A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement By Earnest Breeberg
Until two months ago, the only thing I knew about the ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) was that it’s the place where people adopt abandoned animals. Since I don’t own a pet or and I have never owned one, I didn’t know anything else.
The ASPCA was the first humane society to be established in North America and is, today, one of the largest in the world. It’s mission, as stated by founder Henry Bergh in 1866, is “to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States.”
While on assignment in Russia as an American diplomat, a New Yorker named Henry Bergh stopped a carriage driver from beating his fallen horse. The year was 1863, and it was then and there that Bergh realized the effect he could have on the world. He soon resigned his post and returned to New York to devote his energy to the prevention of cruelty to animals. In 1866, he founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Bergh faced an uphill battle from the start. At the time, America was not a friendly place for animals: workhorses hauled overloaded carts through the streets, dogcatchers were known to kidnap pet dogs and hold them for ransom, and dogfighting and cockfighting were common forms of “entertainment.” But Bergh was determined, and he founded the ASPCA on the clear belief that all animals are entitled to kind and respectful treatment and must be protected under the law
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.
Bergh began his crusade late in life. In his 50s, he 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. He started by assembling a group of fellow elites and securing 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.
Henry 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.”
Henry 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.
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