The plight of the New York carriage drivers and their horses has touched the conscience and imagination of people in New York City and far beyond, This is no longer just a matter of the horses staying in New York, it is now much bigger, and growing larger every day. I see now why it is not pure madness for me to believe that the horses are speaking to me in the night – here it is, 3 a.m., and they have gotten me out of bed again and down to my computer. How else could this happen?
The story touches all of us, really, animal lovers and citizens of the free world, the left and the right, people who believe in rights for animals and people who believe in rights for people. As a carriage driver and friend wrote me yesterday, it began as a political conflict in New York, but it is now about our place with the animals of the world and about personal freedom. I know what she means. At stake is the meaning of personal liberty, the role of moral government, the fate of animals, and perhaps most important of all, the acceptance of a kind of creeping social tyranny, a death by a thousand cuts: the right of others to invade and destroy our individual lives and take away our property and way of life.
Someone asked me recently if opposition to this creeping ugliness was a progressive or conservative position. I said I didn’t know, I don’t think it matters any longer, I just believe it is the right position. You can see this for yourself on a video, a fashion designer came to Central Park to support the horses and show his models in the carriages, and the police stood by as people screamed, provoked the horses, tried to disrupt the photo shoot, shouted insults and intimidated passersby, including some elderly tourists. It was not a scene out of America, really, but it happened here. It speaks to what we have lost and come to accept.
And here is a question to consider from the video: Should free people guilty of any legal notion of wrongdoing really be ashamed of doing work that is both legal and part of human culture for thousands of years?
Yes, people have a right to demonstrate. And yes, people also have the right to live their lives and do their work.
___
A number of times throughout history, tyranny and persecution have stimulated new thinking about liberty.
The carriage horse controversy is, surprisingly, one of those times. It is triggering a new kind of social movement here. In England, in the mid-seventeenth-century era of repression, rebellion, and civil war, there was a tremendous outpouring of political pamphlets and new thinking. By far the most influential writings emerged from the pen of scholar John Locke.
Locke expressed the radical view that government is morally obliged to serve people, most specifically by protecting life, liberty and property – the very things the New York City government is threatening in the case of the carriage horse owners and drivers. Locke urged a system of checks and balances to limit government power.
To prevent a mayor, for instance, from arbitrarily taking away the freedom and sustenance and property of citizens who had broken no law, committed no crimes, violated no regulations. To prevent a mayor and private millionaires from arrogantly libeling, harassing and banishing the work and freedom and way of life for hundreds of people in the face of overwhelming opposition from the city’s citizens, from the business community, from labor, from the press and from people of every age, race and gender. What John Locke created several hundred years ago was a new way of thinking about government and personal freedom.
He insisted that when government violates individual rights, people may legitimately challenge it’s authority and rebel. He favored the rule of law to protect individuals from the power of monarchs and arrogant political leaders. His work became the underpinning of the American Revolution, this principle eerily relevant today, it echoes through the controversy over the New York carriage horses.
The freedom of men and women, wrote one philosopher, is the freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the idea of the master, the securing of the life of the individual person against assaults and intrusions by other persons. That, he said, is the meaning of personal freedom. That is what is under siege in New York City, why the horses are calling to us to fight for personal liberty. The assault on the carriage trade is an almost classic example of wanton assault and intrusion both by government and other persons.
Personal freedom has also come to mean the freedom of the individual to come and go, equality of the courts and political system, and freedom of conscience and personal choice, subject to the will of the people. All of these definitions are relevant in the carriage horse controversy. The people in the carriage trade are not free to come and go, the political system is not representing them in any way, is not equal, their freedom of conscience and personal choice is being trampled, and the will of the people – more than 60 per cent of them oppose a ban on the horses – is being ignored in the most arrogant way. John Locke would be marching with the carriage drivers. So will I, so, I hope, will you.
In New York, the people have spoken, again and again. They want the carriage horses to stay in the city, they are, in so many ways, part of the soul of the city. It should matter what the people think. The fact that it doesn’t – and a loud and cruel and well-funded minority’s will does – is what makes the issue so important.
__
Then, there is the issue of our relationship with animals in our world. Can they remain among us or can they only be sent to slaughter or survive on the rescue farms of the elite, where they will never work or be seen again? Should we work to keep them safe and present among us, or must all of the animals who are not our emotionalized pets vanish from the earth? If we treat our animals well, does government or private individuals have the right to invade our lives, threaten our livelihood, take our animals from us? This does no fit into any definition of personal freedom that I have ever read or heard.
In the carriage controversy, so many questions:
Can any millionaire or private group come onto my farm and tell me that working with sheep is exploitive and abusive for my border collie? Can they take my guard donkeys away because they are protecting my sheep and not living in the wild? Can they invade my life and force me to do things I do not believe, and punish me for things that are not wrong, and have never been considered wrong? If they can do this to the carriage trade, they can do it to me. And they can do it to you.
Are human beings as important as horses? Do we have as many rights as they have? Should government protect people as well as animals? It is proper for human beings to be abused in the name of protecting animals from abuse? It is ethical to endanger, even kill horses, in the name of saving them? Are the carriage drivers less than human because they work with horses? It is proper for a mayor to destroy the work of so many people without ever speaking to them or meeting with them, and after taking enormous amounts of money from the private interests seeking to banish them and their work? It seems a kind of tyranny, this, it fits so easily into John Locke’s notion of an immoral government, one which must be challenged.
___
Thomas Jefferson wrote that personal freedom is as fragile as it is precious. It can die in a swift stroke, or it can suffer death by “a thousand cuts.” This idea is also referred to as “creeping normality,” a phrase, according to Wickipedia, that refers to the way a major change can be accepted as normal if it happens slowly, in increments that are little noticed – a change in work, the environment, a medical condition, or the chipping a way of the freedom of the carriage drivers and thus, everyone else.
When it is normal for people to lie about the condition of the horses and their treatment and living conditions. When it is normal for people to shout insults at the drivers, intimidate their customers, disrupt their work, libel their character and values and dehumanize them as greedy and immoral. When it is normal for millionaires and campaign donors to set policy with mayors in private meetings, away from any accountability or transparency. When it is normal for authorities to stand by while people disrupt a fashion designer trying to do a photo shoot in the park. When it is normal for a mayor – in the face of overwhelming public opposition – to take the work away from many hundreds of people who are not even charged with any wrongdoing by the many authorities supervising them. When it is normal to try to take their private property – their horses – away from them. When it is normal to attempt to force them to do work they would despise and will not do – drive electric cars through Central Park.
This is the death of personal freedom by a thousand cuts, the assaults on the carriage trade have grown crueller and more destructive and menacing by the day. This has happened so gradually – it began years ago – that even the carriage drivers didn’t grasp it for some time. It happened so gradually that the city’s moral conscience and political leadership fell asleep or was corrupted by private interests and money. We are waking up, the carriage trade is determined to fight, and it is right there for us to see, thanks to videos like the one taken in New York.
We can see the small cuts and understand their larger meaning.
__
It is clear now that the mayor does not have the votes in City Council to ban the horses. Even that compliant body has rejected his notions about the carriage horses, and they are in good company. There are legislative procedures that the mayor may try to invoke to bypass the council and force a ban through all by himself. He seems determined to keep this irrational obsession going. I imagine the fate of the horses will end up in the courts.
In their long, angry and stunningly expensive campaign against the carriage trade, the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights have failed profoundly, their strident fringe ideology has been rejected almost universally by the normally fractious world of New York City. It seems that nobody outside of the animal rights movement itself wants to see the horses gone and see them replaced by Disney-inspired vintage electric cars.
__
The famed biologist Jared Diamond has written about the draft horse as well as the idea of thousand cuts, about ignorance as a form of creeping normality. Diamond has written that working horses, of all the animals in the world, including dogs and cats, are the best animals suited to live and work in urban environments, they are the “most domesticable” because of their gentle nature, their herding instincts, their tolerance for other species, their connection to human beings, and their genetic appetite for work.
Diamond writes that creeping normality keeps us from seeing things like environmental degradation, or the loss of animals from the natural world. Instead of banning horses, a moral government would be working hard to keep them safe and present among us.
If the mayor of New York refuses to talk to the carriage drivers or visit their stables, he surely will not want to speak to Jared Diamond or listen to what he says – no one knows much more about the nature of horses than he does. Diamond’s message is very different from the people poking placards in the carriage horses faces to provoke them into harming themselves or human beings. They have no truth to offer us, only red meat for the evening news.
__
So here it is, a new element of my life since the horses first called out to me in January, it seems so long ago. Here I am again in the middle of the night, clacking away, reading my John Locke, looking at videos, grouchy and sleepy as I stumble downstairs with my border collie Red to fire up my computer. I am 67 years old, awash in post-recovery from heart surgery, the horses do not really care. Red knows the drill by now, when I am awakened by the horses in the middle of the night, they pour words and ideas into my head, I put on my bathrobe, come downstairs, eat a banana, look out at the pasture to check on the sheep and the donkeys. Red knows where I am going, he is sitting by the computer sleeping when I get there.
No vacation yet for you, not tonight, was the message from the horses. Before you go, there is this idea about the role of animals in the world and personal freedom. You haven’t made that as clear as you might. Get down there, time is short. You have the words, we will not be banned or sent away again. Okay, I told the horses, sorry to be grumpy, I do not quite understand how I got here, up on my farm. I am grateful for the gift of you, I will never abandon you or break faith. Okay, they say, have a good time, we will be here when you get back.