Principles of Animal Behavior, among other books, he is a fellow in the Animal Behavior Society and has lectured at over 200 universities and museums across the globe. He is a contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today, and New Scientist.
Dugatkin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City, and shared the following:
From page 99 of Nary a Horse Left Standing:Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.In [Henry] 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?” Bergh was convinced such a man would not hesitate and was “persuaded that the obduracy of heart and unrelenting disposition which we discover in some men, is owing in a great measure to the early indulgence of such a disposition towards the inferior animals.The Page 99 Test for Nary a Horse Left Standing works respectably well for one thread in the book: how a massive 1872 outbreak of horse flu that paralyzed almost every major urban center in North America ushered in a revolution in animal rights, led by Henry Bergh and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
That massive outbreak of horse flu soon was dubbed The Great Epizootic, the animal equivalent of a pandemic. In the fall of 1872, horses were the lifeblood of every metropolis across North America. New York City alone had 38,000, who were the living, breathing engines that powered the city. At least half, and likely more, of those horses were laid up for weeks at a time during The Great Epizootic. Suddenly, the power sources driving fire carts, garbage trucks, hearses and delivery carts that stocked the shelves of everything from thousands of mom and pop stores to the new department stores, were convalescing in stables.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Before The Great Epizootic, each day more than 300,000 tickets were sold to ride on streetcars powered by horses. Each of these streetcars transported one or two dozen people to work, to shop or to cultural venues like the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art and The American Museum of Natural History.
During The Great Epizootic the number of streetcars riding the inlaid rails of Gotham plummeted. This was in part due to all the sick horses in streetcar company stables, but it was also due to Henry Burgh and the ASPCA’s work to make sure that when avarice owners of these companies tried to force clearly sick horses to work nonetheless, they failed at the opportunity to line their pockets at the expense of those animals.
The goings on of October 30, 1872 provide a snapshot of what became a daily occurrence. That day, in the heat of The Great Epizootic, Bergh and a team from the ASPCA stationed themselves near a switch that allowed streetcars from the Third Avenue streetcar 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 forced it to stop and inspected the horses. “Mr. Bergh pointed to the yellow looking noses of the horses,” reported the New York Herald, a paper that had already dubbed Bergh “the great philohippic.” “These animals are too sick to work,” the Herald wrote, quoting Bergh, “take the other track and go back to the stables.”
The next day Bergh was back on the streets, this time where the Bleecker Street streetcar line ran, to inspect more horses. So it went every day during The Great Epizootic, when nary a horse was left standing.
The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.
The Page 99 Test: Dr. Calhoun's Mousery.
--Marshal Zeringue
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