Reviewed by: A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement by Ernest Freeberg Robert Chiles (bio) A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement By Ernest Freeberg. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 336 pages, 6" × 9". $30.00 cloth, $17.99 e-book. Ernest Freeberg has produced a splendid study of the nascent animal rights movement in Gilded Age America, centered on that movement's most recognizable and polarizing figure: ASPCA founding president Henry Bergh. While the book offers gripping accounts of pivotal episodes throughout Bergh's public life, it is not a biography; rather, Freeberg's exploration of Henry Bergh's career is a vehicle for interrogating broader trends in industrial America, uncovering surprising histories of the centrality of animals to the Gilded Age city, and inviting profound philosophical reflection. This carefully crafted, wonderfully readable work is bursting with fascinating anecdotes and poignant insights, all animated by masterful storytelling. A Traitor to His Species is a magnificent achievement that will inform, surprise, entertain, and challenge anyone interested in Gilded Age America or curious about the complex relationships between people and animals. It is easy for modern city-dwellers to forget the timeless, "ubiquitous and seemingly inevitable" role of animals in urban life through most of human history. Freeberg reminds us that as cities grew in the nineteenth-century United States, so too did urban Americans' [End Page 403] reliance on animals "for energy and food, companionship and entertainment" (2). At that moment, some Americans began pondering the ethical dilemmas of anthrozoological relations and sought "to untangle animal rights from human privileges" (8). While a dramatic shift in the role of animals in Gilded Age society was thus "provoked by technological revolution," it was "mediated by men and women who organized for the first time to protect animals from the worst abuses of human exploitation" (3). In all of this, New York State took the national lead, incorporating the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the spring of 1866 and then swiftly passing a trailblazing anti-cruelty statute—enforceable by ASPCA agents with police powers—that "became a model for similar legislation across the country" (4). Henry Bergh, the dynamic figure behind the law and founding president of the ASPCA, immediately emerged as "the highest lightning rod in every stormy clash over animal rights" (5). While centered on Bergh's influential and controversial career, this compelling study transcends its main character to furnish fascinating insights and nuanced analyses of a diverse array of issues arising from the countless roles of animals in Gilded Age life. One of the many commendable features of this book is its structure. A series of thematic chapters are arranged around a specific controversy, allowing the author to use each example to build multiple stories at once: the centrality of animals to urban life; the often spectacularly brutal results of human use of animals in an industrial metropolis; the response to such abuses by a growing anti-cruelty movement; the place of Henry Bergh as the recognized leader of this movement; and the evolving relationship between activists, industry, the state, and the public, when it came to moderating cruelty and modifying social attitudes. From the perspective of content alone, these chapters are delightfully informative. For example, several chapters remind readers that Gilded Age New York was very much an equestrian city. Yet these "vital partners in building the Gilded Age city" were "pushed to the limits of their strength by the demands of a rapidly growing industrial economy," and so "many became interchangeable parts, worked intensely and therefore briefly, recycled in just a few years to the market for broken horses or the rendering plant" (52). From the eleven thousand horses pulling New York's streetcars in the late 1860s to the aging horses of the city's impoverished hawkers or carters, the "brutal excess" involved in coercing these animals across the metropolis "was a common and demoralizing sight on city streets" (47, 48, 52). Although Bergh and his agents routinely monitored and occasionally arrested working-class teamsters, and although the aristocratic Bergh condescendingly lectured Irish immigrant drivers...
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Apr 1, 2024
Ilka Ute Emmerich 
Open Access