The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [33]
Certainly, Roosevelt wasn’t a vegetarian or what would later be called a vegan. Although he was only five-foot-eight, he ate enough beef and wild game for a football squad. Nobody of his generation promoted hunting—and eating game—more assiduously than Roosevelt. As Darwin’s idea of survival of the fittest implied, the natural world was violent. Deer, elk, rabbits—and many other species—usually died violently, torn to pieces by predators. Hunting, if done correctly, was the least violent way for an animal to die. A principle with universal application, according to Roosevelt, was that living creatures, even cattle or lambs on their way to slaughter, needed to be handled with dignity. (Roosevelt was prescient in this regard. In 1958 the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act mandated that a cow had to be knocked out as painlessly as possible before an incision was made.) 9
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One of the Roosevelt family’s friends, in fact, was Henry Bergh, a founder of the modern animal protection movement. The son of a wealthy shipbuilder, Bergh had grown up in New York City and then drifted through his early adulthood, spending the Civil War years traveling around Europe. After a brief stint during the Lincoln Administration as a secretary to the American legation in Russia, where he had befriended the czar, Bergh and his wife, Matilda, settled down in London. There, he had a religious epiphany, a humane vision pertaining to animals.10 Since childhood, Bergh had always been concerned about their well-being. In London he met Lord Harrowby of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to explore how he could take the group’s anticruelty creed to the United States and create a similar organization in New York City. An incensed Bergh explained to Lord Harrowby how sickened he had been watching Russian and Caucasian peasants whip donkeys with sticks until their legs buckled and their backsides were full of festering welts. Such mistreatment, he believed, needed to be stopped. A prohibition movement had to be launched at once.11 His new motto for his life emanated from the pages of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason: “Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”12
Bergh’s father had died, leaving Henry and his brother and sister an enormous inheritance. Once Bergh returned to Manhattan from abroad, immediately claiming his money, he embarked on changing the way Americans looked on animals, pushing for numerous new anticruelty laws. Many of his early supporters had become active in both the abolition of slavery and public health advocacy.13 Whether it was designing ambulances for horses or sponsoring “clay pigeons” for shootists, Bergh and his followers were on a tub-thumping mission to reverse barbaric behavior. Stray dogs in the city pound, for example, were being captured and crammed into large iron cages, and then lowered into the Hudson and East rivers and drowned. Aghast at such rank cruelty, Bergh wanted to find more humane ways to euthanize dogs. His efforts in this regard were successful, as a progression of more ethical killing techniques—for example, administering gas into decompression chambers and sodium pentobarbital injections—soon prevailed.14
An omnivorous pamphleteer, Bergh printed a circular trumpeting a society