BOOK REVIEW : !PLIGHT OF ANIMALS! : HISTORY

Henry Berg and the Birth of Animals Right Movement : '' A Traitor to His Species '' by Ernest Freeberg.

IN MARCH 2019, drivers near Yankee Stadium in New York were startled to find themselves sharing the expressway with a reddish - brown calf. Police officers trussed and tranquilized the terrified animal in front of rolling cameras, and the scene went viral on social media.

The calf had escaped from a nearby slaughterhouse. Its bid for freedom reminded city dwellers that tens of thousands of animals die in New York each year.

It was once utterly impossible to ignore this fact. In 19th century New York, cattle driven through the streets to the stockyard on 40th Street, stray dogs were drowned by the hundreds in wire cages in the East river, and trolley horses fell dead in their tracks.

P.T. Barnum's menagerie on Broadway burned to the ground three times, killing hyenas, big cats, and hundreds of other animals. The trapped creatures screamed in a ''horrible chorus'' of ''mortal agony.''  The New York Times reported.

One man did more than any other to change the way New Yorkers - and Americans overall - treated their animals.

In his vivid and often wrenching new book, ''A Traitor to His Species,'' the historian Ernest Freeburg tells the story of Henry Bergh, a wealthy New Yorker who braved ridicule, assault and death threats for over two decades as he sounded the alarm about animal suffering.

Among Bergh's many achievements, the most consequential was the founding in 1866 of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

''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.

Bergh began his crusade late in life. In his 50s, he was posted as diplomat by the Lincoln administration to Russia, where he was horrified by the cruelty he saw carriage drivers inflicted on their horses.

One day, he chided a violent driver, who ceased his abuse. Heartened by this episode, Bergh began to cast about for a way to draw attention to the suffering of animals in an age when many people thought they couldn't feel emotion or even pain.

Back in New York, Bergh assembled a group of fellow elites and secured a charter from the State of New York to create the A.S.P.C.A. Remarkably, Bergh and his A.S.P.C.A. agents were empowered to make arrests when they witnessed animal cruelty.

Bergh flexed his new muscles immediately, marching onto a docked schooner and arrested the captain. His hold was stacked with starving and thirsty green turtles. They were immobilized on their backs, their flippers bleeding from the ropes threaded through them.

Turtle flesh was highly prized on dinner tables, in taverns and at ''turtle clubs'' devoted to this delicacy.

The ensuing court case drew national attention, just as Bergh had hoped. ''Notoriety is wanted,'' he insisted - and he got it. He was ridiculed for trying to protect lowly turtles, but he had made his point.

Every creature, Bergh believed, deserved humane treatment. 

The World Students Society thanks author Victoria Johnson.