Animal rights have been around for generations and there are always individuals who stood up to fight for them. This is one of those stories. Henry Bergh was a man ahead of his time but also a necessary figure whose actions shaped our lives and the relationships we have formed to protect the animals for whom we care.
(Also, an excellent bibliography!)

As an animal liberation activist, this was an important book to read. While I don’t find Henry Bergh to have been an animal rights advocate, I do see how his work was so very important to the origin of the movement. Most of Bergh’s work would be considered animal welfarism which is completely different from animal rights/liberation. This book was very thoroughly researched and written in an engaging style. I’m usually not one for history books but I found this to be a good read for everyone, not just history buffs.

Sadly, society has not changed much since Bergh’s work which the author acknowledges. I think that makes this work all the more essential reading. This would be great for high school or college students to read, discuss, and use for papers and projects.

Thank you to Ernest Freeberg, Perseus Books, Basic Books, and #NetGallery for an ecopy in return for an honest review. Review will be posted on NetGallery, Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon.

I received a complimentary eARC for an honest review of this book.

In the late 1800s, Henry Bergh had no reason to give a flip about animal welfare. In today’s times, we’d call him a “trust fund baby.” His family benefited durning the Gilded Age, he didn’t have to worry about making a living.

However, connections and fate let him to a diplomatic post in St. Petersburg, during which he observed the cruelest treatment of an exhausted horse and it stirred his moral crusade. This isn’t to say that he had radical ideas to not use animals for work or for nourishment—he sought to make humans more humane.

In this engaging and superbly researched work, Freeberg shows a man true to his convictions, putting his time and money into the establishment of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). He takes on dogfighting ring thugs, PT Barnum, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and more. As his fame (or infamy) grows he inspires a movement across the country.

Highly recommend this read for anyone interested in the animal rights movement or history buffs.

#NetGalley

I would like to thank Ernest Freeberg, Basic Books, and NetGalley for providing me a copy of A Traitor to His Species in exchange for an honest review. Over the past few months, I have become increasingly more interested in reading biographies. While I am still relatively new to this genre, this biography quickly skyrocketed to my list of favorites!

This book shares the influence that Henry Bergh had in this country. Henry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (A.S.P.C.A.), fought vigorously for the rights of animals across many different fields. While this book does center around Bergh there were several other individuals that were mentioned so readers can learn more.

What I loved about this biography was the overall layout. It clearly stated each issues that Bergh addressed. I also really enjoyed the images that were incorporated throughout. It brought this huge piece of history to life for readers who many not even think twice about how a certain regulation came to be regarding animals.

I will absolutely be recommending this biography to all my animal-loving peers.

this was a really interesting read, the research was really well done and I enjoyed getting to know Henry Bergh, he had a interesting life.

Gilded Age Americans lived cheek-by-jowl with free-range animals. Cities and towns teemed with milk cows in dark tenement alleys, pigs rooting through garbage in the streets, geese and chickens harried by the packs of stray dogs that roamed the 19th-century city. For all of American history, animals had been a ubiquitous and seemingly inevitable part of urban life, essential to sustaining a dense human population. As that population became ever-denser, though, city dwellers were forced to consider new ways to share space with their fellow creatures-and began to fit urban animals into one of two categories: the pets they loved or the pests they exterminated. Into the fracas of the urban landscape stepped Henry Bergh, who launched a then-shocking campaign to bring rights to animals. Bergh's movement was considered wildly radical for suggesting that animals might feel pain, that they might have rights. He and his cadre of activists put abusers on trial, sometimes literally calling the animal victims as witnesses in court. But despite all the showmanship, at its core, the movement was guided by a fierce sense of its devotees' morality.

A Traitor to His Species is the fascinating biography of Henry Burgh, an affluent New Yorker who seemingly had something of an epiphany aged 52 years old and believed he was put here on earth with the purpose of ending animal abuse. Founding the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866, he was the subject of ridicule with people labelling him as insane for his crazy outlook and him giving a voice to the voiceless. I feel a Bertrand Russell quote is apt here: ”Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” and look where we are now; almost the entire population are advocates of rights for animals so we have a lot to thank the eccentric Henry Burgh for. This is a thoroughly entertaining and immersive read and is accessible to all. It's evident that Freeberg has researched the man and his legacy thoroughly as there is extensive detail which I appreciated. For animal lovers, activists and history buffs, this is an important and significant book and an absolute must-read. So much more than just a biography, this is a compassionate, eminently readable and often heart-wrenching account of the plight of animals in nineteenth-century America. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Basic Books for an ARC.

This title was reviewed and featured as a "ray of hope" on a recent episode of the Beacon podcast at mainebeacon.com.

Before reading this book I had never heard of Henry Bergh and I'm so happy I read this book because it sheds a lot of light on how the state of the animal rights movement today came to be. Some of the things that used to be a big battle seem obvious to us today (issues like dogfighting), but it wasn't always like that.

What I liked:

This book broke its chapters more or less up by specific battles fought by Bergh. The moving of livestock, dogfights, the way public transportation horses were treated, pigeon shooting, etc. To me, even when things weren't 100% in chronological order, this made the book very easy to follow.

I also liked that not every single thing in the book was Bergh getting his way or being amazing. I've read way too many bios of people where you can tell the author clearly admires their subject too much and ends up publishing a glowing review of their life that leaves you feeling like you can't really trust it. This book shows some of the more extreme opinions Bergh had, and also some times he made decisions he came to regret.

What I didn't like:

So, this book was about Bergh in his role founding the ASPCA and for this reason there was not a lot about his personal life included, but I would have really liked to have just a bit more. Similarly, Bergh's work obviously had him working closely either with or against people quite often in his goal to promote animal welfare and yet pretty much everyone else in the book is not mentioned as having a significant relationship to Bergh much at all with the exception of P. T. Barnum who comes up multiple times. I would have liked to get a closer look at some of the people who were present in Bergh's life as opposed to just the man himself. Influences play a huge role in the overall picture of a person and in the decisions they make.

Sometimes I felt the descriptions of the things the animals had to endure were more graphic than they strictly had to be, but then again if they were not then would we really understand exactly what it was that Bergh was up against? Hard to say.

Overall, definitely one to read if you seek to understand the history of the animal rights movement in North America, but like most other things, it does not come without its own flaws.

A Traitor to His Species is the morbidly entertaining tale of ASPCA founder Henry Bergh and his tireless mission to convince Gilded Age mindsets to take animal rights seriously. Ernest Freeberg treats his subject honestly and fairly throughout, painting an admirable portrait of a noble, yet very flawed man and movement who faced ridicule and skepticism from a public convinced of man’s dominion over the “dumb brutes” that increasingly crowded their lives in growing cities. The narrative can be a bit jarring in tone at times, reflecting the strangeness of the time period and the uphill fight the movement faced: for every turtle abuser Bergh has arrested in the streets, we have accounts of teamsters clubbing horses to death and giant cages of stray dogs lowered into the river to drown, all in full view of the public and considered very normal.

Decidedly not for the faint of heart, but an interesting snapshot of history and a mark of how far Bergh’s legacy reaches among the animal rights movements of today. Well worth a read if only for Bergh’s continuous battles with P.T. Barnum, a pantomime villain if there ever was one, whose large collection of exotic animals and questionable usage of it continually made him a target of Bergh’s ire.

**Thanks to Netgalley and Basic Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.**