I remember the cold day in January when I first visited the Clinton Park stables with Maria. I had gone looking to see if the horses were well cared for, but what struck me the most was not how happy the horses were, but how happy the drivers and medallion owners were. It was not, I thought, that these good people were perfect, or needed to be, it was that they were happy.
The next thing that surprised was learn that the campaign against the carriage horses was not a debate about the horses, or an argument about animal welfare or the future of animals in the urban world. It was an ideological assault – personal, brutal and relentlessly cruel – against the people who owned and drove the horse carriages. To understand this unnecessary controversy, it is first essential to understand that. It has always been about attacking and dehumanizing the drivers, who have been called thieves, torturers, abusers, immoral, callous, greedy, liars and inhuman or less than human beings.
This is always the language of hate, the precursor to persecution, the ugly advance work necessary to demonize people to the point that their freedom and property can be taken away by the so-called moral community around them. Earlier this year, one of the gentlest and most beloved of the carriage drivers approached the mayor at a public event with his young son. He asked the mayor why he was do determined to ban the horses, and the mayor said “because your work is immoral.” He said this right in front of his son, and then turned away. He did not speak of the horses, he spoke of the character of the people who drive them.
There it was, from the mayor’s mouth to our ears. It is about the people, not the animals. The story has never been about the welfare of animals, not one animal on the earth will lead a better or safer life if the carriage horses are banished to rescue farms and slaughterhouses.
Hannah Adrendt wrote that to understand World War II, one had to grasp that the persecution of people by the Germans was not a by-product of the war, it was the point of the war. There are many differences, but the same principle applies here. Once I understood that, and it is really quite evident, then the carriage horse story, an utterly irrational conflict, began to make sense. The people in the carriage trade are beginning to understand it as well. They have begun to represent themselves as very human beings – they have children and dreams and bills to pay – rather than argue the absurd idea that the horses are being mistreated or abused. And they are turning the tide.
This is also why it is so important that the assault on the carriage trade fails. It is important for animals, and for people. If the horses are banned, they will disappear from cities for ever, and the damage to them and the carriage drivers can never be undone. Cruelty and hatred will be the only victor.
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It is – sadly – not a common thing in America to see people who love their work, who love what they do, who are so eager and willing to talk about what they do, to show off what they do to total strangers.
I can testify that it is a joyous, even miraculous thing to have one’s life’s work be with animals. In a rational society working with animals would be admired and encouraged, celebrated. In the Corporate Nation, where work has become so impersonal and dehumanized, there is nothing healthier for animals, for people, for the earth than for people to work alongside animals. There is love and excitement and meaning in this work beyond what so many people trapped in their corporate whirlpools will ever know. I recognized it right away in the stables. It is the oldest work on the earth, and if you are a healthy human being, you will come to know love and connection in a way few outsiders can ever know and understand either.
Those of us who are blessed in this way – I write about animals and live with dogs, donkeys, barn cats, sheep, chickens and write about them – are connected to nature, to Mother Earth, to the sacred and healing connection between people and animals, I call it the Great Partnership. In a way, this is a great hope for the future of the wounded earth.
The drivers I met on that cold January day, and on many other visits, were radiant, excited, eager to show the horses, to touch them, to try and explain how much they love their work, how important it is to them, how much a way of life. Their love and enthusiasm for their lives were infectious. They talked of their parents, their grandparents, their horses, their great hope that their children would continue in this work.
Such happiness is precious, all the more painful to see them being systematically robbed of this joy and harmony, their work and way of life turned into a cruel and angry struggle. For the drivers, much of their joy and their dreams have been taken from them, one cruel day at a time, month after month, year after year. It can never be the same again.
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We are the watchers. We are witnesses. You and me.
That is the message of Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Sioux Nation, a champion of the horses. “We see what has gone before,” he has written.” We see what happens now, at this dangerous moment in human history. We see what’s going to happen – what will surely happen – unless we come together: we – the Peoples of all Nations – to restore peace and harmony and balance to the Earth, our Mother.”
Writing about the carriage horses, I have come to see what the chief has always seen, the fate of the carriage horses is a powerful metaphor, it speaks to the fate of human beings, to our ability to come together in peace and harmony, to save the world, to save ourselves. To treat one another well, rather than to attack, wound and kill each other. Our Mother is crying out in pain, the horses are calling to us to understand how our rage and violence is endangering our world. The controversy in New York is a perfect symbol for this, the horses call us to a new awakening, a new social movement. One that is truly humane, both to animals and to people.
More and more people are joining every day..
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It did not have to be this way. It did not have to be so angry and cruel. The people who call themselves supporters of animal rights could have simply and sincerely begin a discussion about the welfare of the carriage horses. Is it safe for them to be in New York City? Could it be made safer or easier for them? What can be done to keep the horses in the city and make their good lives even better? They could have simply argued their cause rather than battered other human beings.
They did not have to attack the people in the carriage trade. They did not have to call them thieves and murders and abusers. They did not have to invent and distort false horror stories about the horses treatment and well being. They did not have to lie and call the driver’s awful names, and make fun of the way they look and taunt the horses with placards and sticks.
It is possible to compromise and negotiate. In Brooklyn last month, a long and difficult neighborhood issue was resolved in a meaningful way, a model for conflicts like the future of the carriage horses, where there are so many different points of view.
After years of struggle, the Brooklyn Public Library announced plans to sell it’s decaying Brooklyn Heights branch to a real estate developer for $52 million and the promise of 114 affordable units at a different site in the neighborhood. The company agreed to convert the city-owned branch into a 20-story luxury rental complex with a new, hi-tech 21,000-square-foot library on the bottom floor.
The agreement was a relevant example of how government, community, private interests and business can work together to resolve a difficult situation, preserve a valuable and beloved institution, build affordable housing and give the library system an enormous amount of money as well as a new library. There was little name-calling, much good faith. How easy it is to imagine a mayor brokering a similar deal between the stable owners and the developers hungrily circling their property on the West Side of Manhattan. How easy it is to imagine a new ground floor or underground stables as part of an agreement, perhaps a grazing area in a corner of Central Park, or along the nearby parks on the West Side of Manhattan.
People who actually care about the horses might argue for more grazing ground, newer and more efficient stables, safe traffic lanes to and from the park, more therapeutic and educational work for the horses in the outer boroughs and poorer neighborhoods. They might use the opportunity development provides to give everyone something of what they need – better facilities and access for the horses, new stables for the owners, preservation of a way of life and a beloved institution for the drivers and the people of the city.
It did not have to be like this, disconnected and victimized people screaming insults at the drivers and the horses, taunting their riders, threatening people who disagree with them, taking money under false pretenses from well-meaning but naive people on the Internet.
The mayor could resolve this conflict in a day, rather than prolong it and align himself with hatred and abuse. Billionaires are eager to deal for the stable land, many times more valuable than the land owned by the Brooklyn Public Library. For the horses, for the drivers, for the city, that is a tragedy all of it’s own.
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Thomas Merton wrote that happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. That was the faith of the Native-Americans in America when the horses, unable to find work among white people, were slaughtered and driven from the earth. That is what Chief Avrol sees happening again: a disintegrating world filled with violence and hatred and environmental deprivation, the horses about to be sent away once more. It took me a long time to see this, it was hard for me to understand it. I am beginning to see it, I am beginning to understand it.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have made the pilgrimage – a holy obligation for people who love animals and wish to live and work among them – to the Clinton Park stables, it is open every day to anyone who wishes to see the horses for themselves, to peel the veil of lies. If you go there, you will see what I have seen and so many others have seen, Albert Camus’s definition of happiness: “But what is happiness,” the great philosopher asked, “except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”
This is and has been the life of the carriage drivers, the simply harmony between men and women and the life they have loved, the life they lead, the life that the mayor of New York and his supporters in rage are seeking to take from them without any kind of cause or due process.