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that would prohibit “thoughtless and inhuman persons” from hurting “dumb animals.” He mailed this broadside throughout the state, but his search for people to sign a petition encountered a lot of resistance. The pervading sentiment in New York was that an owner of an animal could treat it however he or she wanted. To start legislating whether a farmer should slaughter a billy goat or whether a barkeeper could shoot a garbage-eating tabby was tantamount, most people thought, to interfering with constitutional rights of ownership. “Without animals you would have no meat, no milk, no eggs,” Bergh snapped at his critics in a public statement. “There would be fewer vegetables and little grain, because the farmer would have to pull his own plow. You would have to walk everywhere you go instead of riding. Your shoes, your coat, that beaver hat, your gloves, the silk scarf you were wearing—all of these things and many more you have only because of the world’s dumb creatures. Since we are so dependent on them, I consider it morally wrong to be needlessly cruel to them.”15

Puck showed Henry Bergh as “The Only Mourner” to follow the dog cart to the New York City pound.

Henry Bergh cartoon in Puck. (Courtesy of the ASPCA)

While some other New Yorkers scoffed at Bergh’s plea for the humane treatment of animals, the Roosevelt family embraced his animal rights program (as did the legendary editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and former president Millard Fillmore). A massive lobbying effort began in 1865, with Bergh heading the grassroots effort in Albany. A constant force at his side was Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt, who insisted that the humane treatment of animals had to become law. On April 10, 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was officially incorporated in New York state and laws were passed prohibiting abuse of animals.16 A man who beat a mule or horse could now be charged with a misdemeanor. When the ASPCA was officially incorporated at a public meeting at Clinton Hall in Manhattan later in April—with Mayor John T. Hoffman in attendance—Bergh was unanimously elected president. Today the ASPCA’s first annual report (1867) is on display at the organization’s facility on Ninety-Second Street in Manhattan. Both Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt and John J. Roosevelt (T.R.’s granduncle, who was twice elected to the New York state legislature) had chartered the new organization.17

Knowing that Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt, John J. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and other powerful New York philanthropists were on his side, an empowered Bergh now began patrolling downtown like a cop twirling a billy club, looking for animal abusers to arrest.* For cruel attitudes and practices to end, a few animal abusers would have to be handcuffed and carted off to jail. Or maybe—as the extreme believers in animal rights advocated—these abusers could be put in the stocks or dunked in a barrel. Somehow, an example had to be made of the animal abusers if the laws were to have an impact. It didn’t take Bergh long to act. Just outside the ASPCA’s tiny office at the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Street, he spied a butcher with a cart full of hog-tied calves, crammed so tightly together that they were bleeding from hoof lacerations and bellowing loudly in agony. Bergh, who was on horseback, chased the butcher’s cart, and finally caught up with it at the Williamsburg Ferry slip. Hopping off his horse, Bergh implored the butcher to release the calves or else go to jail. “Yah,” the butcher yelled, as if being accosted by a lunatic. “You’re crazy.”18

Tempers flared and a shouting match ensued. The police were called in to settle the rancorous dispute. The result was a lawsuit filed by the ASPCA against the butcher. It was the first of many suits Bergh would file in the coming years. Sounding as impassioned as the captured John Brown after his Harper’s Ferry raid, Bergh resorted to courtroom theatrics, hoping to persuade the magistrate to side with the humane movement. His passionate pleas, however, fell on deaf