Before the automobile, cities were powered by horses. These urban equines ferried passengers in streetcars and carriages; they pulled fire engines and ambulances. They delivered everything from milk and ice to mail. They hauled the coal for locomotive and steam engines.
As Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy explain in “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came To Feel the Way They Do About Animals,” horses were often overworked – and brutally punished by their owners when they did not perform.
After being repelled by the violence of a bullfight in Spain in 1848, diplomat Henry Bergh was awakened to the suffering of animals; upon his return to the United States, he committed himself to advocating on their behalf. Bergh founded the nation’s first animal welfare organization, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in New York in 1866. He helped pass state anti-cruelty laws that gave him and his ASPCA agents enforcement powers, a role he relished. Top-hatted, tall, and with an aristocratic bearing, he patrolled the streets of New York, confronting the mostly working-class men he saw flogging their horses. “Can’t beat my own horse?” responded one driver incredulously when Bergh commanded him to stop. “You’re mad!”
Wasik, the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and Murphy, a veterinarian and writer, call the Gilded Age crusade to ease the suffering of animals “an inspiring, incomplete, important moment in the history of American social change.” In their deft hands, it is a fascinating, elegantly written, and often surprising story.
They cover a period of 30 years, beginning with Bergh’s founding of the ASPCA. The timing, after the end of the Civil War, is significant, as former abolitionists were primed to devote themselves to new issues. Writing of antislavery activists, Wasik and Murphy note that “their moral energies were freed to be channeled into other causes, and their imaginations, trained for decades on ghoulish narratives of cruelty to enslaved people, would turn to the misery of other beings.”
Readers encounter a range of animals in “Our Kindred Creatures.” In addition to working horses, the authors focus on the cattle and pigs being slaughtered in the Chicago stockyards, the elephants touring the country with P.T. Barnum’s circus, and the city dogs swept up daily by dogcatchers and taken to the pound. (They were killed at day’s end if nobody claimed them.) The authors devote a chapter to birds hunted and stuffed to be placed atop women’s hats, according to the fashion of the period, and another to animals used in medical school demonstrations and experiments.