On this day in vegan history · August 29, 1813
The Man Who Stopped Traffic for a Horse
Henry Bergh was born into a shipbuilding fortune and spent it building the first American law with teeth against cruelty to animals, then walked the streets in a top hat to enforce it himself.
The facts
- Born
- August 29, 1813, New York City, son of shipbuilder Christian Bergh
- ASPCA founded
- April 10, 1866
- Anti-cruelty law passed
- April 19, 1866, nine days after the ASPCA's founding
- First year of enforcement
- 119 prosecutions, 66 convictions
Henry Bergh was born August 29, 1813, in New York City, the son of shipbuilder Christian Bergh. After years of comfortable idleness and a diplomatic posting in Russia, where he intervened when he saw a peasant beating his horse, Bergh returned home determined to do something permanent about animal cruelty. On April 10, 1866, he founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and nine days later the New York State Legislature passed his bill, "An act for the more effectual prevention of cruelty to animals," making it a crime to over-drive, over-load, torture, or cruelly beat any living creature. The law gave the ASPCA its own uniformed officers with real enforcement power, and Bergh used it personally, walking the streets to stop cart and carriage drivers he saw abusing their horses. In its first year the young society brought 119 prosecutions and won 66 convictions.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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over-drive, over-load, torture, torment, deprive of necessary sustenance, or to be unnecessarily or cruelly beaten, or needlessly mutilated, or killed as aforesaid any living creature
New York's 1866 anti-cruelty law, drafted by Henry Bergh
Source: ASPCA -
The friend to every friendless beast
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Tales of a Wayside Inn, Part Second: Interlude
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Bergh's 1866 statute was the first animal cruelty law in the country with real enforcement behind it, and the ASPCA model of a private society with police power was copied across the United States within a generation, laying the legal groundwork every animal cruelty case since has stood on.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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