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The victory won by the New York Carriage Horses and the carriage trade today in New York goes far beyond the city and it’s beautiful park and twisted politics.

The irony of the mayor’s second drubbing at the hands of carriage drivers and horses is that with just a few simple tweaks, he could have gotten almost all of what he wanted, a deal that would remove the horses from the streets and turn the carriage trade into a small and confined tourist amusement like the carousel or hot dog vendors.

He would be their landlord,  assuming those stables were ever built, he could give them a death by a thousand cuts instead of one fatal blow.

But he is too arrogant to negotiate or even meet face-to-face with his targets. He never did visit the stables, as he said he would, he never could negotiate, listen, reason or even explain what will soon be regarded as one of the most destructive and weak-minded obsessions in big-city political history. The horses gave him a New York-sized thrashing, and it almost a certainty that this city council will not revisit the issue anytime soon, if ever.

The carriage trade is standing proud, the horses keep their safe and good jobs, the mayor has soiled himself on an issue he never seemed to grasp or know how to articulate. As for the mayor, he says he is undeterred and will press on with his war on the carriage trade. I suppose the horses may have to whup him again.

They are battle-hardened and ready.

New York is our biggest stage, and the message going out now is this: it is not cruel for domesticated animals like carriage horses to work and to live in cities, where they have dwelled for thousands of years, often in far worse and more crowded conditions than modern-day New York. They can be safe and content living among us. These are, in fact, the luckiest horses in the world.

The carriage trade has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they can live and work with these animals, treat them well, submit to exhaustive regulations and oversight, and earn a living. The horses have thrived in New York, so do the individualistic and proud people who work with them. For now at least, that tradition can live.

The animal rights movement in its current incarnation has failed in the most profound way to tell the truth, to do its homework, to listen or learn, to negotiate or compromise. But more than any other failure, they have failed to speak for the true rights of animals, or act in their best interests. The drivers have saved their jobs, but up to 200 horses have saved their lives. They are not overworked, mistreated, sick or depressed.

It was wrong and unjust to claim that they are.

These groups do not speak for the rights of animals, they have no vision for the future, they are too often abusive and hateful. They are too often acting out of their own emotional needs and animal fantasies and projections, not the best interests of animals. They have lost the right to speak for the rights of animals or to determine their fates and futures. No independent agency  or entity – medical, veterinary, political, police, health – has supported the claim that the horses are suffering in New York or are being treated cruelly and callously.

Every horse that remains among us is a triumph – for people, for the environment, for the idea that we need to keep animals among us and protect them, not drive them away and diminish them.

Increasingly, animal lovers and animals themselves are facing issues that relate much more to civil rights than animal welfare.

A law-abiding, profitable, well-regulated industry was targeted by one millionaire and several private organizations and nearly destroyed. People and their families living in fear and turmoil for years without any kind of due process. The horses were not abused, but the people in the carriage trade were. The city has not yet spoken to that issue, it is the elephant in the room. The mayor has allowed himself to become  one of the most prominent enablers of abuse and cruelty in the history of domesticated animals. And, it seems, all for money.

In the end, the horses and their humans were fighting for their civil rights against social organizations and political leaders who cared nothing for truth or compassion, and know nothing about animals.

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals from infringement by governments, social organizations and private individuals, and which ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the city, society and state without discrimination or repression.

The horses nearly paid for their lives because of the arrogance and ignorance of the mayor and the animal rights groups who insisted that work for working animals is animal abuse.

The people in the carriage trade nearly lost their freedom, way of life and property.

Their rights were infringed on by government, social organizations and several private individuals. They were denied the opportunity to participate in the civil and political life of the city, they were denied the right to be heard, to petition, to negotiate on their own behalf while others were given ample opportunity to do all of those things.

The truth was nearly trampled in this conflict, the horses kept it alive. The speak for themselves in so many ways.

In a sense, I was hopeful the new ban legislation would pass, since it would have forced the carriage trade to go to court. I don’t believe any judge would have allowed the mayor’s noxious new regulations to stand. Given the mayor’s irrational and fanatic campaign against the horses, the trade may yet get their chance.

I think the message that will go out today is that the horses can be in the city, can be safe there, are as or more important than more cars and trucks and condos, do uplift and nourish and inspire human beings, as they have for so many years.

It is sad, but the other lesson, one which is unfortunately spreading all over the country, is that in their passion and drive, many elements of the animal rights movement do not tell or respect the truth, do not know or understand animals, cannot be given the authority to speak for their rights. They have abused that trust, and our most sophisticated and knowing city has totally rejected their arguments and beliefs once again. Animals do not need the right to be driven away from people or die, they are entitled to the right to survive with us, our partners in the joys and travails of life.

There are many lessons in that. We need a new and wiser understanding of animals than this, the horses know what they are doing, they have triggered a new social awakening about the future of animals in our world..

It’s sad but not really unexpected news:  New York Mayor Bill deBlasio plans to ask the City Council to ban the Central Park Carriage Horses as early as December 8, three weeks before Christmas, according to various media reports this morning. According to several City Council members, he plans to offer the displaced carriage drivers free “green” taxi medallions – worth about $6,000 and good only for giving rides in the outer boroughs – on condition that they purchase handicapped accessible cabs.

The carriage drivers have made it clear that they do not equate working with  horse-drawn carriages in Central Park to driving cabs in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. They have said they will never accept an arrangement like that.

According to the Capital news wire, the legislation also stipulates that the stable owners cannot sell or give the horses – their private property – away to a slaughterhouse and would require documentation to ensure that does not happen.

Since more than 150,000 horses are sent to slaughter in America each year, that means the horses would have to go to private farms or to one of the many overwhelmed and struggling rescue farms in the country. The legislation will not be voted on for six months. I am no lawyer, but it is difficult for me to believe any court would support such a stipulation.

Christina Hansen, a spokeswoman for the carriage industry,  texted me this morning:. She said they knew something was coming, but were not sure what form it would take:  “We’re going to fight like Hell,” she said.

She means it, too. The carriage trade has been fighting like Hell for several years, and successfully. This has taken a brutal toll, but they are tough, battle-scarred, they know how to fight. I am sorry the mayor chose to ruin their holiday season and add to the struggle and anxiety that has marked their lives, especially since he took office in January and said banning the carriage trade was his first and most urgent priority. Could it have waited until after Christmas, I wonder? But then, the carriage trade people have been so dehumanized, there probably seems no reason to worry about their feelings or families.

In any case, the struggle is on. It is important, it will pit many animal lovers against unknowing politicians and the wealthy and increasingly strident individuals and organizations who claim to speak for the rights of animals. There is a great schism in America between urban and suburban people whose only experience of animals is having cats and dogs, and mostly rural people who live with animals and work with them. This deepening conflict has come to a head in New York City.

The mayor’s planned ban is contemptuous of democracy and the democratic process. Opposition to the ban has been overwhelming in New York, in a year he and his supporters in the animal rights movement do not appear to have convinced a single New Yorker that the horses are being mistreated, or that they are in need of rescue (which so many horses really are.) More than 66 per cent of New Yorkers told a recent poll that they oppose the ban.

There was not a single demographic – race, age, gender, borough, income – that supported banning the carriage horses. All three  city newspapers have opposed the ban, so have the Chamber of Commerce and the Teamsters Union, the Central Park Conservancy, the Working Families Party and just about every child and tourist in the world. In a sane world, that ought to be enough. But it doesn’t seem to be.

The abusive and often dishonest claims and tactics of the animal rights movement in New York in their ugly campaign against the carriage trade has awakened and aroused many horse and other animal lovers around the country, who have been flooding the mayor’s office and City Council mailboxes with petitions and pleas to leave the horses alone. This is becoming a new social movement, one that seeks to treat animals and the people who love them rationally and with dignity. Outside of the animal rights movement, it is well known that work is not abuse for working horses or other working animals, including police horses, bomb-sniffing dogs at Amtrak, border collies and search-and-rescue dogs. The mayor of New York has never owned a dog or a cat or other animal, the City Council President – she supports the ban – says she is qualified to judge the horses because she has a rescue cat.

Beyond the overwhelming public opposition to the ban, platoons of veterinarians, journalists, Native-American leaders,  behaviorists, trainers and equine rescue and advocacy groups have inspected the horses in their stables and at work and have stated they are healthy, well-cared for and safe. These horses, they remind us, are the lucky ones, they are not in need of rescue. But experts have no place in the bubble that is the animal rights movement in New York, the White Rabbit presides, the only people admitted seem to be those that know nothing about animals, and are proud of it.

The mayor’s campaign is elitist. Mayor deBlasio, who claims to be a national leader in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, refuses to visit the horse stables, meet with the owners or drivers, or negotiate the welfare or future of the horses. He describes himself as a proud member of the animal rights movement.  He seems to assume that driving a green cab (not to be confused with the yellow ones) in the outer boroughs is the same thing for the drivers as riding their horse carriages in Central Park.  When a carriage driver attended a public event with his young son and asked the mayor why he was determined to ban the horses, the mayor turned to him and said “because your work is immoral” and walked away.

Steven Nislick, the millionaire head of NY Class, the group spearheading the ban, has referred to the horse and drivers in New York as “random people,” and he was recorded telling one audience in Florida that he thought the horses would be  better off euthanized than pulling horse carriages in New York.

(Buck Brannaman, the inspiration for Robert Redford’s “The Horse Whisperer,” and the most respected horse trainer in America,  has said the horses in the most urgent need of rescue are not the carriage horses – he said their work was light and easy – but those left on farms and stables with nothing to but stand around and drop manure. Those, he said, are the ones to pity.  Horses need work, says Brannaman.)

These are not the animals in need of rescue. The horses are, by every account, healthy and well cared for. Most of them are rescue horses themselves, purchased at auction. The carriage owners and drivers have not broken any laws, violated any regulations, committed any crimes. The assault against them is the invention of a small fringe of well-funded ideologues who have simply decided to reinvent definitions of abuse and mistreatment. There is no evidence that NYClass has saved or helped the life of a single animal, they seem mostly to raise enormous amounts of money by posting manipulative photos of injured animals and donating them to favored political causes and politicians. Like the mayor of New York and members of the City Council.

We need to reclaim the notion of animal rights. In this controversy, the groups who profess to speak for the rights of animals have lost their credibility and right to speak for the future of animals. They have not told the truth about the horses and their treatment. They have been caught in lie after lie, exaggeration after exaggeration. In many cases, they have simply invented incidents and accusations that have no basis in reality or fact. They have not accounted for the millions of dollars they have taken from well-meaning people and spent, and their campaign against the people in the carriage trade has been unconscionably cruel, abusive and insensitive. They appear again and again to be utterly ignorant of the real lives of real animals, thus have forfeited the right to speak for them.

I do not know the secret strategies of the carriage trade, they haven’t told me. My guess is that they will take it one step at a time. First, fight the ban, and if it actually is passed, then fight in court. They are threatened by powerful and wealthy interests – the millionaire founder of NYClass, who has spent millions trying to drive them out of business, the mayor, the City Council President, billionaire real estate developers eager to scarf up the West Side stables where most of the horses live, increasingly strident animal rights organizations who claim to speak for the rights of animals but do not.

I would imagine real estate development in Manhattan will engulf the horses before the mayor does, but the next six months will tell. People who love animals will have their cause, and will be called upon to represent it. The questions for us are elemental: do we want animals to remain in our world? Will we sit by as one animal after another is driven from our midst, only to vanish in the holocaust wiping out so many animals in our world? Will be silent as the rights and freedom and property of fellow citizens are taken from them?

This is not a right-or-left thing, it is a right and wrong thing. There is nothing progressive or humane about taking someone’s work, way of life and property away for no reason. Government exists to protect freedom and property, not take it away without cause.

Civil and political rights, according to Wickipedia,  are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals, and which ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression.

The rights of the horses – to be safe and secure and continue their historic work with people – are threatened. The rights of the carriage horse owners and riders are being infringed upon by government in New York, and by wealthy private individuals and social organizations. They are threatened with the loss of their work, way of life, freedom and property without any kind of representation or due process or cause.

That is the very definition of a civil rights violation. If they can do it to them, they can do it to us.

The mayor, after a year of dissembling and dodging and equivocating, is finally coming out into the open, it appears, and making good on his surprising campaign promise. He was given a huge amount of money by NYClass for his mayoral campaign, many believe he really has no choice but to pursue the carriage trade ban.  I believe this ban will fail, that he will find the horses  powerful and worthy opponents. They have rallied their city and called up some powerful spirits to protect and defend them. They have called upon us to consider the way we treat one another, and the way we treat them and the earth. Animals do have a voice, and the horses are speaking loudly and eloquently.

For the sake of animals, this is a struggle that needs to happen, a debate that is overdue. Will animals survive in our disaffected world or not? Or will they be driven away, taking the wind and rain and thunder with them? Who gets to speak for the rights of animals, the people who own, love and work with them, or the people whose only vision is to take them away?  I believe they belong among us, they have as much right to be here as we do. If there are ways to make them safer and healthier, then let’s hear them and talk about them and make sure they happen. That is what animal lovers do.

We need them, and they need us. In the next six months, those of us who love animals will get to find out who we really are and what we believe in. And whether animals can remain among us, or are doomed to banishment and extinction.

Civil and political rights, according to Wickipedia,  are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals, and which ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression.

I have always thought of the plight of the New York carriage trade as being as much of a civil rights issue as one involving the rights and welfare of animals. This week Nurse Kaci Hickox believed her civil rights were violated when she was ordered confined in quarantine for 21 days even though she was not ill. She believed her rights had been infringed upon by a panicked government. She hired a civil rights attorney –  Norman Siegel, formerly of the American Civil Liberties Union, rather than a civil attorney. She seemed to intuitively understand – as the carriage trade is perhaps beginning to understand – that she was involved in a civil rights controversy, not just a health controversy. And she had the courage and the sense of entitlement to pick up her dying Iphone and call CNN from her tent.

In doing so, she made some history.

Two powerful governors retreated abruptly the next morning from their demand that she be quarantined for nearly a month, and she was immediately released. It seemed that the very appearance of Siegel, a famous attorney,  on television supporting Kaci Hickox’s claim that the government had violated her rights seemed to send the politicians scurrying for cover. Truth loves the light, and sends ignorance packing.

In the United States, the idea that government could arbitrarily and with little or no cause imprison someone in a tent without any guidelines, due process or evidence, is still a big deal, even in the midst of panic and confusion. There are two sides to every argument, including this one, but the plight of Kaci Hickox touched something deeper in our consciousness even than Ebola. And she highlighted what is so wrong and disturbing – and important – about the carriage horse controversy.

If the actions of the two governor’s was troubling and controversial, just consider the idea that the mayor of New York can take a lot of money from a wealthy private individual who has arbitrarily decided that he has the right to speak for other people’s animals and then vow to shut down a law-abiding and well regulated industry – the carriage trade – without any guidelines, due process or evidence. If he persists, the mayor of New York and his colleagues in the animal rights movement may soon learn the lesson the governor’s of New Jersey and New York just learned. Pressed to the wall, or into a tent, people will fight for their rights.

I don’t know the mayor of New York City, but I see along with everyone else that he is positioning himself as a great and progressive national leader, and I suppose we may get to see if he can turn himself into another political pretzel, all things to all people. Ruining the lives of hundreds of people without cause and sending hundreds of animals into danger in the name of animal welfare is not a progressive position in my mind. It undercuts his very identity as a political leader and a caring human being. He has no trouble calling out other politicians who abuse the rights of people, even as he becomes one of them.

New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio quickly – and ironically – took up Kaci Hickox’s cause, saying government had, in fact, overreached, and that her treatment was “shameful.” I wondered, watching this drama unfold, if the mayor had any grasp at all of the giant hole he and his supporters in the animal rights movement were digging for themselves as they continue to promise that the people in the carriage trade will be out of work, their property seized, their 150-year-old industry banished. Does he have a clue, I wondered, that the carriage drivers have the same case as Kaci Hickox, perhaps much bigger and better?

Hickox at least had a brief bout of fever when she arrived in the United States in a midst of a worsening global epidemic, none of the five agencies that regulate the carriage trade have lodged any complaints against them at all. No human being in New York City has ever been killed by a carriage horse, even as many thousands a year are killed, maimed or injured in motor vehicle accidents (many more people – about 7,000 more,  are hurt each year than have yet died of Ebola in all of Africa). In the past year, more than 5,000 cases of alleged animal abuse were reported to authorities in New York City, not a single one was filed against a carriage horse.

The issue of civil rights generally comes up in America when the public is panicked, when mobs form, when government leaders pander or hide, and the rights of people are in danger and need to be protected. I am not an attorney, but if you consider the civil rights issues involved in the carriage horse controversy, the Kaci Hickox case seems almost minor. Nobody is claiming she is greedy, cruel, dishonest,  less than human or trying to take her work and way of life from her.

If not a panic, the notion that the horses are being mistreated and abused by their very existence working in the city is a hysteria, unsupported by any authority, expertise or law. It is the belief of a tiny minority of citizens, supported by an angry and obsessive millionaire who has joined up with a powerful politician to infringe on the rights of law-abiding private individuals – the carriage horse owners and drivers.

It is very difficult for me to imagine the mayor or the animal rights groups being foolish enough to let their outrageous and unwarranted assault on the carriage trade to go to trial or get near a judge – the carriage trade should only be so lucky – but I can only imagine the feast a lawyer like Norman Siegel might have getting deBlasio and the architects of the anti-carriage trade ban on a witness stand under oath, and asking them to talk about money and evidence and their understanding of horses.

You could fill a theater with the equine and rescue and veterinary experts, writers, neighbors and animal lovers who have flocked to New York City all year and who have – to a one – pronounced the carriage horses content, happy and healthy. In the animal world, the mayor and his ban are considered so irrational and unknowing as to nearly be insane. There is, in fact, no reputable behaviorist, horse trainer or animal expert who believes it is cruel for a work horse to pull a light carriage in Central Park. These are the safest horses on the earth, the ones least in need of rescue. The only evidence that exists for this claim are the emotionalized fantasies of people – far outside of the world of people who actually know about animals – who have come to believe there are no real differences between horses and human children.

– First, there is the issue of infringement by government. The people in the carriage trade have scrupulously and almost without exception followed the many hundreds of regulations imposed upon them to protect the carriage horses. No one in the carriage trade is currently even accused of breaking any laws, violating any regulations, committing any crimes. It is difficult to imagine that in the era of the  deBlasio administration,  violators and abusers would not be eagerly brought to justice.

The assault against them is the very definition of arbitrary and unwarranted intrusion by government. Government, according to John Locke and Thomas Jefferson (they invented the idea of democratic government) exists first and foremost to protect freedom and property, not to take it away because a politician is close friends with an animal rights ideologue and took a lot of money from him in his election campaign. The mayor is right when he claims the quarantine of Kaci Hickox was an abuse of governmental authority. He might try listening to himself.

One of the foundations of our legal system is equal justice under the law. It is not always attainable, but there is no question it is the goal and ideal. How can the government actions against Kaci Hickox be an intrusive overreach, but the utterly baseless assault on the carriage trade a moral step to defend the rights of animals?

–  Fairness and justice. In court, an enterprising lawyer might also pursue the mysterious and still secret influence of money on the effort to shut down the carriage trade. Animals lovers all over the country have given millions of dollars to animal rights organizations in New York in the belief – thoroughly debunked this year – that the carriage horses were being abused. The money did not go to help horses or animal in need, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been funneled to politicians, including enormous amounts of money that went to the campaign of Mayor deBlasio.

I have been researching this story for nearly a year, and I cannot find any evidence that NYClass, the animal rights group spearheading the campaign against the horses, has ever directly assisted a single animal or it’s owner, yet the group appears to have spent millions of dollars in donated money – a conservative estimate – to elect Mayor deBlasio and other politicians and ban the carriage horses. Perhaps under oath, the people in this organization could explain what their true agenda is? They refuse to tell reporters.

– People and property. A central element of the move to ban the horses is the promise – by the mayor, the City Council President and the animal rights groups involved – that every single horse will be sent to a horse rescue facility and live out their lives in comfort and safety. Aside from the fact that the groups will not name these farms, and from the reality and tragedy of equine life today – more than 155,000 horses are sent to slaughter each year in America, and equine rescue farms are desperately overcrowded and underfunded  – I wonder how the mayor and his supporters can justify their assumption that they can seize the horses from their owners and decide where they ought to go?

The horses are private property, an important asset in the lives of the middle-class working families who own and work with them. Does the mayor really think he can seize horses that are not, by any rational standard, in need of rescue, and send them to rescue farms that may or may not exist? Can the mayor seize the material property of any business he and his friends don’t like and banish them from the city without cause?

The Ebola crises and it’s connection this week to New York City brought into focus the importance of civil rights in our lives, and the urgent need of relief for the people in the carriage trade, who are not only conducting their business in a humane and legal way, but have suffered cruel and relentless  harassment for years, accused of foul crimes, dehumanized and slandered. That is, in itself, a violation of civil rights, and it is a disgrace that the media and political community have permitted it and condoned it – even enabled it – for so long. There is a mountain of evidence that can prove well beyond any reasonable doubt that these people are innocent of the crimes they have been accused of committing. And make no mistake about it, abuse is not an argument or opinion, it is a crime.

The civil rights of the people in the carriage trade have been trampled in a more menacing way than Kaci Hickox’s have.

They have lost their  their right to participate in the political and civic life of the city, the right of every citizen. The animal rights groups will not speak to the carriage trade or visit their stables. The mayor has refused to speak with them, visit their stables, or meet with or negotiate with or listen to a single one of their representatives (he regularly has tea and pate and goes to dinner parties with the head of PETA in New York, a close ally and a friend, and the leaders of NYClass.). The people in the carriage trade have not been shown a single piece of evidence to justify their banning and persecution,  or given the chance to respond to the many accusations made against them, nor have they been permitted to participate in discussions about their horses, their future or their welfare.

It seems it costs a lot of money to get to talk directly to the mayor about carriage horses. A carriage driver and animal spiritualist – he often and at his own expense brings his horse to the seriously ill – approached the mayor at a civic event with his young son by his side, and asked him why he was persecuting the carriage trade. “Because,” said the mayor, “your work is immoral.” The mayor then turned his back and walked away.

It is difficult for me to imagine a more disturbing civil rights issue than the specter of a secretive millionaire teaming up with a powerful politician to take away the way of life, freedom, dignity and peace of mind of innocent and law-abiding people.

In the past year, many people in and outside of New York have a awakened to the civil rights implications of a carriage horse ban. The Ebola epidemic have brought it into even greater focus. Thomas Jefferson wrote that governments will always bear watching, their natural tendency is to overreach. George Washington write that government is not reason, it is force, a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Ronald Reagan said the first duty of government was to protect the people, not run their lives.

I was touched by Kaci Hickox’s willingness – right or wrong –  to stand up against the most powerful people in government and assert her rights as a citizen.  I have seen the evolution this year of many of the people in the carriage trade. In January, they were discouraged, confused and uncertain. Like Kaci Hickox, they have come to understand that a great wrong has been done to them, and that they have the right to speak out against it.

The carriage horse have called upon them to speak for their own rights, and the true rights of animals.  They are rising to the call, the mayor has made the wrong choice, he has chosen to stumble and fall.

Hattie McCarren, an African-American single mother in New Orleans who cares for four children and six grandchildren – she is 63 now – did not intend to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached. When the hurricane bore down on the city and officials belatedly realized how severe the storm would be, they issued a mandatory evacuation order and Hattie hurriedly piled her extended family into a battered old mini-van and left her dog Gus, a Lab/Shepherd mix behind. She expected to return in a day or so, she left food for him and water on the second floor.

Dogs were not allowed in the evacuation shelters.

It was almost a month before Hattie returned, and there was no sign of Gus. Many pet owners left their animals, fully intending to return. People without resources – people like Hattie – were forced onto buses or the trucks of volunteers and barred from bringing any animals. Tens of thousands of domesticated pets were abandoned in New Orleans. In the weeks following Katrina, hundreds of rescue and animal rights volunteers poured into the city, searching for these animals, feeding and rescuing them and ultimately, putting many thousands up for adoption.

It took Hattie two years to find her much loved dog Gus and two more to get him back. The same people who rushed to save her dog refused to return him to her. She not only lost her home, she was plunged into the angry and arrogant world of animal rights

I talked to Hattie this weekend, I found her story and that of so many others online, and through the powerful NPR documentary MINE, which documents the story of thousands of people who experienced the same nightmare. These were mostly poor New Orleans residents who were victimized first by Katrina, and then again by people claiming to be acting in the interests of the rights of animals. The shocked producers of the documentary said it often seemed that some elements of the rescue movement did not care much about people, just animals. That is a familiar observation to anyone who follows the New York carriage horses and their story.

“I didn’t have much money,” Hattie told me, “but I never stopped looking for Gus, we spent hundreds of dollars looking for him, people in the neighborhood got together, we hired this young lawyer to help us out, lot of us were looking for our dogs and cats, hoping and praying they was alive.” She found him through an animal registry set up by the Red Cross, he had his name and rabies ID when found.

Then she said, to her shock, she learned she had to go to court to get Gus back. She had been tagged as an animal abuser.

Hattie is deeply religious, she has had a dog all of her life. “I gave thanks to the Lord when we found Gus,” she said, “it was a miracle, it was such a happy day for all of us. I was ready to cook grits, Gus loved his grits in the morning, and some fresh chicken liver too. But it was too soon for me to be happy, the fight was just starting.”

Hattie’s story, and many hundreds like it draw attention to the new reality of animal rights:  in a growing number of cases, the carriage horses prominent among them, the animal rights and rescue cultures have evolved into a government-tolerated kind of cultural militia answerable only to themselves, and with a self-appointed police, judge and jury ethos that has gone gone out of control. It functions beyond law, reason or humanity. It is, in a growing number of cases, a rogue culture, not a benign force for helping animals.

I talked to Hattie’s lawyer in New Orleans. “It was surreal,” he said,”these people had no right to seize someone else’s property, turn it over to someone else, and refused to return it. That is just not the law anywhere in America.” This is a lesson the mayor of New York might soon be learning for himself.

In Hattie’s case and many others that are being documented, animal rights organizations,  with the help of naive and money-hungry politicians are trampling on the human and civil rights of animal owners and lovers and with people who earn their living working with animals or farming with them. I am encountering and receiving stories like Hattie’s every single day from all over the country, I can barely process them.

When Hattie finally located Gus, he was living in a home outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the rescue volunteers who had found him wandering the streets of New Orleans took him and put him up for adoption. When Gus was taken to a vet, it was discovered that he had heart worm, not uncommon in the South. The rescue group told Hattie that because Gus had heart worm, he had clearly been abused, she was guilty of neglect. They refused to return him to her, they said she was not fit to own a dog.
They said if she applied for another dog, they would refuse to give her one.

It took Hattie and her lawyer – and more contributions from family and friends –  nearly another two years to get Gus back. Many others were not so lucky. “People around the country opened their homes to Katrina dogs and cats, giving them loving homes and bonding with them,” reported the documentary. “It was convenient for adoptive families to imagine that the animals had been abandoned by their owners, or that their owners had been neglectful.” Some people interviewed even went to far as to say Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to these dogs and cats. This is also familiar language to the New York carriage horse drivers, several animal rights officials have been quoted as saying that the horses would be better off dead than pulling carriages in New York.

As many people are coming to see and know, there is an elitist, sometimes even racist, strain in the attitudes and decisions of some animal rescuers and animal rights workers – they consider themselves to be progressive.  Increasingly, they are establishing criteria for owning and keeping animals – dogs, cats, horses, chickens and sheep – that favor the wealthy and penalize working class people. They are establishing new and unexamined criteria for  abuse, adoption and cruelty without any process of law or any kind of negotiation or dialogue with animal owners and lovers.

I have received scores of messages from people refused adoptions –  even of older dogs who have languished in shelters for months and years – because their property is not large enough, far enough from traffic, equipped with big fences, or they can’t commit to expensive medical practices and procedures. In some cases, the elderly are refused adoptions because it isn’t clear how long they might live or how far they can walk each day.

Do people like Hattie have the right to adopt and live with dogs if they are held responsible for their care and welfare?

These increasingly Draconian decisions – Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) has passed legislation forbidden people from buying dogs from breeders –  splits animal ownership and access along class and economic lines. It doesn’t help the millions of dogs languishing in “no-kill” shelters for years sometimes, either. Shelter dogs are the only way many people can have animals in their lives, and the only way many dogs can find homes when wealthy people don’t adopt them.

People are often told they can’t adopt one of the millions of needy animals in shelters because they work (James Epstein, a publishing assistant, in Boston was denied a dog because he works and lives alone. He should have lied, he said.) Preemptive and expensive medicines that were once considered optional choices and are now mandatory, no longer choices but indicators of cruelty and abuse. The people most affected are people without access to politicians, expensive websites and fund-raising campaigns and who have a difficult time standing up to the well-organized, lavishly funded coalition of organizations who make all kinds of decisions without any kind of accountability.

“I could not understand how these people in Michigan could try and take Gus away from me” said Hattie, happy to have Gus finally back in her life, thanks to a judge. She was afraid to send me a photograph of Gus, she said, because she thought the animal rights people would come and take him away again. Hattie reminds me that need a movement for animals that people support, not fear. And that helps people, not persecutes them.

“They told me they worked for animal rights – how could they tell me that I was not fit to raise my dog? They made me feel so bad. And then, to not get him back because he had the heart worm. I don’t have no hundreds of dollars for heart worm pills, but if I’d know he had it I would have raised the money somehow. I did when he came back. He is my dog, nobody had the right to take my home and my dog from me. I won’t lie down for that.”

The rescue and animal rights movements are both grounded in good intentions and great need. They have moved far away from their original mandates and good intentions, they have become something no one imagined and few people quite grasp. They break into farms and research facilities, intimidate and threaten students who study poultry farming, attack  people who disagree with them, harass them online,   pressure movie producers into killing animals rather than subjecting their companies to relentless attacks, they hound circuses and county fairs, people whose ponies ride kids around farmer’s markets. They seek everywhere to banish animals who work and deprive their owners of subsistence, it seems increasingly clear that they are killing many more animals than they are helping.

When the public is consulted, it seems they have a radically different agenda than the animal rights groups. More than 62 per cent of New York City residents want the horses to stay in New York.

The mystical carriage horses have awakened a new kind of social movement. They are awakening people to the need to reclaim the idea of animal rights and offer animals  greater roles in the world than living on rescue preserves, where they will eat hay and drop manure for the rest of their lives. Or simply vanish from the world.

More and more animals like  horses are being abandoned,  sent to slaughter or simply not acquired in America because there are not enough rescue facilities on the earth for all the animals who will need them if they have no connection with people, no work to do, and the regulations and restrictions for keep them make it unsustainable for many people, especially the middle-class and the poor.

Money, as always, has become a significant factor in the care and future of animals. Groups like PETA, the A.S.P.C.A. and the H.S.U.S. are coming increasingly under fire for the enormous salaries of their executives, the money they are pouring into political coffers, their manipulation of images and emotions to collect donations.

Animal rights have become one of the most effective money-laundering operations in American life, the money often thrown away to campaign against elephants in circuses, or develop things like those ridiculous electric vintage cars for Central Park that would have easily paid to save a thousand horses from slaughter or for a great outdoor space or grazing area for the carriage horses in New York City.

Who, after all, is against rescuing animals? Or opposed to the rights of animals? How many animal lovers are able or willing to resist the hundreds of thousands of money-making images of abused, starving, suffering dogs, cats and carriage horses that flood social media every day and raise enormous amounts of money to pay for rescue and animal rights executive salaries, high-tech websites and blogs, and to donate to lawmakers happy to ban breeders, horses, circus animals, farm animals, pets, pony rides and other work and interaction that actually keeps animals alive and in our world.

Stories like Hattie’s remind us that the real rights of animals are deeply entwined with the real rights of human beings. One cannot exist without the other. Animals can only survive and prosper when they are connected to human beings who understand them and their lives. Animals will never have rights if the rights of the people who own them are not protected as well. There is no right for animals greater than the most basic:  to exist alongside of us, to share the joys and travails of the world.

No secret and privately-funded organization ought to get to unilaterally decide who gets to have an animal and who doesn’t, or to exclude loving and worthy people because they don’t have lots of money. They do not get to arbitrarily and outside of the law decide – in collusion with mayors and millionaires –  that they will redefine abuse to fit the impulse of the movement, or the whims of celebrities and wealthy people looking for causes.

For me, Hattie is a worthy symbol of this  extra-legal social movement in the same way Rosa Parks became a powerful symbol of the civil rights movement. Make no mistake about it, civil rights are as much an issue with animals as they were and are with people. The civil rights of the New York Carriage Horse drivers and owners are being violated almost every day of their lives, in many different ways.

Hattie’s rights were also trampled upon, and she had the courage and the will to stand up and say just what the carriage horse drivers are saying, and in the very same words: enough, you can’t take my animal away from me without cause, you cannot tell me how to live.