The Cost of Cruelty (1881)
AUTHOR: Bergh, Henry
The speech addresses both the economics of mistreating animals (with the specifics of this mistreatment) and the morality of mistreating them.
Bergh, Henry. “An Address”
---. “An Anthropozoonet”
---. “Editor, Forest and Stream”
Clubb, Henry Stephen. “Economy in Food”
Douglass, Frederick. “Address Delivered by Hon. Frederick Douglass”
---. “Lecture on Trip to Europe”
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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Automobile as a Reformer”
---. "The Cattle Train"
---. “The Beast Prison”
---. “The Cattle Train”
---. “On Dogs”
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---. “Turkeys Turning the Tables”
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Lovell, Mary Frances. “Address on Humane Education”
---. “The Commonest Form of Cruelty”
---. “Cruel Teneriffe”
---. “The Point of View”
---. “Woman's Responsibility Toward the Animal Creation”
Moore, J. Howard. “The Cost of a Skin”
---. “The Martyrs of Civilization”
---. The New Ethics
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Nichols, Thomas Low. How to Live on a Dime and A-Half A-Day
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
Smith, Ellen Goodell. The Fat of the Land and How to Live On It
White, Caroline Earle. “To the Editor of the Philadelphia Medical Journal”
SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)
Bergh writes not just of the economic loss from the death and abuse of “meat” animals resulting from the conditions of their transport to the slaughterhouse, but the value of the animals’ labor in the economy, including chickens’ eggs and goose feathers, as well as the strength and utility of horses and oxen. Thus, the “cost of cruelty” is both economic (the loss of animal meat in transit) and medical (humans eat the diseased meat of abused animals that causes cancer).
Addressing first an outbreak of disease in New York in 1872, Bergh describes how the epidemic resulted in a great loss of horses across the city, leading to the abuse of those that remained. This is a potent image of the importance of horses to the functioning of the city. Bergh then attempts to put an economic value on these animals, who are treated as if they “are cheaper than oats” (76). This economic tallying leads him to identify the cost to the meat market of “shrinkage” (how much weight a cow, ox, sheep, or pig loses during transport, not including those that are killed in transit). Bergh suggests that if this information (about wastage and abuse) were made public, the situation would change rapidly.