It is unusual to come across beautiful animals and know that something awful is almost certain to be about to happen to them, I think that is perhaps what drives me the most, God spare the animals of the world from the well-meaning intrusions of human beings, there is nothing in all of history more dangerous to them.

A good and sincere person e-mailed me this morning to protest about my writing on behalf of the carriage horses, “I hate to see any animal cooped up in a city stall,” she said, anguished, “they ought to be grazing in the wild.” A few generations ago, many Americans lived on farms or grew up on them, but the family farms are perishing, the big corporate farms replacing them, the cows of the future will never set food outside of their concrete moorings.

I wanted to take this good woman by the hand and bring her out here to upstate New York to the wild, to see the carcasses of the deer and coyotes and racoons and moles, dead of starvation, eaten by predators, struggling to live through this awful and bitter winter. Animals come from the real world, we cannot protect them from the ravages of life any more than we can insulate ourselves and our families. Some will get sore feet, die of strokes and  heart attacks, eat some poisonous thing, get some untreatable affection. There is a difference between life and abuse, reality and cruelty, anyone who lives on a farm, or with animals knows it, understands it.

As we romanticize about the lives of animals, we lose touch with the truth of them, we patronize them and lose respect for them and their adaptability, we need more and more to see them as piteous and helpless because that is how we feel about ourselves and our own lives. We need to save them from us and our good intentions, these intentions are driving animals out of our midst, we need to know them, we need a wiser and more knowing understanding of them.