Pigeon-Shooting (1875)

AUTHOR: Bergh, Henry

KEYWORDS: animals, Christian morality

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

This letter, addressed to James Gordon Bennett, Jr. (publisher of The New York Herald), begins by reminding Bennett of his particular “moral responsibility” as a newspaper magnate and public figure. Bergh finds it particularly objectionable that Bennett “sanction[s] and promote[s] […] the useless slaughter and mutilation of innocent animals.” Bergh assumes that Bennett agrees that “all living creatures are endowed with the right to live” because to believe otherwise would go against “Divine wisdom and authority.” Bergh then asks Bennett to imagine that one of the pigeons about to be shot for “recreation” were to address him directly:

I am wholly in your power; you will not pretend that I ever harmed you, or that there exists any natural or legitimate reason for my destruction. The sphere in which I moved was assigned to me by the same Allwise Being who made you, and so bountifully endowed you with wealth, reason and all the material possessions of this world. I was betrayed into captivity while seeking to provide nourishment for my little family, now dead of starvation.

You are about to immolate me upon the blood-stained altar of inglorious rivalry, and what will you gain by the crushing of my delicate limbs and ruptured arteries that a senseless target would not afford you? If, however, this little body, so cunningly and so mysteriously contrived by its Creator, be necessary to your reasonable benefit – if the brief existence which it inherits be required for any purpose which religion and human policy condemn not – take it, it is yours; but offend not its Author, nor insult the cultivated spirit of your generation, by a deed which your own conscience, on reflection, will characterize, but which I refrain from doing (244).

Bergh is particularly incensed that Bennett has offered a reward of $10,000 to the person who shoots “the greatest number of pigeons on a certain day.” He closes his article by once more appealing to Bennett's sense of responsibility: “To the famous journal founded by the wisdom and sagacity of your late father millions of people look annually for precept, example and advice; and when they read in your fair columns your sanction of betting, and unnecessary mutilation and killing of unoffending animals, can you consistently rebuke the demoralization of the age in which you live and exercise so commanding an influence? (244)”