This article was adapted from “Nary a Horse Left Standing,” by Lee Alan Dugatkin, published by The MIT Press. It was reprinted with permission from MIT Press Reader.
On Wednesday, October 23, 1872, a slew of articles appeared in The New York Times, The New York Herald, and The New York Sun, warning New York citizens that their city was in dire straits. In what must have struck New Yorkers like a thunderclap, the Herald ran a huge story titled “THE EPIZOOTIC,” in which readers cast their eyes on a sub-headline of “Seven Thousand Horses in the City Stricken with Catarrhal Fever During the Past Twenty-Four Hours,” followed by sub-sub-headlines of “Millions of Dollars in Horseflesh at Stake” and “How the Disease Will Affect Local Traffic and Travel.”
The reporter who penned the story began by assuring his readers that though what they were reading would seem almost impossible to believe, it was all too true. He had personally visited “all the principal stables in the city,” and, if anything, the seven-thousand figure in the headline was an underestimate. No one’s horse was safe: From the “squalid shed that shelters the costermonger’s nag to the magnificent palace where the millionaires’ thoroughbreds recline at their ease, surrounded by all the luxury that wealth can purchase,” horses were falling ill at an alarming rate.
Read more: “Did Cars Rescue Our Cities from Horses?”
In a city where so many relied on horses directly and indirectly for their daily keep, sick animals were forced onto the streets to pull streetcars, deliver merchandise, pull fire carts, and more. Some questioned the wisdom of such actions from a moral and economic perspective.
Arguably, chief among them was Henry Bergh, the founder of the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), who did everything he could to help those sick horses. A native New Yorker, whose father had been a shipbuilder often employed by the U.S. government, Bergh was portrayed as “a tall, elegant figure [with] a high forehead, on which a single lock curls gracefully down in the Ciceronian style ... his otherwise classical features are modernized by a moustache.” In 1862, he was appointed Secretary of the Legation in St. Petersburg, Russia. Before he assumed that position, one historian of the animal rights movement described Bergh as “a cultured swell who had previously expressed only modest public-mindedness.”
Bergh’s outrage at animal cruelty seems largely to have been born in 1863, after witnessing a Russian carriage driver beating his fallen horse. Bergh stepped in to protect the unprotected, and from that time on, the Times reported many years later, “[he] began there that active interference on behalf of the rights of animals to kind treatment which has earned for him a worldwide reputation.” The following year, Bergh resigned his post in Russia for health reasons and, on his return to America, stopped in Europe for an extended visit. While he was in England, he met and befriended Dudley Ryder, Second Earl of Harrowby, who was serving as president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Ryder was more than happy to work with Bergh on plans to create an American version of his beloved RSPCA.
The coming-out party for the nascent ASPCA was a February 8, 1866 lecture that Bergh presented to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in lower Manhattan. While Bergh prepared for the meeting, he had drafted a short petition, considered the founding document of the ASPCA:
Patrons of a Society Proposed to be Founded for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dumb Animals
The undersigned, sensible of the cruelties inflicted upon dumb animals by thoughtless and inhumane persons; and desirous of suppressing the same—alike from considerations affecting the moral well-being of society, as well as mercy to the Brute creation: consent to become patrons of a Society having in view the realization of these objects.
By the time Bergh stood up to speak at the American Geographical and Statistical Society, this document had already been signed by the New York City mayor, John T. Hoffman, along with former U.S. Representative Horace Greeley, former Navy Secretary George Bancroft, philanthropists Peter Cooper and James Lenox, businessmen such as A.T. Stewart, John Jacob Astor III, and two dozen others. Soon, the document had been signed by “one hundred of the best men in New York.”
In time, Bergh, the first president of the ASPCA, expanded on his personal views on cruelty in general: “I know of nothing in nature, in reason, or in revelation,” he said at an early meeting of the ASPCA, “which obliges us to suppose that the unalienated rights of a beast are not as sacred and inviolable as those of a man; or that the person who wantonly commits an outrage on the life, happiness, or security of a bird, is not as really amenable, at the tribunal of Eternal Justice, as he who wantonly destroys the rights and privileges, or injuriously takes away the life of one of his fellow-creatures of the human race.”
The petition, Bergh’s comment at that early ASPCA meeting, and much more make it clear that while one mission of the ASPCA was indeed to prevent animals from being subjected to human cruelty, there was also another moral factor at work: people who are cruel to animals are a clear and present danger to human society. And societies that sit by idly while such people go unpunished decline. In Bergh’s speech to the ASPCA in which he invoked “the tribunal of Eternal Justice” for acts of cruelty against animals, he also tells his fellow members to ask themselves this: “Why should a man ... who without the least remorse torments and destroys other creatures, hesitate to do the same, after such an apprenticeship, to any human being that happens to stand in the way of his caprices or ambition?”
In large part because of the power wielded by the people who signed Bergh’s petition, the New York State legislature granted the ASPCA its charter on April 10, 1866.
One anti-cruelty law had been on the books in New York for going on four decades by the time the ASPCA was formed. That law ordered that “every person who shall maliciously kill, maim, or wound any horse, ox, or other cattle, or sheep, belonging to another, or shall maliciously and cruelly beat or torture any such animal, whether belonging to himself or to another, shall upon conviction, be adjudged guilty of a misdemeanor.” But Bergh lobbied for even stricter laws, which he and the society soon got passed. On April 12, 1867, only a year after the ASPCA was chartered, the State of New York passed an Act for the More Effectual Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Section 1 of that act declared, among other things, that “if any person shall over-drive, over-load, torture, torment, deprive of necessary sustenance, or unnecessarily or cruelly beat, or needlessly mutilate or kill ... any living creature, every such offender shall, for every such offense, be guilty of a misdemeanor.”
Many in the public and the press supported Bergh and his society. When Bergh lobbied to have the ASPCA chartered in 1866, the Times stepped up to his defense. But Bergh and the ASPCA also had vocal dissenters aplenty, including some policemen, who thought their time was better spent on more pressing matters than how people treat animals.
Bergh also had skeptics in the press, who often portrayed him as a nosy-body, holier-than-thou, do-gooder. Many in the public, and even among Bergh’s friends, thought that his call for the use of public whippings for people who were guilty of extreme forms of animal cruelty was indicative of a man who cared more for animals than for people. Bergh not only argued for such punishment, but once told a reporter that “nothing improves ruffians so much as a good healthful clubbing well laid on,” leading some to counter that the founder of the ASPCA practiced a “malevolent benevolence,” and was “more gratified by the punishments he inflicts than by the good he is supposed to accomplish ... he has the heart of a fanatic of the Spanish Inquisition.”
Horses played such an integral role in powering New York City that, even before the Great Epizootic struck, most of the cases the ASPCA brought to court involved horses there. From its inception through 1872, more than half of the 1,533 cases the ASPCA took to court involved drivers forcing sick or injured horses to work. Just as important, the society tried to help the horses that fell victim to these crimes.
In 1867, the ASPCA began operating the first horse ambulances in the country. These ambulances, with slogans like “The Merciful Man is Merciful to His Beast” painted in eye-catching colors on their sides, served as flashing lights do for modern-day equivalents, responded to hundreds of calls a year, and brought ailing horses to veterinarians for treatment.
All of which is to say that when the Great Epizootic broke out in the fall of 1872, the ASPCA was ready to protect the rights of the sick horses and to prosecute those who thought that working a sick horse was just part of business. Bergh and his agents were on the streets from day one, checking whether horses were sick and whether they were being forced to pull extra-crowded streetcars and omnibuses.
The events of October 30 capture nicely what became a daily occurrence: That day, in the heat of the epidemic, Bergh, accompanied by two officers from the ASPCA, stationed themselves near a switch that enabled streetcars from the Third Avenue line to move from uptown to downtown tracks. Two policemen stood by to keep order. When a Third Avenue streetcar came along, Bergh and his team stood in front of the car, forcing it to stop, and then inspected the horses. “Mr. Bergh pointed to the yellow looking noses of the horses,” the Herald reported, and told the driver, “These animals are too sick to work. Take the other track and go back to the stables. I’ll go with you.” The driver thought twice, but “a glance at the policeman’s baton persuaded him” to do as Bergh ordered. The passengers were astounded when they realized that the streetcar was heading back to the depot and begrudgingly deboarded.
Bergh then met with the president of the Third Avenue line, who implored him not to interfere with traffic that day and guaranteed that, starting the next day, they would not use sick horses on the line. Bergh agreed. The following day, he was back at the same sort of thing, this time focusing on the Bleecker Street Line.
Bergh had no qualms about pushing the envelope regarding the legal authority of the ASPCA, as he did in his “Sabbath of the Steeds” letter, published in the Herald. Though neither the ASPCA charter nor city laws allowed the ASPCA to act preemptively, on Saturday, November 2, Bergh wrote the president of one of the streetcar lines a short letter:
Sir, tomorrow will be the Sabbath which the Supreme Ruler has declared shall be one of the rest of man and beast. Out of respect for this ordinance and from the considerations of mercy and humanity to the toiling brute let there be a total cessation from travel by [street]car, carriage and other vehicles on that day. Twenty-four hours of repose to the sick and weary horses will turn eminently to the pecuniary and moral profit of their owners. Let it, therefore, be shown tomorrow who are the merciful and who are the avaricious among the proprietors and public.
The streetcars ran that Sunday anyway, but, not surprisingly, streetcar companies began filing injunctions to stop Bergh from shutting down their operations. Those cases got caught up in the courts and were not settled until post-epizootic, when in 1873 it was ruled that the ASPCA could no longer make routine inspections to assess the health of streetcar horses, but the organization did have the authority to arrest a driver if a “plain violation of the Statute occurred in their view.”
Certainly, there were many in New York City, as well as in Boston and Philadelphia, where local ASPCA branches had been formed, who knew Bergh and the ASPCA before the Great Epizootic. But the actions of the ASPCA in New York City between October 21 and the end of November brought them national attention and, in turn, brought the matter of animal protection to the country’s attention.
About two and a half weeks after the first recorded cases of horse flu in New York City, the Great Epizootic finally showed signs of subsiding. A Herald article noted that “the interval of gloom and of paralysis that has affected the city ... [after] the first attack of hippohinorrea was yesterday almost passed off and the mysterious mist of malaria seemed entirely lifted from our poor equine brutes.” There were still plenty of sick horses, the story noted, but many had recovered, and the ill, on the whole, seemed on track to as well.
One sign of the upturn was that most streetcar lines were now employing the majority of their horses. Those horses, the Herald reported, “did not look either very emaciated or very weak.” But there were exceptions. All was not well on the Bleecker Street line, where horses appeared as “sorry beasts that seem as if about to fall into pieces or melt away into melancholy grease spots.”
Commerce was recovering, and the downtown business district was coming back to life. Suddenly, the cartmen’s stands were home to healthy men and healthy horses, able and willing to move goods, construction materials and more from one place to another in the city. “Merchants had no difficulty in securing all the means they required for shipping their goods as soon as they were packed,” reported the Times, and shipping rates had largely returned to normal. No surprise then that the “faces of the millionaires and merchants and bankers ... [were] cheerful and confident.” As the horses who powered transport and commerce began recovering, so too did those who pulled fire carts, hearses, mail carts, and more.
Then, just as quickly as things got better, there was fear they might take a turn for the worse again, when cases of dropsy—what today we call edema or swelling from fluid in body tissues—were seen in horses in some of the stables around the city. “There has appeared in the large stables of the city a second phase of the horse disease,” the Herald reported, “a relapse tending to dropsy which in several instances has proved fatal.” The danger of dropsy was, in part, a function of where the swelling occurred. Affected horses, as a general rule, the Sun explained, looked “dull and listless,” but their very life was at risk, “[if] the swelling extends to the breast in the region of the heart and lungs.”
There was general agreement among veterinarians that the cause of this new horse malady was in fact the long hand of the Great Epizootic: “It seems to affect those animals that were compelled to do work in the first stages of the epizooty,” read one article in the Herald. The Sanitary Committee of the New York City Board of Health concurred.
Bergh, who, after praising those stable managers who took good care of their animals during the epizootic, lambasted those who didn’t: “Most of the horse owners, particularly the streetcar and stage lines, were too anxious to make money and drove their animals off their feet. Those that were allowed to recover only partially are now the ones that are falling victim to the new phase of the disease.”
On November 15, the Herald reported there was “no perceptible interruption to travel,” and the number of horses showing signs of dropsy was small compared to those who contracted horse flu—only a dozen of the 2,000 horses at the stables of the Third Avenue Streetcar Line were showing symptoms, and similar percentages were seen in other large stables. Still, the citizens had seen what it was like to lose horsepower and were spooked.
The alarmed response to the outbreak of dropsy, though understandable in light of the damage the horse flu itself caused, proved to be an overreaction. Within a week, reports of dropsy plummeted, and though estimates of casualties and the mortality rate are hard to gauge, they were likely very low. Less than a week after the initial dropsy scare, the Herald calmed readers by reporting that “the business markets today presented a scene of great activity and buoyancy.”
Everyone, including veterinarians, agreed that whatever caused the Great Epizootic in horses had vanished by the end of November. Before it did, Adoniram Brown Judson, assistant sanitary inspector for New York City, estimated that it claimed about 1,400 horses, or 3.7 percent of the city’s 38,000 horses. As horse flu had burned hot, there had been occasional “alarming stories ... going the rounds of the city” that the disease afflicting the horses could be spread from horse to human, but there’s no evidence at all that such tales were true.
It had been a very difficult five weeks for the horses and the citizens of New York City. As for the latter, New Yorkers had come to see just how reliant they were on their biotic mode of transport for almost everything that made their city great. But on a deeper level, many, likely those sympathetic to Bergh, came to appreciate how an animal’s moral value stretches beyond its practical use. 
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Lead Image: Courtesy of the Library of Congress
