I was at my town’s sweet little Memorial Day Parade yesterday and was eager to photograph the entry of the Washington County Draft Animals Association, parading proudly down Main Street in front of hundreds of cheering and appreciative people.
This year, I saw the oxen in a completely different – and revealing – context. The spirits of the New York Carriage Horse were marching too.
Watching these two calm and obedient creatures and their very competent and proud handler, I thought with some sadness that it is fortunate that these two oxen do not live in New York City and did not march there.
New York City is only a few hours from Cambridge, N.Y., but it might as well be on Mars. In New York, the very idea of abuse has been stolen, privately re-defined to fit the temporal causes and emotional needs of people. I do not believe there was one human being on Main Street in my town who believes for one second that these two healthy oxen were being mistreated in any way. Yet just a few hundred miles away, the carriage horses in New York City – and their owners and drivers – are fighting for their very existence, as are carriage horses all over the country.
How ironic this wrenching controversy is. The people who know the most about working animals – those who have lived and worked with them for centuries – are voiceless in the debate, and those who know nothing about them are demanding to decide their fate. Animals have sparked a cultural civil war in America between the rural and agricultural world and the new animal ethos in urban and suburban America: all animals are pets in danger of abuse and in need of rescue. The carriage horse controversy is the animal world’s Battle Of Bull Run, a signal that this difference is deep and wide, the struggle for the future of animals just beginning.
In the rural culture and the agricultural world, animals are partners in our work and lives, work with them is sacred and steeped in tradition and history, it is the farthest thing from abuse. We know here what abuse is, we see it all the time, several of my animals can testify to it, and it is not well cared-for draft animals working with people. Those are the lucky ones.
In the real world of real animals, we know that animals stumble and fall, get sick and die, work hard and long, just as people do. We know there is no such thing as a no-kill farm and a no-kill world for animals, no paradise for them or for us. In New York City, there are no animals left except the carriage horses, there are only pets, animals there are seen only through the prism of vulnerable beings, wards and emotional surrogates for needy and disconnected humans.
Imagine how different this scene would have been it the oxen had paraded in New York City. If this confident and proud young woman paraded her two oxen down Fifth Avenue in a parade.The mayor would faint away in his limousine; the animal rights blogs would light up; petitions and donations would pour in, and various TV stars would rush to offer to take the animals home with them for cuddling and safe keeping.
Hordes of reporters – the Washington Draft Animal Association has never seen one – would appear, and there would the angry protesters waving placards and shouting at the people who live and work with the oxen, as they have done for years to the carriage trade in New York, calling them greedy, abusive and cruel, even murderers, for making the oxen work. Work, the animal rights groups say in New York City, is abuse, and life among people is cruel. They say that no animal should work or live in towns and cities. They must live only in the wild, or on rescue preserves or the farms of the rich.
The demonstrators would also surely be shouting at the many children who were waving at the oxen, telling them to “go home” and stop supporting cruelty and abuse. (Of course, it is fortunate for the demonstrators that they did not show up to yell at the oxen in my town, they would not be surrounded by hordes of manipulable reporters but a very different kind of crowd – angry farmers and townspeople, 4-H kids with pitchforks, and our mayor would be leading the charge.)
By the standards of the mayor and animal rights activists in New York City, these oxen are piteous and mistreated creatures. When the parade stopped for traffic, they lowered their heads. So they must be depressed, they would say in New York City, pining for the wild, yearning for face time with their friends. Like the carriage horses, these oxen work, and as the carriage horses, it is their purpose, their meaning. They are so important to the people who know them and live and work with them and yes, earn their subsistence from them.
The oxen work in the heat, they work in the cold, they do not get five weeks of vacation, their stables are not cleaned out every three hours. Their barns are not air-conditioned or heated, there are not five separate government agencies monitoring their welfare, they are not guaranteed retirement when they get old.
And yes, they do parade on asphalt and in traffic, nose to nose with fire engines and farmer’s trucks. And unlike the carriage horses, they even have horns. It is possible one day that one of these animals might spook and bolt and injure someone. Farmers are sometimes injured in their work, it does not cause them to send their animals away. It is also possible any one of us watching the parade can stumble or fall wreck our cars on the way to or from the parade. That is life, the universal toll, the price to pay for a meaningful existence.
I am grateful to live in a community where these wonderful animals can parade through the middle of town and be admired and appreciated, and where young people can learn about them without experiencing the rage and fury and cruelty the carriage trade owners and drivers suffer in New York almost every day.
The horses are awakening us to what it means to have animals in the world, to the need to reclaim the idea of abuse and cruelty, to live freely and openly with them without fear or governmental intrusion. In many ways, the horses are beginning to unify that fractious city. All kinds of people who normally disagree – the editorial writers of the three newspapers, the Teamsters and the Chamber of Commerce, the Central Park Conservancy, big and small businesses, tourists and visitors, the great majority of city residents – are speaking out for the horses and for the future of animals in our world.
Maybe the distance between us is not as great as it sometimes seems, perhaps it is true that the animals can do what people and politicians cannot do, bring us together and help us to save the earth.
Perhaps the greatest and most important work of animals is yet to come. Inspired by the horses, we may just keep the lost and disconnected souls of the world from driving the animals out of our parades.