, speechless servant.”
Bergh attacked another famous American, P. T. Barnum, for abusing wild
animals to entertain humans. Barnum relished the fight with Bergh; it
brought him more publicity and bigger audiences. (It was only in 2017
that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed down, after
a long campaign by animal rights activists.)
No possible site of animal cruelty escaped Bergh’s attention — the Erie
Canal with its straining, bleeding mules; vivisection laboratories where
dogs were pinned down and sliced open in front of medical students; city
slaughterhouses where cattle were clubbed to death after enduring
horrific privation on railroad cars left to bake in the sun while the
animals gasped for air and water. When “iced meat” emerged as a partial
alternative to the transport of live animals, Bergh embraced the
innovation — both because of the relief it would bring livestock and
because it removed the morally corrupting sight of abused animals from
the view of all but those who worked in the industry. Today, when a
desperate creature manages to break loose and run through New York City,
it reminds us of the hidden cost of our tastes.
As Freeberg shows, Bergh rankled many Americans with his insistence that
individual liberties must sometimes bow to the common good. But even
some of Bergh’s targets came to respect him deeply for his convictions.
When Bergh was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in 1888, P. T. Barnum was
in attendance.
Victoria Johnson is a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter
College and the author of “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and
Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic.”
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