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

Author:Ernest Freeberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: State & Local, NJ, MD, DE, United States, NY, Social Activists, 19th Century, Social History, Biography & Autobiography, Middle Atlantic (DC, PA), Environmentalists & Naturalists, History
ISBN: 9781541674165
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2020-09-21T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GENTEEL RUFFIANS

TAKING ON THE livestock shipping industry required humane societies across the country to coordinate their efforts, a challenge that helped to forge dozens of local and state organizations into a national movement. Though they failed to win significant victories over the railroads, their efforts gave the far-flung societies a common project, a collaboration that helped them learn to share information and moral support. The expanding network also made it easier to chase miscreants across state lines, a problem that had long frustrated Henry Bergh in his attempt to stop working-class blood sports.1

Bergh’s notable success in prosecuting Kit Burns had proven to be a small victory on a big continent. Most purveyors of dogfights and ratting contests found it easy enough to move their show to the more lawless frontiers of New Jersey. Bergh, lacking legal jurisdiction across the Hudson, implored New Jersey legislators to take up the cause by passing their own anticruelty law. And whenever he managed to track the movements of the dogfighting elite, he wrote urgent letters to the authorities in other states, pleading with them to make things “hot for these ruffians.” “For heaven’s sake,” he told the mayor of Philadelphia, “save these poor dumb brutes from mangling each other, for the unholy purpose of affording amusement to these demons, miscalled men.”2

As the animal welfare movement spread across the country, some of the most notorious dogfighters found it ever more difficult to ply their trade, the ground shrinking as bad publicity and public indignation over these events grew. In 1879, Bergh notified the police chief in New Orleans that Harry Jennings, the notorious dogfight promoter, was headed his way. A comrade of the late Kit Burns, Jennings had boarded a steamer for New Orleans, in the company of twenty-one fighting bulldogs. He planned to stage what he called the “Great National Dog Fight.” But Bergh got there first, not only with his letter of warning but also with the wider cause itself. With his support, the state had recently joined the ranks of those with an anticruelty law that turned dogfights from a lowbrow amusement into a criminal enterprise. The city’s Picayune, a champion of the anticruelty movement, called on the police chief to see that the law was “relentlessly enforced against the vagrant ruffians who have come here to make the soil of Louisiana the arena of their inhuman sports.” When Jennings landed in New Orleans, he and his customers had to console themselves with an exhibition of rat killing. In the absence of a national law protecting animals, the SPCA movement began to construct an ad hoc communication network to challenge the interstate commerce in cruelty.3

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.