Here is a startling truth about the New York Carriage Horses, something almost every horse owner in the world knows but the mayor of New York City and his colleagues in the animal rights movement do not yet know: cities are not an alien and dangerous environment for draft horses, cities are their natural habitat, their ancient home and purpose. Living and working in cities is precisely what they are bred to do and meant to do. It is their safest place.
Large draft horses have never lived in the wild, never roamed freely. They are too large, too slow and too passive.
Draft horses eat a staggering amount of food each day, they would have to forage constantly outdoors, and there are very few pastures that offer them enough food for them to survive. They would starve to death in harsh weather – cold or snow. They cannot move quickly enough to outrun predators, and they are not naturally aggressive, they do not really know how to fight. There are no vets in the wild, if they get a hoof infection or viral illness, they will die, and painfully.
And then, there is this. There is really no wild left in America.
Their large frames and breeding require movement and work, and they are drawn genetically to human connection and need of it. These horses were carefully bred and worked by humans to be vital tools in the growth of our civilization.
Orthopedic veterinarians testify that the bone and body structures of these huge animals requires regular exercise and work, standing idly in pastures weakens their muscles and bones, collapses and corrodes the bone and muscle support structure that keeps them strong and healthy. Much is made of the five weeks of vacation the horses get, but that is mostly to appease human concerns, five weeks of idleness is not any better for a draft horse than it would be for a border collie.
There is perhaps nothing worse or more unhealthy for a large draft horse than to be sent to a farm for the rest of his or her life, with little opportunity for exercise, and no stimulation or human connection. These animals are not the ponies and wild horses of the fabled American Plains, of Native-Americans, cowboys and cavalries. The draft horses have never lived like that, and could not survive in that kind of environment. Humans had no work or purpose for the wild horses, and they perished or were exterminated.
There is this idea, prevalent among the people seeking to remove the horses from New York, that the horses were somehow snatched from their idyllic and pastoral lives in the mythical wild and brutally forced into hard and cruel labor. It makes people feel good to think of returning them to this fantasy existence. But it would not make the horses feel good. This life, working with people in crowded human environments, was always their work, it was what they were created to do, what they evolved into doing. It was their salvation.
The ironic truth about these horses is that the “freedom” the animal rights movement is demanding for them would be their cruelest possible fate, second only to the slaughterhouses of Canada and Mexico. How is it that these groups, and the mayor, and so many people who say they love animals don’t know this, while so many people – behaviorists, vets, trainers, writers, horse lovers – do? That is the true story, plight of animals in our world, the people who know nothing about them have somehow claimed the mandate to determine their fate, while the people who know everything about them have been marginalized, ignored and pushed out of the conversation.
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For some years, the argument for banning the New York Carriage Horses from New York centered on the idea that work was abuse for them. On the website of NYClass, the primary group funding the drive to ban the horses, that remains the message, which reads “Stop Horse Abuse,” along with a controversial and disputed photo of a seemingly injured carriage horse.
That allegation – that the horses are being abused – has been challenged by equine advocacy groups, police and health inspectors and many respected equine veterinarians and veterinary associations. It has simply collapsed. The city’s mayor, who said frequently during his campaign that the horses were being abused, has changed course. Just before Christmas, he introduced legislation into the City Council to ban the carriage trade. He now says he knows the horses are well-cared for, but that it is immoral and inhumane for the horses to be working in or near congested city streets.
The question is the most interesting and certainly the most valid of the many accusations leveled at the carriage trade in recent years. Where do horses belong? Is it really cruel and alien for the horses to work in congested cities? The reality of the big horses is quite different from this idea that they wish for a different life, that they are depressed and oppressed by their work. As Americans have left rural areas for cities and suburbs, they have lost touch with the animal world, with the real lives of real animals.
In recent years in America, animals have become emotionalized, exploited for our own psychological well-being. We have less and less real work for them to do, so their new work is making us feel loved and connected. This is especially true of pets like dogs and cats, it is the new rationale for their existence. But it is not true of the big horses. In our time, more and more people see all animals as child-like appendages to the family, or piteous creatures in need of our rescue. Many see all animals as pets. Many urban people no longer understand the difference between a poodle on a leash and a 2,000 pound carriage horse.
To many people, writes Anne Norton Greene in Horses At Work – Native-Americans, horse lovers, animal lovers with a spiritual bent – horses are symbols of nature and of the ancient connection between animals and humans. They represent something that is timeless and essential, they are the world of original things.
Greene points out that as much we like to think of horses as symbols of nature, they actually represent one of the very oldest kinds of technology. “More precisely,” she writes, “horses are biotechnology, or organisms altered for human use.” Horses became living machines centuries ago, modified by breeding for size, strength, speed, temperament and appearance.
Horses are one of only fourteen large domesticated animals in the world, the others being camels, llamas, reindeer, yak, asses (donkeys), pigs, sheep, goats, and several different kinds of cattle. While these animals are different in many ways, all of them share some traits and characteristics. Together, these traits are what domestication means.
These animals are all large enough to be useful for work or food, but not too large to control or be trained. None are carnivores who would see humans as food or prey. All are herd animals, which means they are unusually stable for the animal world, they have good temperaments and stable dispositions, they are accustomed to living in hierarchical social groups and fit comfortably and naturally into human society, something the vast majority of animal species cannot do.
They also, say veterinarians and behaviorists, have finely-balanced fight-flight instincts and are neither aggressive or confrontational. They are tolerant of other species – like the dogs and cats and mice and rats who live in cities – and are not inclined to panic or stampede, say behaviorists. Beyond that, they are not territorial, they do not engage in violent or elaborate mating rituals, they do not required lots of space or specific places, they do not have diets that are dependent on particular places or plants or habitats. Horses have manageable sizes.
These domestication traits and requirements eliminate almost all of the large animals of the world. This is why famed biologist Jared Diamond – you will never see him quoted in the media or on the websites of animal rights groups, yet he knows as much about animals as anyone on the earth – says that draft horses are the most “domesticable,” that is well-suited animals in the world to be in cities, much more suited to urban environments than dogs or raccoons, cars, busses, trucks and pedicabs.
Says Ann Norton Greene: “Though horses do not have the greatest strength, speed, size or stamina available in the animal world, they do possess all the characterizations necessary for domestication: non-territorial herd animals, easy reproduction, sociable disposition, and manageable size. Horses, say equine and animal historians, were integral components of the industrializing of urban America.
How can it be that in contemporary New York – where horses are so much safer, regulated and protected than at any time in the city’s history, horses are suddenly unsuitable for the very environment they were created and bred to live and work in? Good people can disagree on anything, and it is certainly valid to question whether horses can be safe and healthy in a crowded and frenetic city.
But that question is best answered by facts and truth, not demagoguery and hysteria. Ignorance does not serve the interests or rights of animals, that is dangerous for them. They deserve to have their fate decided by the many people who understand the reality of their lives and care about them.
The carriage horses are right where they belong, where they were bred to be, meant to be. There is no safer or better or more appropriate place for them here in the city, in Central Park, the place of original beings.