 Okay, let's get started. Since we only have an hour for our great event today, welcome everyone. I'm Beth Daley. I'm the editor and general manager of the conversation, not your traditional newsroom. We sit at the nexus of academia and journalism and our mission is democratize knowledge for the public good. So welcome. I'm just so thrilled to have you all here today. We're gonna be having a great conversation with Jenny Weeks and Ernest Freeberg who I'll announce in just a few minutes. But I first wanted to explain a little bit of rules of the road for how our webinars work. If you have a question, please chat it into the question and answer. You will be responded to, we'll gather questions and Jenny will ask as many as she can. Ernest, after they have a conversation. And also please say on to the very end, we have a special effort we're trying, which is about a book club of a book that we're gonna be talking about today. That's some of you may be quite interested to learn about. So with further ado, let me please introduce Jenny. Jennifer Weeks, our senior environment and energy editor. Jenny's covered environment science and health for a decade as a freelance journalist before joining the conversation in 2015. She's written for so many publications from the Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine, Autobahn, Discover Slate. Previously she was a congressional aid public interest lobbyist and policy analyst. She holds a BA in history from Williams College and MA in political science from the University of North Carolina and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. So thanks Jenny for serving as our moderator today. It's great. Well, as a history major, I'm thrilled. So yeah, exactly, yeah. And it's gonna take me a lot longer to introduce Ernest, but I'm gonna do it fairly quickly. So Ernest Friedberg's teaching and research interest center on the cultural and intellectual history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th century. These books have examined the history of disability, the origin of civil liberties and free speech doctrine in America. The impact of technology and invention on American life and the founding of the movement to protect animal rights, which is a book we'll be talking about today, a traitor to his species. So Friedberg is a distinguished lecturer for the organization American Historians and has produced a number of public radio documentaries on historical themes. I'm gonna leave it at that because I wanna get really quickly to the conversation we're gonna have today. Again, for everyone, please write the questions into the Q&A. The chat is disabled just to keep the conversation going for Jenny and Ernie. And Jenny, I'll let you take it away from here. Okay, well thank you. I guess I'll just say that the way that I came across this book and found out about Ernie's work on this issue was that I saw a glowing review of it in the Air Times book review. And I first read it and thought, boy, that sounds really cool. And then I sort of went, ooh, I wonder if the author's a scholar, which means they could write for us. And happily turned out that was true. So this is the way that started. Ernie, the book is really cool. And the first thing that I wondered was, what a compelling character Henry Berg was. And I wondered how you came across him. And since some of your other animal rights is in our animal welfare, isn't the main focus or the unique focus of what you've done. How did you find out about him and what made you think that there was a real story to tell about him? It's a combination, Jenny, of two things. First of all, he is a fascinating character. The more I learned about him, the more I realized he was a window on this big topic. He was the founder of the ASPCA, the first society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, which is still with us. And the founding of this whole idea that there ought to be organized protection for animals in the United States. So he has an important legacy that way. But it also seemed like a really interesting window on the change in the human relationship to animals in this time period. Which is really, it's Berg, but it's many, many other people, many other changes. Cities are growing enormously rapidly. And it's not just people that are crowding it to cities, it's also their animals. So the collision between horses and livestock and the pigs and the gutters cleaning the garbage and a surprising number of packs of stray dogs running wild in the streets. All of this. Maybe you should remind us of the timeframe we're talking about just so everybody's clear on this really unique arc of history. Right, it's, well, I mean, roughly called the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era. So it's the decades right after the Civil War. Berg founds the ASPCA in 1866, the year after the Civil War. And this is the period of, you know, when we think of this as a great industrial revolution, the beginning of a transition in the United States from being a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban country. And animals were, you know, a part of that transition, essential to that transition, but also humans had to rethink really for the first time when you think back about the relationship between humans and animals down through history, they were central to cities. And I think starting in the 1860s and 70s with this movement and a bunch of other changes, we see by the 1920s or so that animals are largely marginalized in cities, right? I mean, one historian says it best, I think, says that by the 1920s, it's pests and pets. You know, it's the animals we love tremendously and the ones that we try to keep out of the cities. So this whole world, this whole culture, this of human-animal relations changes. And Henry Burg is sort of a lightning rod in the middle of that transition. Okay, yeah. Tell us a little bit about his arc because he started out quite radical and, you know, progressed to lobbying the New York legislature. And so sort of, you know, he clearly was sort of figuring it out as he went because no one had ever done something like this before, certainly not on this issue. And not a lot of sort of street advocacy like that that I know of really on a lot of other issues at the time. For Burg. No, I mean, Burg, I mean, people called him the riddle of the 19th century because something happened to him during the Civil War that led him to devote his cause to this. Up to that point, he didn't even particularly like animals. By any, he didn't have pets, he wasn't, he didn't, you know, that wasn't his cause. But when he was 53 years old, he had this sort of conversion experience. He always described this as the moment he was working for Lincoln as in the embassy in St. Petersburg in Russia. And he was bothered by the way teamsters were treating their horses in the streets. And one day he just finally snapped and he demanded that a teamster drop his whip, he's beating his horse and the man did it. And Burg said, wow, that's the first really useful thing I've ever done. You know, that felt great. I'm gonna devote my life to this. And it's interesting, Burg's not the only one of these 19th century reformers who describes almost a religious conversion to this kind of devotion for the rest of his life to the cause of fighting what he considered to be one of the great evils, the cruelty to animals. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about his upbringing and his background and sort of, you know, what his life was like before he came to that conversion point. Yeah, and that added to the riddle. He was, you know, he was the heir to a fortune. His father was a very successful shipbuilder in the early 19th century. And so Burg dabbled in shipbuilding, decided he didn't like it. Had a couple of years of college, I went to Columbia University and then took his fortune and went to Europe, married another wealthy socialite and they sort of wandered the capitals of Europe. Burg wanted to be a playwright and a poet. And he wrote a lot of apparently very bad plays. The few that ever got mounted got terrible, terrible reviews and maudlin sort of silly poetry. So I think he, you know, here's a guy who was at a sort of crisis point in his midlife about what the meaning of his life had been. But he had some real tools because he was wealthy, because he was articulate, because he was dramatic. He understood the theater, right? And part of what he had to do after that was to dramatize to his fellow Americans the problems of animal cruelty, which had been there were invisible because they were so common, right? And he had to kind of bring them forward, force people to look at them and to reckon with them. Yeah, well, you wrote about one really dramatic episode for us in the piece you did about the horse flu of 1872. And some of the participants here may not have had a chance to read that article, but it's just a fascinating episode that I had never heard of before when you brought it up. So why don't you tell people a little bit about that and how Berg really sort of used that as a sort of not grandstanding is the wrong word, but sort of spotlight moment, I guess. That's when I first met Henry Berg, was standing in the middle of the streets in the middle of the great horse flu of 1872. This started in the fall of 1872 in Toronto. It was an influenza virus that spread incredibly quickly all across North America. It finally burned out a year later in Nicaragua, but everywhere it went, about 5% of the horses and mules in that city would die, and the rest would be debilitated. 95, 90, 9% of the animals would suddenly get sick really within a day or two because this was so contagious. And so they weren't able to work. And it was really, in some ways a fascinating experiment to test how important animal energy, horse energy, horse power was to the modern city at that point. Everything relied on horses. We think of this as the great era of the steam engine with the importance of the transcontinental railroad and so forth, but even the railroad didn't run without horses to bring coal to the trains, to haul things away from the trains, to move the trains around in the yard. So essentially the entire economy comes to a grinding halt in 1872. This influenza would take about four to six weeks to work its way through the city and then move on to the next one. The real problem came because people were desperate to force their animals to work. This would be equivalent to having a gas crisis. Suddenly it's an energy crisis essentially, and many people were desperate. Many people felt if we don't force our horses to work, we are gonna starve. We've revealed that cities themselves were absolutely dependent on horses bringing materials in for food. So they started to work their horses even though they were sick. And when they did that, these horses would very, very often develop a secondary illness and would die very, very quickly. So it's at that point that Berg and his fellow agents from the SPCA were in the streets arresting drivers who were forcing their horses to work as an act of cruelty. And it was a, as I suggested in that piece, it was a turning point I think for public opinion because many people thought Berg was a little bit eccentric or a lot eccentric caring more about horses than humans. But in this particular case, horse suffering was so visible and the dependence on the health of these animals was so obvious that many people started to say, you know, actually we need to rethink this. We've been taking horses for granted. Maybe Berg has a point. Got it, yeah. Tell us a little bit about how when he founded the ASPCI, how many followers did he have? Did he have a small handful of radicals who's latched on or how did the movement grow? And sort of how did it evolve over the decades that he was doing this? Yeah, it's really interesting. There's several things to say about that. One is that there's an obvious antecedent here in the anti-slavery movement, which had itself organized in many of the ways that Berg tried with the, you know, using the printing press, using conferences, using the sort of appeal to the problem of cruelty. So there was already in 1866, you know, a sense that, okay, this is how we move society forward. This is how we battle an evil. Unlike the anti-slavery movement though, nobody was gonna sign up, you know, against an anti-cruelty movement, right? I mean, nobody's in favor of cruelty. So lots of people, you know, when Berg first proposed this idea, he got support from the mayor and the police chief and lots of distinguished philanthropists and they were happy to support this. So passing the law was the easy part. The problem came when he also, as part of that law, got the authority to go out and make arrests and he started to go out and start to arrest people who thought, wait a minute, you know, I'm against cruelty, but what you're picking on me for something that I have every right to do, right? It's my horse, it's my livestock, it's my dog, you know, mind your business. And so suddenly, once he started to actually apply the law, it became much more controversial. But I think it's also worth, you know, one more thing, I think it's important to note that it wasn't just Berg. I mean, Berg was the most interesting, eccentric, extreme promoter of this cause. But almost simultaneously, Philadelphia found an SPCA movement of its own with a particularly strong branch led by the women of the movement and also in Boston. So it's in the air. Many people are recognizing, I think after the Civil War, you know, this is one of the next important causes to move progress forward. Interesting, yeah. Were there other animals besides horses that really sort of grabbed the spotlight? I mean, you can see how horses were so central because they were moving commerce everywhere. Were there any other types of animals that were particularly kind of notable? Sure, well, I mean, another important piece of this was livestock and, you know, this is pre-refrigeration. So, you know, rather than having meat arrive in a grocery store wrapped in plastic and refrigerated, the meat would walk on its far hooves down the street in the middle of the city, right? So any major urban environment was dotted with livestock pens and with slaughterhouses. And hence the meatpacking district in New York, right? Yes, absolutely, right. And so people began to notice the cruelty that was inherent in that. And it starts with getting them there in the first place. So the SPCA movement was very interested in trying to fight the problem of the fact that people would put these animals on the trains in the Midwest or sometimes as far away as Texas or Kansas. And they would ship them to New York or Boston with hardly a break at all. They would essentially have no food and water for weeks sometimes. It wasn't unusual for 20% of the animals to just die en route. It was just considered part of the spoilage of the process. And then once they arrived, there were really no standards, no sanitation standards and no humane standards in terms of how animals were slaughtered. So it's both a public hygiene problem because the refuse is all over the place in downtown environments. But for many of the people like Berg, they said having less live in the midst of this animal slaughter coarsens us. Lots of kids like to go watch the animals get slaughtered as kind of an entertainment. And he said, we need to rationalize this, we need to move it out of the cities, we need to hide this in a way because it's going to, it's going to, people are gonna start to enjoy this or at least lose their sensitivity to animal suffering if we don't move this out. And linked to this, I mean, it's interesting. They also were really at the beginning of the cruelty-free movement. They were arguing essentially eating animals who have been treated cruelly means that you're eating animals that themselves are poisoned, diseased, stressed, and ultimately it's bad for human beings as well. So they began to try to make this link that I think is very familiar to us now about the link between kindness to animals and also our own concerns about human health. Well, and certainly at this same time, this was when cities were all starting to build public water systems and sewer systems and things like that. So you can certainly see how the waste and all of the carnage would really kind of combine with that public health movement, yeah. That's right. And so those sort of centralized slaughter houses, the sort of that developed ultimately, we all think of Chicago as the center of this. It certainly was not driven by humane considerations, but in other ways that the Humane Society applauded this because it centralized this and got it out of the streets where everybody was participating and watching and so forth. Right, ironically now animal welfare activists are trying to show people what's happening in slaughterhouses because they're saying people don't see it and it's out of sight, out of mind. So kind of come full circle on that, I guess. Absolutely. Yeah, I don't want to miss this next question which we could probably spend the whole hour on which is Berg's relationship with P.T. Warnum. And I think most people know that the Ringling Brothers Circus just within the last four or five years has stopped using elephants in their shows and things like that. So they've had a very long arc of their own on animal issues, but please tell us about Berg and Warnum and how they intersected. Right, yeah. I think it's a mild word for it. Yes, they became sort of friendly rivals over time. Berg was very, very critical of Warnum's use of animals. Warnum himself said, this is an educational process. He created not just the circus that we think of, but also and people knew him most for the American Museum that he founded in New York which was the major tourist attraction in Manhattan for decades. And this is an era of European colonialism when the market in wild animals from Asia and Africa begins. And so Warnum was an expert at buying and bringing for the first time the first orangutan and the first, you know, the early giraffes and the hippos and that sort of thing. And his argument was this is educational. This gets people to know and appreciate God's creation. I'm a benefactor. That's certainly a longstanding argument for zoos too. Yes, exactly, right. And you know, in fact, zoos emerge out of this by people who say, you know, we shouldn't allow a huckster like Warnum to be providing this. We need to, you know, this is a civic responsibility if it's worth doing it all. And so the zoos begin in this period. But Berg says, this is exploiting animals. And he's way ahead of his time in terms of protesting against the training of elephants and the use of them in entertainments and circuses and menageries and so forth. But he was also against zoos, you know, the main attraction of the Central Park Zoo, which was not a very scientific institution at the time. People just sort of, you know, stuffed their extra animals. Warnum would store his winter animals there. So Berg was very critical of that and basically said, this is not entertainment. This is cheap sensation at the expense of these animals and they should be returned to the wild or you mainly killed. This is unacceptable. And here's another, you know, this is another example where Berg pushes the argument to the limits because these were enormously popular. You know, the Central Park Zoo was a tremendous attraction. And many people just laughed at Berg. You know, this is another eccentric idea that he has that circuses and zoos are exploitive. Warnum enjoyed fighting with Berg because Warnum was great at turning every fight into a way to sell tickets. And so he- Was he the one who said there's no such thing as bad publicity? Absolutely. And so, you know, bring it on. You know, Berg appealed to his supporters by protesting. And Warnum got his ticket sales by, you know, saying, you come see for yourself whether I'm abusing these animals and so forth. Interestingly though, I mean, this happened over the course of two decades of Berg's career. Warnum lived a bit longer. When Berg died, Warnum went to his funeral and he said, you know, he and I were both true animal lovers. And when Warnum died, he left $1,000 to build a fountain in his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut in Berg's honor that's still there. So they, you know, he came to respect, they differed, but there are kinds of debates about what's an appropriate way to observe animals. Where's the line between education and exploitation? I mean, I think it's a very relevant set of questions that still we should wrestle with today. And they really were sparring partners in starting that conversation. Well, and it played on for decades afterward. I mean, when I was little, I grew up in Washington, DC. And I remember when Ringling Brothers Circus came to town, you would go down to where the rail yard, they would unload all the animals, they'd parade the elephants through the streets to wherever the, you know, temporary barns were and things like that. It was a big thing and crowds came. So then things have really, over the last few decades changed a lot, but yeah, it was a long, long process. I was struck by, you know, thinking about, I mean, part of my argument in the book is, you know, we live in this world in the 19th century packed with animals. Humans and animals are relating in a very intense way that is not part of modern life anymore. But at the same time, we get this incredible infusion of animals from around the globe that for the first time, Americans, you know, not just scientists traveling somewhere, but also, you know, anybody can not a Saturday afternoon go to the zoo or attend the circus. And so the exposure to the world's animals as morally complicated as that may be really begins in this period. So, you know, we take that for granted too. And I think that's really another legacy from the late 19th century. No, it is a real eye opener. I mean, even now when you go to an aquarium or a zoo, sometimes you see people really learning things. And you know, that's one reason why those arguments are so complicated. Before we go to questions, let's talk a little bit about the title to the book. Was Berg actually called a traitor to his species or was that more sort of your encapsulation of how he was seen? That's an encapsulation of what many people essentially said that he was putting, you know, in one case after another, he was protecting animals at the expense of humans, right? And Berg's argument was it's the expense of human frivolity and, you know, and cruelty, right? It's your thoughtlessness, you know? But for example, you know, one of his major wars was to shut down horse railroads when they were, this was the mass transportation system in the cities. The trolley companies would work these horses right to the edge, you know, use them up, recycle them within a few years by working them so hard. And Berg and his agents were out in the field stopping this, right? And when they did, the horses would have to go back to the barn, the traffic jam would cause, everybody would have to get off and walk, right? And so Berg, for Berg, this was a moment when he got lots of publicity. People were interested in this, but others said, look, he's making us walk through snowstorms, you know, he cares more about this horse than he does about, you know, the poor working girl in the thin dress who has worked all day and now has to walk home in a snowstorm, you know, probably gonna die of pneumonia, you know, Berg is, Berg is callous. Berg, you know, as I said, he wasn't an animal lover, he was a hater of human cruelty. And, you know, Berg pushed the envelope in many ways. And the one way that got the most feedback, I think, was when he said that those who are cruel to animals and to women and children should be publicly flogged. And- Oh, that's a really interesting connection because now, I mean, police will often take cruelty to animals as a sign that someone could become, you know, physically violent against people. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, he was onto something there very early, it seems like. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, the link between protect animal welfare and protection of dependent women and children, they're very closely linked as a movement. In fact, Berg was very important in connecting the two. Yeah. Let me see, it looks like we have some questions here. So let me see what people have. Were there any incidents or people that you would have liked to include in the book but weren't able to? Well, what was fascinating about Berg was two things were important about his law. One was that he not just passed a law against cruelty, but he also sent agents into the field. And, you know, the SBCA had a sort of legal authority to go and enforce the law. And that was absolutely controversial but absolutely crucial. The other thing about Berg was that he wrote into the law, horses, cattle, livestock, and other animals, all other animals. And this is where Berg got really interesting. And because he essentially, you know, everybody said, yeah, of course we need to protect horses. Yeah, we shouldn't abuse the cows that we're about to eat. But when Berg started to push against mistreatment of turtles being shipped up north and for turtle soup in cruel ways, when he started to worry about the buffalo, when he started to worry about rats that were being part of the entertainment of ratting contests where terriers would try to kill rats, people were shocked. And that's what makes Berg, I think, so controversial and so fascinating is that he pushed this in all sorts of directions that I couldn't possibly touch all of them. So he had a campaign against boiling lobsters, for example. Wow. I just couldn't get in. I couldn't, you know, even though I'm a manor with a history of connection to lobsters, I couldn't fit it. And it goes on and on. I mean, because people would push him and say, I found this on the web for history of connection to lobsters. Siri is trying to help me here all of a sudden. No. Seriously, would you like to order a lobster? Never done that before. Yeah, so he would push it in all sorts of directions and I could only touch on samples of the way he pushed the argument. But that's fascinating though because all the things you mentioned, cock fighting, there's a famous essay that got published about 10 years ago about cruelty and lobsters. I mean, you know, he really, I guess there's this hierarchy of sort of within the animal world that we tend to care most about the charismatic furry animals and less about say chickens and certainly less about snakes or fish or things like that. So he really was seeing way far ahead of where a lot of people leave not today. I mean, that's really interesting. And well ahead of his own followers. And very often they would say, you know, well, we can't quite go that far. Right, horses, yes, snakes. Yeah. So, yeah. And that was another area where he got into trouble because he would say any living creature is as valuable as a human being. So he really had the sort of complete view of things. Yeah. He might've been trying to just provoke people when he said those things. Cause you know, he did not wage a campaign to protect mosquitoes, but he held out the possibility he might. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Well, let's see, here's another question. Given the history of this time period and its impact on our perspectives on non-humans, how do you think this impacted behavior researchers such as Harry Harlow, I think the wire monkey psychology researcher and their use of animals? Are there any readings you can recommend on the history of human animal relationships in research? Well, Berg and his allies were really founders of the anti-bivisection movement. So that's really, you know, that's the place to look is sort of the longer history of that. And there is some interesting work. James Turner, the historian has written a lot about Victorian ideas about pain and suffering and the relationship between humans and animals. So that might be a, it's called reckoning with the beast. But yes, Berg and most notably, Carolyn Earl White, who was the, I mentioned Philadelphia had a very strong women's branch of the SPCA. And so they launched the American anti-bivisection society which is still going. There's another classic example of a conflict where the critics said, look, this is going to pay off in reducing human and animal suffering because we're going to understand more about the body. So this is, you know, this is suffering that these animals just have to put up with. And Berg was an abs, you know, basically an abolitionist who said, under no circumstances is this acceptable. There's some knowledge we have no right to know. And that would include any knowledge we would get out of causing this sort of excruciating pain to animals. It, you know, he vowed to work the rest of his life to overturn the use of vivisection, but, you know, no sort of controls were put in place for another hundred years. That took quite a bit longer. Yeah. Here's a modest question. Dr. Fieberg, I'm fascinated by this story and the questions surrounding how we as humans interact with other animals. What do you think the future of animal rights will be and should be? Yeah, future is not what historians do, but I think that's a very good question. I think it's clear if we look at, you know, Berg was considered an extreme radical at his time. And now we look back, and there are many people involved in the animal welfare movement, the animal rights movement, the animal liberation movement who would look back. And I think they should recognize Berg as a, you know, as an important milestone that sort of started this conversation, but it's clearly expanded enormously since then. And so I think it will continue to do so. I think that our growing understanding about animal sensitivity, sensibility, is it contributing to that? One very blind spot I think for Berg and his movement was an absence of ecological or environmental understanding. And so there was a lot of focus on the urban problems of animals, but very little way to even understand what was happening more broadly. Berg did try to intervene with the slaughter of the buffalo in the 1870s without success. But beyond that, it's really hard to find evidence of him or these others in this movement, understanding the kind of cruelty that's involved in species destruction, in habitat destruction. Well, and he was really working at the time of Westwood expansion too, so yeah. Right, absolutely. You know, and partly I think this is, you know, it's easier, I shouldn't say, it's not easy, but it's easier to focus on the cruelty that's in front of you than to understand the systemic cruelty that's going on. And it's also easier to focus in a reform movement on an urban problem at a time when many of these urban problems were being dealt with and there were strategies for doing this. And much harder to, you know, the example I use in the book is this focus on the treatment of turtles that were being shipped up from Key West and they were shipped upside down with a rope through their flippers to keep them together. And when Berg started to say, this is cruelty to animals, the reaction was turtles aren't animals, you know, and then the reaction was, well, maybe they're animals, but they don't feel anything. So, you know, they're so far down the chain of being that, you know, and so Berg had to sort of push this. But what he never said a word about in 20 years of fighting, he never won a case to help the turtles. But he also never realized that the turtles themselves were being driven really to the brink of extinction by consumption. So it was easy to see the turtle in front of the saloon clipped on its back with a sign on its belly that says Friday soup at noon, you know, and the treatment of that animal. But to see a species, I think, I mean, this is a long way of getting at sort of where's the movement going? I think environmental consciousness is a big part of expanding the animal welfare movement. Right, well, and to be fair, you know, we have reporting from the scene now that didn't exist back then, you know, I mean, someone once pointed out to me that at the time when Laurie Ingalls Wilder was writing about, you know, homesteading on the prairie and, you know, freezing in tar paper shacks during the winter, that's exactly during the gilded era. You know, people in New York were living in these mansions lined with red velvet, you know, these opulent conditions and eating turtles shipped, you know, to them from the Caribbean for lunch. And, you know, there was like no consciousness between these two worlds of what they were left. There just wasn't a lot of connection. So, you know, and now we have that, you know, we have photos from the scene and things like the undercover investigations and, you know, much more sort of awareness of what's happening where. Let's see, we have more questions here. What do you think of Stephen Wise and the non-human rights project? I'm not aware of what that is. Is that a name you're familiar with in an organization? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, this is expanding on this idea, which would seem so surprising at the time that an animal could have rights, right? And obviously the conversation is pushing much further at this point to attribute much more rights and agency to animals, right? So, you know, these sorts of efforts to expand on this, you know, trace their way back. I think their right to say that, you know, there's a, this was the minimal possible amount of rights that you could propose, that Berg proposed to say, you know, every being has a right not to be treated to unnecessary suffering, right? We have a right to use animals in any way we want. We're not allowed to abuse them was essentially the, you know, that was the nature of rights that Berg is proposing. And obviously this is expanding to suggest that animals have a right to a full life. And, you know, at the farthest example that essentially, you know, we have no right to interfere that our engagement with them will be interference with them, with their rights. It's the extension of a conversation that began 140 years ago. Well, and certainly, I think a lot of people who are animal advocates, some will talk about animal welfare and others will talk about animal rights, which I think is intended to go further than just welfare, correct? Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. So this question actually sort of loops back to the idea of focusing on the cities as opposed to things happening beyond them. Did enforcement of these laws extend to the farms where production took place? I assume meaning when Berg was doing this kind of work. No. No, it didn't. It really, it was, you know, they began to organize for the first time. Really what happens is these SPCAs are very local. They're based on state laws. They're organized around cities. And it's really cattle transportation that begins to unite them into what became the American Humane Association as a sort of collaborative because they realized that this is an interstate problem, right? So they solved the problem of cattle transportation from Texas to Boston by just worrying about what's happening in Boston. You have to check it out every way along the way. But really they did not intervene with the process of raising the animals. But once they got into the transportation system, that's where they tried to intervene and tried to expose the cruelties that were built into that system and change the laws. In fact, the first successful federal legislation was called the 28 hour law, which required the railroad companies to take these animals off of the trains every 28 hours, give them a rest, give them food and water. It turned out not to be a good idea because these animals were so tortured by being on these trains that once you took them off, you had to torture them again just to get them back on. So it wasn't the solution to the problem. They moved instead to try to find shipping cars. And ultimately it was, you know, slaughter closer to the point of where they were raised became a way to minimize that kind of cruelty. Yeah, you really, you had the animal. I mean, you mentioned how there were slaughterhouses in big cities and things like that. And there's still in a lot of cities, you can see some markers of animals once being there. You can see all the little carriage houses in Brooklyn that used to have horses in them behind, you know, which are now residences themselves. But certainly the animal processing industry has moved out to the Midwest and the South and the Plain States really dispersed away from cities. And the main societies were surprisingly, you know, I came to this knowing like everybody knows that Upton Sinclair is the jungle, right? In the early 20th century, which exposes the cruelties of the meatpacking industry in Chicago to both humans and to the animals. But in the 1860s and 70s, this looked like a great improvement, you know, so that these humane societies were pushing the idea that it was okay to eat meat that had been slaughtered a thousand miles away and shipped in a refrigerated rail car. That this was actually, you know, cruelty free would be too extreme. But that basic idea, this is gonna be less cruel. And so while this was in, you know, a good thing for Swift and Armor and the other companies to be promoting this, it also was something that the humane societies surprisingly also said was going to be an improvement. Better than what was. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Here's an interesting question. Did Berg favor vegetarianism and was he a vegetarian? Berg spent a lot of time in slaughterhouses, as I said, you know, he saw some very terrible abuse of animals. He said, it almost made me a vegetarian. He never was, which is interesting. But he said, humanity made a wrong turn at some point. We should be vegetarians. We're not now, it's too controversial. I mean, there were clearly, there were vegetarians, there was a vegetarian reform movement in the 19th century. But it was radical and Berg decided, this is one step too far to try to advocate for this. So he, you know, he said, I care about turtles, but also turtle soup. So. Interesting. Yeah. It was a compromise. He felt like, you know, he said, you know, basically civilization, he had an idea that civilization is going to purify and get better and better. Eventually all human sin is going to be wiped out by progress. And so he figured vegetarians, you know, would rule the roost sometime down, you know, down the road of history, but not right away. Yeah, well, and he also, this was really before nutrition research and things like that. So, you know, part of it may have been that people didn't really understand, you know, you need certain things in your diet and you can get them different ways. Right. I'm sure. That's a whole new angle we have on that now. Here's a question. This may go back to the vivisection issue. How does this extend to medical research? Was it happening then? And if so, did he protest it? So vivisection probably, I think, is mainly the kind of medical research that was going on then, right? That's right. That's right. And they would, it was interesting conflict over this in Philadelphia, where one of the leading surgery colleges, one of the leading medical schools, routinely would get stray dogs from the city pound to operate on in front of their students, for the students to experiment on these live dogs. The SPCA, the women in Philadelphia who really founded the first animal shelter in America. Up till that point, the pound was a very brutal, very quick visit for animals that'd just be dispatched as quickly as they were gathered. It wasn't a year round thing. It was only done in the summer usually because people were worried about rabies. And so these women created this animal shelter and they won from the city the right to control the stray dogs. As they were gathered up, they would be kept there and they were euthanized mainly after a certain period, but otherwise they would try to find adoptions and return dogs to their owners. So the doctors come to them and say, give us some dogs. We'll take them. We're ready. And they said, no way, you're not. And so there was this battle, particularly a gendered battle where the women were being accused of being sentimental and soft and the doctors were claiming this was disrupting progress and so forth. And this is really what escalated into a pamphlet war that became the anti-bivisection movement. And also helped the doctors recognize that this was a potential threat to their practice of vivisection. So they ended up making sure that whenever an anti-cruelty law was passed, that there was an exception made for medical experiments. Interesting, yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, Berg considered that to be a betrayal of the whole movement. One of the worst exceptions granted and devoted his life to trying to stop that without success. Interesting. There's another question here, asking for a little more about the animal rights movements in Philadelphia and Boston at the same time Berg was working. So you've talked a little about that particular part in Philadelphia. Boston certainly had the advocacy from the women who founded Mass Audubon, who worked to get people to stop putting complete dead birds on women's hats, but I'm sure there's more to it than that. Right. Yeah, I mean, the really important contribution from Boston comes from a man named George Angel, who was the founder of the Massachusetts SPCA, along with the many reformers, sort of the Boston Brahmin reformers of that era got behind this movement. Berg believed, as I said, in whipping, in finding, in dragging cruel men to jail, basically said they're never going to learn. The best we can do is hope to just terrorize them so that they will stop terrorizing animals and women and children. George Angel was much more optimistic, and he is really the founder of what became humane education. So he started right away, and this is in 1868, two years after Berg had launched his movement. He found a newspaper called Our Dumb Animals, unable to speak, unable to, for themselves, Berg Angel is speaking for them. And this magazine was full of sentimental stories about the kindness of animals and their generosity and human-animal relations. It had news about the movement. And Angel had this distributed, first of all, to every schoolhouse in Massachusetts. And then it was a nationwide distribution. He produced millions of copies of this monthly journal. This was also an avenue for the women in the movement, and the majority of the rank and file of this movement were women. And they were not in a position to go out and wrestle with Teamsters and go into the slaughterhouses and take on the butchers. But humane education was an important avenue for them to participate in the movement. So they created what they called Bands of Mercy, where they would invite young people, and their targets were particularly boys, assuming that boys were more cruel than girls, and they would invite them to be part of this club and they would sign a pledge that they would devote their lives to protecting animals. They would read literature, they would get badges, and these sort of support them. And George Angel and others who were advocates of this said, if we can raise a whole generation of kind boys, we're gonna solve all kinds of social problems. We're not just gonna stop animal cruelty, we might stop wars. We might stop all kinds of abuse if we can touch the hearts of kids at the right age. And having a pet, having empathy for animals is heart training, right? Sort of the high watermark of George Angel's contributions down to today was that he was the one who brought the novel Black Beauty to the United States. That sold a zillion copies. He called it the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Horse. So it's again, a link to the anti-slavery movement. This is gonna touch people and move the whole public. And it was a British novel, but he published the American version and gave it away for free for decades. Wow, that's a really effective piece of action just by itself, boy. Yeah, still going. There's a huge animal hospital here in Boston named for Angel. Yes, right. As you might expect, yeah. That's his institution, for sure. Yeah, mm-hmm. Here is a question from a fellow UT volunteer. Were you cognizant of agenda-setting theory prior to writing the book? Though it's not explicitly mentioned in your book, Berg, the way that Berg used the press to promote his animal rights cause is a classic example of the theory in action, although it wasn't formally founded until the 20th century. Nope, I don't know agenda-setting theory. I know Berg was indeed a powerful user of the newspapers. And I think this is partly his theatrical training. He understood also that it was important not to be ignored. And so there were times when he very intentionally said, yeah, I lost this case, I lost the turtle case, but everybody read about it, everybody thought about it and better to outrage people than to have people not think about us. So in that sense, I think he was a very savvy manipulator of the press, and if that's agenda-setting theory, then there you go. Yeah, well, and certainly he sounds like he had that in common with Barnum believing there was no such thing as bad publicity. Right. Yeah. Yeah, they were masters. Right, equal foes. How would you compare, this question says, how would you compare the climate today for promoting animal protection relative to that in Berg's day? Well, I think it's enormously different. We are far more, first of all, I mean, it's one thing to have sympathy for animals. It's another thing to actually have the power of a law and even more important to have the institution that is making sure the law isn't forced. So I think Berg and the SPCA founders really deserve credit for that. But I think it's expanded tremendously since then, right? So I think the awareness of this, the default assumption that cruelty is a problem that human comforts and privileges have to be balanced with respect for animals. I mean, we have obviously a long way to go on this. And I think one of the interesting struggles that emerges out of the book is to what extent are problems solved simply because they go out of sight? Right? I mean, if you remove slaughter from downtown where people are seeing the suffering of these animals in the livestock pens coming off the trains and they're seeing the brutality of slaughter, do you solve that problem by moving it somewhere else where you don't see it? Or do you just hide it, right? And I think this gets back to your point earlier about animal rights activists trying to expose often against, you know, surmounting state laws that are making it difficult for them to expose the kinds of abuses that are happening in factory farming situations, for example. Yeah, there's actually a term called ag-gag laws. Right. Laws that states adopt to prevent people from basically usually going undercover and getting hired under a different name or something so that they can take pictures and show conditions on farms and states, a number of ag states have tried to criminalize this. Yeah. Yeah, so some of the problems that, you know, it's also possible, I mean, I think technology solved a lot of these moral problems of the 19th century. There was no pet sterilization, you know, in this period. And, you know, the problem of horse abuse in cities was solved not by an upsurge of kindness, but by the engine, right? Replacing gradually over time, it took quite a long time. So some of these problems evolve and change and new technology poses new threats. And as I said, I think our awareness of the breadth of the problem is much greater with the animal rights movement and also with the environmental movement. And to meet that, I mean, there are many, you know, the SPCA is still with us and still going strong, but obviously there are many, many, many organizations that are organized around particular problems of factory farming and environmental degradation and so forth. Yeah, factory farms really are an area where animal welfare and environmental concerns converge because, you know, you have, these are, the official term is confined animal feeding operations for people who haven't heard of this, people call them factory farms. So they're large operations that have, you know, 500 or 1,000 dairy cows, you know, 3,000 hogs, something like that. And they keep them mostly inside or mostly are completely inside and in very small spaces. And it's very efficient, that's how you get, you know, inexpensive meat, but there are a lot of concerns about the welfare of the animals in those settings. And also you have these enormous lagoons of manure and air emissions and all kinds of environmental issues. So that's definitely a point now. Yeah, so, you know, that's an intensification of the problems that were happening in downtown areas. You know, and still with us are issues about the link between the way we treat those animals and the impact on health when we consume those animals. Yeah, here's an interesting question sort of back to the micro level. What advice and funding ideas would you give to small zoos when they struggle with proper housing and expensive care? We unfortunately lost two giraffes at the Reston Zoo in the Washington DC suburbs to a barn fire. They have constantly struggled with funding. Heartbreaking, beautiful zoo, but huge responsibilities. Woodburg have supported small zoos. Yeah, you know, I would say no. I would say that, you know, he was in ways that I think are surprising to a modern sensibility because I think we do, many of us would recognize the value of getting closer to these animals in terms of raising our awareness and our concern about them. You know, Berg from what Berg saw, you know, and of course, you know, what we're talking about now is our modern ideas about zoos that have evolved into a very different kind of institution, you know, concerned about species protection and conservation, much more sensitive to the environments that these animals are in. So, you know, it's hard to know, but I think he was certainly at the time very skeptical about our right to do that to any animal. We need to wrap up in just a minute. So, Ernie, are there any other sort of angles or questions or things that, you know, you just found particularly interesting that we haven't touched on here that you'd wanna raise before we summarize? Well, I think it's interesting that Berg, you know, he went after dog fights. He went after these sort of working class saloons where there was rat pits where terriers would be put in these pits and would battle against rats and destroy them. And he was often accused because he hated this and he would stamp that out. He was often accused of going after poor people. And Berg wasn't elitist and he was a nativist. And, you know, there was a lot of ways they considered to be the Irish immigrants to be the worst thing that, you know, the most cruel of all, but Berg always insisted that wealthy people are just as capable of cruelty. And he went after wealthy people, for example, in their hobby of shooting pigeons. They would have massive tournaments where pigeons, often passenger pigeons on their way to extinction would be shot out of traps, it's a trap shooting. And Berg was a big advocate of the clay pigeon as a replacement and took on, you know, the Vanderbilts and Gordon Bennett Jr. And these, you know, various people who are very, very powerful and always insisted that cruelty is something which cuts across class, that everybody is against cruelty except for the cruelty that they particularly find convenient or interesting. And pop back in. Hi, everyone. That was a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much, Ernie. Oh, sure. Fantastic. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, and having some of your expertise leading the conversation has been wonderful. But we're doing something, so thank you. This is not possible without the generosity of our individual supporters. So thank you for those who donated. It directly goes to these webinars. So if you do support us, thank you. If you don't, please, we'd love you to consider doing so. I do, we're doing something new. We're gonna try to have a book club because we are called The Conversation and Dr. Friedberg has been kind enough to agree to come back and talk about the book if there's a group of people who wanna read it. And so this has been an experiment, but I put in the chat that if you would like to be part of our book club, to be traded to a species, Henry Berg and the birth of the animal rights movement, please email Lisa dot ting at The Conversation. This will be also in a follow-up email to all participants as well as a recording. We've gotten many, many requests for a recording of this talk. And we're gonna all gather back for some of you will gather back on, I believe it's late April on the 28th for a discussion, kind of a more free-flowing discussion with our book club if there's people who wanna join. So please think about it. Thank you all so much for coming to The Conversation webinars to the seventh of a series. We've started since the pandemic began and we're really grateful for you to coming. And thank you so much again, Ernie and Jenny. My pleasure. Thank you. Okay. Take care. Bye everyone. Thank you.