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.”