A traitor to his species Henry Bergh and the birth of the animal rights movement

Ernest Freeberg

Book - 2020

From an award-winning historian, the outlandish story of the man who gave rights to animals. In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and beast alike. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement. From the center of these debates, Henry Bergh launched a shocking campaign to grant rights to animals. A Traitor to His Species is revelatory social history, awash with colorful characters. Cheered on by thousands of men and women who joined his cause, Bergh fought with robber barons, Five Points gangs, and legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, as they pushed for new laws to protect trolley... horses, livestock, stray dogs, and other animals. Raucous and entertaining, A Traitor to His Species tells the story of a remarkable man who gave voice to the voiceless and shaped our modern relationship with animals.

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Basic Books 2020.
Language
English
Main Author
Ernest Freeberg (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
vii, 322 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-307) and index.
ISBN
9780465093861
  • Introduction A New Form of Goodness
  • Chapter 1. Something Bold and Outrageous
  • Chapter 2. The Riddle of the Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter 3. A Radical Gospel of Kindness
  • Chapter 4. Horse Trolley
  • Chapter 5. Barnum and Bergh
  • Chapter 6. Beneath the Struggling Beasts: Henry Bergh and Kit Burns
  • Chapter 7. America's First Energy Crisis
  • Chapter 8. The Movement Grows
  • Chapter 9. Market Murder
  • Chapter 10. Civilized Slaughter
  • Chapter 11. Genteel Ruffians
  • Chapter 12. The War on Dogs
  • Chapter 13. Bergh's Perverted Philanthropy Challenged
  • Chapter 14. What About Cruelty to Humans?
  • Chapter 15. Animals as Spectacle
  • Chapter 16. Legacy
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

University of Tennessee historian Freeberg (The Age of Edison) delivers an evocative biography of Henry Bergh (1813--1888), founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The heir to an industrial fortune, Bergh founded the ASPCA in New York in 1866, and over the next two decades led nationwide animal rights campaigns. Drawing parallels between animal welfare and abolitionism, Bergh convinced New York lawmakers to criminalize animal cruelty and empower ASPCA officers to intervene in cases of abuse. Though the law had wide public and official support when it came to obvious cases such as abandoning old livestock to die of starvation, Bergh pushed for anticruelty measures to be applied to more commonly accepted practices, including dogfighting, rat baiting, and shipping turtles upside down and bound together with rope that "pierced through their flippers, creating wounds that still oozed after weeks at sea." Bergh's crusades, many of which pitted him against circus impresario P.T. Barnum, often made him a figure of public ridicule, Freeberg writes, but were part of a rising new belief that "cruelty was a social problem that could and must be addressed." Freeberg marshals a wealth of detail in tracking Bergh's campaigns and paints a vivid picture of Gilded Age America. Animal lovers and history buffs will savor this immersive account. (Sept.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The stirring life of the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Humans have always exploited animals for energy, food, companionship, and entertainment. By the 19th century, American cities teemed with their numbers, diseases, and smells, and they continued to be treated as insensible entities to be eaten or exploited. After discussing these issues in the preface, Freeberg, who heads the history department at the University of Tennessee, begins his vivid, often gruesome account of Henry Bergh (1813-1888), a wealthy New Yorker who accomplished little of note until, at age 52 (according to his own account), he found his life's mission: ending animal cruelty. In 1866, he persuaded New York to incorporate his American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. With no money appropriated, it seemed a harmless gesture to legislators, but Bergh had included a feature absent from previous, unenforceable state laws: The society could arrest and prosecute offenders. No shrinking violet, Bergh went into action and soon became a wildly popular and reviled media figure. With few exceptions, readers will support his crusades, well-delineated by Freeberg, but Bergh faced an avalanche of abuse and lost as many prosecutions as he won. Most readers will quail at the casual cruelty that Freeberg describes and that Victorians took for granted: Cattle shipped from the Midwest spent a week packed into freight cars with no food, water, or room to lie down. Slaughterhouse workers began work while the animals were still alive, and children gathered to watch. Stray dogs were often drowned. Healthy horses worked until feeble and were then sold to people too poor to afford a healthy horse, so they worked them to death. Dogfights and cockfights entertained the poor, and the rich slaughtered and crippled thousands of birds in live pigeon-shooting contests. Upon Bergh's death, most states were enforcing ASPCA--backed anti-cruelty laws, and universal feeling that animals did not suffer had become a minority view. A successful effort to make a splendid American crusader better known. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.