A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement

by Ernest Freeberg

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541674165
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	57 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee. He has authored three award-winning books, including The Age of Edison. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Introduction A New Form of Goodness 1

Chapter 1 Something Bold and Outrageous 7

Chapter 2 The Riddle of the Nineteenth Century 21

Chapter 3 A Radical Gospel of Kindness 31

Chapter 4 Horse Trolley 47

Chapter 5 Barnum and Bergh 63

Chapter 6 Beneath the Struggling Beasts: Henry Bergh and Kit Burns 75

Chapter 7 America's First Energy Crisis 91

Chapter 8 The Movement Grows 115

Chapter 9 Market Murder 121

Chapter 10 Civilized Slaughter 141

Chapter 11 Genteel Ruffians 161

Chapter 12 The War on Dogs 181

Chapter 13 Bergh's Perverted Philanthropy Challenged 213

Chapter 14 What About Cruelty to Humans? 227

Chapter 15 Animals as Spectacle 245

Chapter 16 Legacy 263

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 279

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

06/22/2020

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"Vivid and often wrenching... 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."—New York Times

"Vivid... The narrative's pace never slackens. Expansive yet carefully documented, Mr. Freeberg's book is less the biography of a man than of a noble effort that eventually spanned the nation. A Traitor to His Species isn't primarily about animals or their rights. Instead, as articulated in Mr. Freeberg's clear-eyed conclusion, this is a book about us, about the searing truth that how we choose to treat animals reveals what kinds of humans we are."
—Wall Street Journal

"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."—Publishers Weekly

"Freeberg's well-written biography benefits from detailed descriptions of the situations and conditions that inspired Henry Bergh to act. A Traitor to his Species is a good read, making a fresh case for Bergh's genius at using the media of the day to advance public awareness and debate over animal welfare in a world that lived close to animals and relied on their bodies for labor and raw materials as well as food."—Katherine C. Grier, author of Pets in America: A History

"Vivid... A successful effort to make a splendid American crusader better known."—Kirkus (starred review)

"In his lively treatment, Freeberg offers a thorough and human portrait of the ASPCA's founder, Henry Bergh, presenting the strongest possible case for his courage, resilience and tenacity. In bringing back to life Bergh's fabled battles, Freeberg provides both context and evidence for Bergh's prominence as a leader of the nascent animal protection movement, one of America's most significant post-Civil War reforms."—Bernard Unti , Humane Society of the United States

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-07
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.

Kirkus Reviews