The Friend of the Weak Animal

...It happened in the year 1866, in the city of New York... when horse-drawn carriages were in common use to the exclusion of every other means of transport. In a narrow alley a horse shies and rears proudly under the whip of a brutal coachman, who rains blows and curses upon it as though his heart were hewn of rock — or as though he had no heart at all!

Suddenly the light of the street, from afar, casts the silhouette of a man in elegant dress, who gently rebukes the driver of the carriage, saying:

— Your hand off the animal, my friend; you have no right to treat it in this rough fashion!
— No right to beat my own horse! Who says so?

And the whip came down anew upon the weak animal's body with savagery... whereupon the man in the elegant dress did no more than beckon to a policeman who was passing and ask him to arrest the coachman on the charge of "cruelty to an animal."

In court, the coachman paid a fine of ten dollars in cash, still muttering something about people meddling in other people's private affairs!... and what business had this man with him and his horse!!??

Those dollars were the first money to enter the treasury of the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," founded in that same year... and that elegant man was none other than the society's founder, Mr. Henry Bergh...

That was some eighty years ago; today people are gentler in their treatment of the weak animal, and they know for certain that whoever breaks these laws will be reached by the hands of the society's members, wherever he may be...

Bergh was a man of high culture. Abraham Lincoln appointed him first secretary of the American legation at St. Petersburg. In the seat of his new post he felt, with a true feeling, that his mission in life stood above the post — that it lay in the humane field... The idea was inspired in him by a Russian coachman whom Bergh saw with his own eyes bringing his thick whip down upon a weak horse's head until he forced it, humbled, to its knees!!

...And Bergh did nothing less than leap from the official carriage belonging to the legation, wrench the whip from the coachman's hand, and, hardly knowing what he did, bring it down upon his shoulders, upon his legs, upon his whole body, in revenge for the poor animal.

...That very day Bergh resigned his post at the legation and took ship back to New York, where he founded his society, which was destined to spread across the world in a short time...

...And people supposed that this elegant young man aimed, by this work of his, at fame and glory... until there came a day when a steamer put in loaded with turtles — most of them in a state to break the heart, between dead and alive, suffering deep wounds throbbing with their blood... Bergh learned the news, went up onto the ship, and led the captain off to court; and there a long trial took place, in which the captain's counsel tried to prove that turtles are not among the animals covered by the law!

— Are they plants, then, or lifeless matter?! said Bergh...

Bergh lost the case, but he won a great deal... for the "Herold" came out having devoted six full columns to Bergh's cause... and by the following day

the number of people who had become acquainted at length with this institution ran to upwards of a million!!...

Then followed the many incidents in which Bergh took his stand as the noble defender of the submissive, weak animal, demanding heavy fines as the penalty for cruelty and savagery. The society grew, its efforts spread abroad, its aims became known, and people came forward to support it and to cherish it at once. Public opinion was awakened to it through the newspapers, which at first commented on the incidents and episodes with a certain astonishment, but before long respect showed in their tone.

With the society's expansion its finances thinned, and its president, Bergh, had to find a way to revive his enterprise. And God answered his prayer: Bergh heard a knocking at his door, and the man at the door begged him insistently to visit a sick man in the hospital. Bergh answered the summons, wondering all the while what on earth the sick man could want of him?

The sick old man expressed his intense admiration and esteem for the work of Bergh and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and asked Bergh to carry on with this great humane work.

And when this old man died — he was a wealthy merchant — he left the organization a hundred thousand dollars... which were the greatest store for widening its works and taking them up again on a large scale.

The thirty-three branches of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that Bergh planted with his own hand have today become 600, thanks to solidarity and cooperation and the spread of the society's spirit — not in America alone, but in all the countries of the world...