Animals: Humane Anniversary

In the year 1822 a high-minded little group of men led by an M. P. from Galway, Richard (“Humanity”) Martin, gathered at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in London, and formed the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In the same year they induced Parliament to pass a bill to punish persons who ”wantonly and cruelly” beat or ill-treated horses, mares, geldings, mules, asses, oxen, cows, heifers, steers, sheep.

In the year 1864 one Henry Bergh, son of a wealthy New York shipbuilder, returned to the U. S. from a consulship in St. Petersburg thoroughly disgusted with the way Russians abused animals, thoroughly determined that there should be no such abuse in the U. S. Taking his inspiration from “Humanity” Martin, he lined up John Jacob Astor, Peter Cooper, other prominent New Yorkers, in 1866 founded in New York the first A. S. P. C. A. From the New York Legislature he secured a charter granting its officers the power of arrest and the privilege of licensing dogs, in return for which he proposed to keep the streets free of strays.

Until his death in 1888 Henry Bergh stumped the U. S. lecturing on humanitarianism, urging others to set up their own local organizations. In 1877 John G. Shortall, president of the Illinois Humane Society, called a meeting in Cleveland to co-ordinate those organizations, formed the American Humane Association. Last week the American Humane Society held its 50th anniversary meeting in Milwaukee, Wis., and did honor to Henry Bergh.

In its early days, A. S. P. C. A. devoted itself to such matters as the ruthless over-crowding of calves and cows in shipment, the plucking of live fowl, the mixing of marble dust in horse and cattle food as filler. Nowadays such societies are busy with such diverse matters as inspecting poultry markets, removing injured animals in ambulances, extricating stranded cats from trees.

Henry Bergh’s New York A. S. P. C. A. was the father of all U. S. be-kind-to-animals organizations, but it is now brother to nearly 500 of them, of which the American Humane Association is general supervisor and propaganda force.

Friendly toward the A. S. P. C. A. and the American Humane Association, although the friendship is not entirely reciprocated, are numerous national and local antivivisectionist societies which devote their energies to attacking scientists who use animals for experiments. To them antitoxins and serums produced by infecting animals with disease are anathema. Most prolific distributor of antivivisectionist literature is the Vivisection Investigation League, headed by 81-year-old Sue M. Farrell, who learned her humanitarianism direct from agnostic Robert Ingersoll; anti-vivisectionists also include such unusual celebrities as Fannie Hurst, George Arliss, Ellen Glasgow, Mahatma Gandhi. Irene Castle McLaughlin, but their societies were not officially represented in Milwaukee.

Climax of the Milwaukee meeting was the re-dedication of the only existing statue of Henry Bergh, first dedicated in 1891 by the Wisconsin Humane Society, still standing in Milwaukee’s City Hall Square. President of the Association since 1927 has been Rotarian-Boy Scout Leader Sydney Coleman, 51, executive vice president of the A. S. P. C. A. Last week under his aegis, most spectacular event was the annual humane-trap contest of which the winner, D. Ralph Knapp of Plattsburg, N. Y., was awarded $100 for the second successive year for a painless chain trap.