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

Description

Gilded Age Americans lived cheek-by-jowl with free range animals. Cities and towns teemed with milk cows in dark tenement alleys, pigs rooting through garbage in the streets, geese and chickens harried by the packs of stray dogs that roamed the 19th century city. For all of American history, animals had been a ubiquitous and seemingly inevitable part of urban life, essential to sustaining a dense human population. As that population became ever-denser, though, city dwellers were forced to consider new ways to share space with their fellow creatures-and began to fit urban animals into one of two categories: the pets they loved or the pests they exterminated. Into the fracas of the urban landscape stepped Henry Bergh, who launched a then-shocking campaign to bring rights to animals. Bergh's movement was considered wildly radical for suggesting that animals might feel pain, that they might have rights. He and his cadre of activists put abusers on trial, sometimes literally calling the animal victims as witnesses in court. But despite all the showmanship, at its core the movement was guided by a fierce sense of its devotees' morality. A Traitor to His Species is a revelatory social history, bursting with colorful characters. In addition to the eccentric and droopily-mustachioed Bergh, the movement and its adversaries included former Five Points gang-leader-turned-sports-hall-entrepreneur Kit Burns and his prize bulldog Belcher, larger-than-life impresario P.T. Barnum, and pioneering Philadelphia activist Caroline Earle White. There are greedy robber barons and humanitarian visionaries-all bumping up against one another as the city underwent a monumental shift. For better or worse, they all forged our modern relationship to animals.

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.

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