The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [35]
The determined Bergh, however, continued pushing his ASPCA agenda forward. The rumor soon spread that he was a fanatic, an unhinged fool who thought feral cats, kitchen pigs, and leopard frogs had rights. Bergh, for example, challenged the poultry industry, insisting it was inhumane to drop live chickens into a scalding bath. Old horses, he also insisted, should never be turned out in the streets to die. The great impresario P. T. Barnum, livid because Bergh had the temerity to claim he treated his prize circus animals in an “abominable” fashion, fired back a volley, denouncing Bergh as a “despot.”20 Quite simply, Bergh became a citywide laughingstock, accused of caring more about hens than about battered women. Lies circulated that he had pet dragonflies and caterpillars. “It hurt him when people were amused at a picture of him with donkey ears, surrounded by animals laughing at him,” his biographer Mildred Mastin Pace said, “or a caricature of him wearing a horse blanket instead of a coat.”21
A repetitive cycle soon developed that stymied the ASPCA. Every time Bergh succeeded in arresting an abuser, the judge would throw the case out, usually ridiculing it. Even his friends said he had a crusader complex. Recognizing that for the ASPCA to become effective he would have to forgo street rumbles and win a landmark legal decision, Bergh tempered his impetuous patrols. Matter-of-factly, he now started searching for a litmus test, a case he could win. It was hard to make above-the-fold news in the New York Times or Herald-Examiner in cases about whipping mules. There wasn’t much inherent drama in a stubborn mule that wouldn’t budge; it boiled down to a semantic argument over what constituted a heavy hand. To succeed, Bergh needed a ruse that would grab everybody by the lapels and say, “Wake up! New laws have been passed!” Seeking controversy, Bergh made a strange but inspired tactical leap. In 1866 he decided to bet the ASPCA franchise on defending green sea turtles that were being systematically tortured on the East River wharves without so much as a murmur of public protest.22
For starters, Bergh felt pity for the sea turtles, which had been shipped to New York from the Mosquito Lagoon area in Florida (and various Caribbean islands) to be sold for soup and stews. They were valued for their meat and calipee (the cartilaginous part of the shell), and their eggs were also being collected from beaches to be used in cooking and as curatives. The East River fishermen had pierced the huge fins of their captured greens with a screw-like device and then tied them up with straitjacket thongs, giving them no food or water. The 400-pound turtles lay on the dock, writhing in pain, piled up like cordwood, one on top of another. Often they were left upside down, struggling to right themselves. Marching up to Captain Nehemiah Calhoun, the fisherman responsible for the turtles’ mistreatment, Bergh informed him that he was under arrest for cruelty to animals. As Bergh and Calhoun argued back and forth a mob of spectators arrived hoping for a pistol duel or a fistfight. Before violence ensued, the police intervened and Captain Calhoun was escorted to the nearby police precinct. Waving a copy of the anticruelty bill, Bergh had the police arrest the captain. After Calhoun endured fingerprinting, a court date was set for later in the week.
Bergh was defeated in the courtroom, but this loss turned out to be a boon for the ASPCA. After the hearing, a counter-sentiment in Bergh’s favor started to swell. The courtroom loss jacked up ASPCA’s fund-raising a hundredfold