Chapter 1
Kindling Kindness
Imagine their agony, if you can: a hundred or so green sea turtles, lying on their backs in the hold of a schooner, sailing slowly north from Florida in May 1866. From their nesting place on the Indian River, the saltwater lagoon that stretches along the state’s Atlantic coast, these turtles had spent decades ranging across huge swaths of ocean, gorging on seagrass and algae and growing to hundreds of pounds in size. To turtle hunters in southern Florida, just one of these gentle giants meant serious money. Standard practice was to steal upon a female laying her eggs on the shore and wrest her onto her back, a job for one man if the specimen was smaller, two men if full-sized. Captives were often stored and fed in a shallow pool while waiting to be sold off for export.
These unlucky hundred turtles, once sold, had been carted onto the schooner, the Active, for a three-week journey up the coast, with Captain Nehemiah H. Calhoun at the helm. Incapable of righting themselves, the sea turtles pitched helplessly atop their inverted dorsal shells. To further immobilize them, holes had been pierced through their fins and carapaces with cords run through them, binding the supine beasts together.
Green sea turtles assumed a tranquil, passive demeanor under such conditions, which made them easy cargo to ship. But their acquiescence belies the miseries manifesting within their shells. Evolution has equipped the marine turtle for a life afloat. Since making the risky nighttime dash seaward as a hatchling decades earlier, the Chelonia mydas female has been constantly in the ocean—excepting only the hours, every couple of years, during which she hauls her heavy body up onto the beach to make a nest above the tideline. She is built for swimming: limbs modified into muscular flippers to propel her across oceans, a flattened top to minimize drag as she navigates the currents, and a large lung capacity, filling the space beneath her shell, to enable long dives.
On their backs, in the darkness below the ship’s deck, the weight of the turtles’ organs puts pressure on their lungs, so their breathing became deliberate and deep, as though they were diving beneath many fathoms of seawater. Although turtles are able to go many months without food, they require water to maintain normal organ function. The Active’s crew might have thrown buckets of water on the turtles occasionally during the voyage, but that is no real substitute for immersion in the salty sea. These turtles—their bodies desiccating, their wounds festering, their air fetid—were being kept in conditions that, over the weeks of their journey, were steadily killing them.
So it was a race against time for the Active to sell off its cargo, because the purchasers of green sea turtles in the mid-nineteenth century were eager to do the killing themselves. This was the heyday of turtle soup, a dish so prized that restaurants would sometimes take out newspaper ads, or maintain special outdoor signage, declaring the hour at which the day’s batch would be ready for sale. Dispatch of the live animal was generally performed in the style recorded by Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery: “Cut off the head, hang it up by the hind fins, and let it drain all night.”
The Active’s destination was the Fulton Market in Manhattan, where it arrived late in the month, docking at nearby Pier 22 on the East River. Like its sister establishment, Washington Market, on the Hudson side of the island, Fulton offered the mid-nineteenth-century New Yorker fruits, vegetables, clothing, newspapers, coffee, tea, and much more, serving hordes of customers out of a motley agglomeration of permanent structures, makeshift stalls, and ships lying in berth at the piers. But the main attraction at Fulton Market, overwhelming all the senses but especially the olfactory one, was the fish. Two hundred fishing boats sold some fifty tons of catch through the market daily. While the Active lay in dock, as Captain Calhoun attempted to sell off his cargo, all around it along the riverside would have been boats and stalls peddling oysters—Fulton Market moved a significant percentage of the roughly 25,000 slurped up by city residents each day—cod, halibut, herring, mackerel, flounder, eel, bass, and just about anything else edible that a boat could drag out of the water within a five-hundred-mile radius.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 30, when a tall man with a military mien and a prodigious mustache led a party on board the Active, the skipper no doubt assumed that this was merely another prospective customer, dreaming of turtle soup. But in fact this man had come on a mission that most of his fellow citizens of 1866 could scarcely understand. A wealthy child of old New York, Henry Bergh had returned to his home city less than a year before, at the age of fifty-two, with a startling new set of moral precepts and an evangelical fervor for their spread. He had chartered an organization, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), which the legislature of New York State had authorized to enforce a new anti-cruelty law that he himself had written. In the weeks since then, Bergh had personally carried out the arrests, sometimes singlehandedly, of various workingmen for their cruel treatment of animals: drivers beating their horses, butchers callously transporting livestock.
Now, as he and his men stepped aboard the Active to drag off Captain Calhoun and his crew, he was demanding moral and legal consideration for a creature that most Americans of the era, if they thought of the matter at all, imagined to be barely more deserving of kindness than a cockroach, if not a cabbage. In the process, he was carrying out a deliberate provocation against not merely the city’s sea captains and live-animal sellers but against any New Yorker who believed that the revolution against cruelty to animals would end in a comfortable place. The exploits of the past month had made him famous. The prosecution of Captain Nehemiah H. Calhoun, soon to be known to all New York as the “Turtle Case,” would make Henry Bergh infamous. And during the two decades to follow, his fame and his infamy, his victories and his overreaches, would change the way Americans thought about the suffering of the living creatures all around them.
•••
When Bergh began his campaign, the ideas underlying it were already circulating widely in England and Europe. But how did they arise?
For centuries, the inheritors of a Western culture based in the Judeo-Christian tradition—the founding texts of which offer few prescriptions against cruelty to animals, even as they make ringing statements of human “dominion” over the natural world—could travel through their daily lives without giving much thought to how domestic animals in their overwhelmingly agrarian societies were treated. Few Europeans truly believed, as the French philosopher René Descartes theorized in the early seventeenth century, that animals should be classed as soulless machines—that, in the summation of one of Descartes’s disciples, Nicolas Malebranche, animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” And yet animals’ inability to testify to their desires, fears, and knowledge made it possible for many to put the question of their suffering entirely out of mind, given their seemingly preordained place in the natural order as mere possessions to be worked and consumed.
To rebel against that suffering, or indeed to see it as worthy of consideration, was—and remains—first and foremost an act of imagination. So perhaps it’s not surprising that resistance to animal suffering began flourishing first in literary minds, before its full flower as a social movement. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure (c. 1605), spared a thought for “the poor beetle that we tread upon,” imagining that it “in corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / as when a giant dies.” Molière wrote a character in The Miser (1668) who declares “such a tender feeling for my horses that when I see them suffer, it seems to be happening to me.” Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), devoted his final fantasia to the land of the Houyhnhnms, horses that rule over their local humans, but express horror to Gulliver when he describes the maltreatment of their kind taking place in England. Some who made this imaginative leap began to practice vegetarianism—among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who by the 1750s was adhering to (and advocating for) a non-meat diet on the grounds of morality as well as health.
One might date the true birth of the movement to 1776, when Humphry Primatt, a retired Anglican vicar living outside London in the town of Kingston-on-Thames, published what could be considered its founding text, A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals. In the introduction to this volume, the Reverend Primatt laid out what he intended to prove: just as “the Love and Mercy of God are all over his works,” he wrote,
our Love and Mercy are not to be confined within the circle of our own friends, acquaintance, and neighbours; nor limited to the more enlarged sphere of human nature, to creatures of our own rank, shape, and capacity; but are to be extended to every object of the Love and Mercy of GOD the universal parent.
Converging in Primatt’s book were a number of crucial forces that would shape the character of the international movement to follow. First, he devoted his entire 326-page volume to the subject of animals, marshaling the biblical evidence for a human obligation to their care. As the first known book-length argument against cruelty to animals, Duty of Mercy symbolized and indeed enacted what would be a crucial leap for so many supporters of the movement—the moment when they became willing to move animals from the margins of their consciousness to the center of it.
The second key dimension of Primatt’s book was its devout character, and the Romantic theology it embodied. We tend to think of Romanticism as a literary movement, but the earliest and in many ways most transformative emergence of the Romantic sensibility was in the pulpit, where the oftentimes vengeful or callous Creator of earlier centuries became supplanted by a deity of love above all—“Love is the great Hinge upon which universal Nature turns,” Primatt begins his first chapter—who saw the consciousness and suffering of individuals as worthy of his divine consideration. This, increasingly, was the God preached around England and elsewhere in Europe, and soon enough in America, too: a celestial Carer who throbbed with feeling for the unfortunate and smiled upon those who took it on themselves to alleviate suffering. It was this religious climate that prompted the English theologian John Wesley, not long before his death in 1791, to remark that “benevolence and compassion toward all forms of human woe have increased in a manner not known before, from the earliest ages of the world.” And it was this religious climate that would give succor to all the humanitarian movements of the nineteenth century, the cause of animals being just one among them.
A third aspect of Primatt’s book, more subtle but nevertheless crucial to the movement to come, was the manner in which he synthesized his religious commitments with the evolving scientific understanding of animals. Central to the Reverend Primatt’s vision of “universal Nature” is the notion that animals are “no less sensible of pain than a Man,” because they possess “similar nerves and organs of sensation”—reflecting a new awareness (ironically, one informed in part by decades of often agonizing experimentation on live animals) that the physiology of humans was analogous to that of other creatures, in ways both large and small. It would still be a century before Charles Darwin and others took that observation to its logical, deeply irreligious conclusion, but in the meantime, the implications for Primatt and future animal advocates were profound. God, having so famously made mankind in his own image, had also seen fit to design animals in a comparable manner, endowing them with a capacity for suffering that must be just as keen, given the similarities in their divine construction. If “all forms of human woe,” in Wesley’s phrase, had become impossible to ignore, then the non-human woes of these suffering creatures must also command human attention.
And finally, there was Primatt’s deft linking of animal cruelty to the evil of slavery and the cause of abolition, which in so many ways became the fount of moral energy into which all other nineteenth-century humanitarian causes in Britain and America, including the one on behalf of animals, would tap. “It has pleased GOD the Father of all men, to cover some men with white skins, and others with black skins; but as there is neither merit nor demerit in complexion, the white man, notwithstanding the barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right, by virtue of his colour, to enslave and tyrannize over a black man,” Primatt wrote. “For the same reason,” he went on, “a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man. For, such as the man is, he is but as GOD made him; and the very same is true of the beast.”
It was just this sort of moral logic that provoked William Wilberforce—who championed the abolitionist cause for decades in Parliament, beginning in the 1780s, soon after his conversion to Evangelicalism—to take up the cause of cruelty to animals as well. In the year 1800, Wilberforce and his devout allies in Parliament unsuccessfully backed a bill to ban the practice of “bull baiting,” a savage old rural tradition in which a bull was tethered in a village square and set upon by dogs. Primatt’s arguments were invoked nearly word for word by Sir Thomas Erskine when, in 1809, he rose to drum up support in the House of Lords for his own, much broader bill—ultimately unsuccessful as well—to prevent “malicious and wanton” cruelty to animals. “I am to ask your Lordships,” he said, “in the name of that God who gave to Man his dominion over the lower world, to acknowledge and recognize that dominion to be a moral trust.” Erskine’s chief proof was the same as Primatt had noted three decades earlier, i.e., the similarities with which humans and animals were endowed by their Creator: “Almost every sense bestowed upon Man is equally bestowed upon them—Seeing—Hearing—Feeling—Thinking—the sense of pain and pleasure—the passions of love and anger—sensibility to kindness, and pangs from unkindness and neglect are inseparable characteristics of their natures as much as of our own.”
These growing sentiments would become formalized in 1822, when Britain passed its first animal-welfare law: the “Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act,” otherwise known as Martin’s Act, in honor of its sponsor, the dogged Irish MP Richard Martin. In June 1824, at the urging of the Reverend Arthur Broome—another minister who had taken to preaching on behalf of animals—a group of notable animal lovers, including Martin, Wilberforce, and a number of clergymen, met to found the world’s very first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The group struggled in its early years: Its first secretary did a brief stint in debtor’s prison over its financial woes, and his successor wound up leaving in 1832 to found his own splinter group. But by 1840, when Queen Victoria extended her sponsorship to the organization, allowing it to become the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), it had set a template for animal-welfare organizations that would extend for the rest of the century.
Inspired by London’s example, Stuttgart had already launched Germany’s first humane organization, and by the time Paris’s organization started up in 1852, scores more had emerged across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In the summer of 1860, they held an international congress in Dresden—more than forty delegates from societies all across Europe attended—and then another, less than a year later, in Paris, where Napoleon III declared his support for their cause.
By then, a revolutionary new scientific idea had captivated Britain and America. The publication, in 1859, of On the Origin of Species reordered popular thinking about humanity’s position relative to other living things. Charles Darwin’s key observation, that the struggle within and between species for natural resources and the opportunity to reproduce rewards those best suited to their environment, applied equally to humans and non-human animals, implying an order to the biological world defined less by dominion and more by interdependence.
Long before Darwin, scientists had understood humans and animals to have much in common. A century earlier, in his widely adopted system of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus had classified Homo sapiens with other primates in the mammalian class of vertebrate animals. Since then, comparative anatomists and physiologists, cell biologists and biochemists had cataloged numerous similarities in structure and function between human and non-human organisms, both extant and extinct. Animals and humans shared a living likeness that was far from superficial, including retinal pigments, patellar reflexes, appendicular skeletal structure, and secretion of stomach acid. Although Darwin’s Origin didn’t explicitly address the primate parentage of humankind, it intimated that what connected man and animals was more than a mere resemblance; it was a common heritage.
Copyright © 2024 by Bill Wasik. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
