The New York Carriage Horses represent best the best opportunity in modern times to try to talk about what animals are for in our lives. One of the world’s greatest cities is deciding whether animals like draft horses can remain in urban environments. I’m sorry to see no one in the city – except perhaps the carriage horses owners themselves – seems to care to have that conversation. The mayor has decided that putting the horses to work is tantamount to torturing them – the mayor unaccountably compared their treatment to “waterboarding” on television the other night. He refuses to meet with the horse owners and riders or even go see their stables. He says banning the horses from the city is one of his major priorities.

The carriage industry is not media savvy, they seem somewhat overwhelmed, they are struggling to contend with the formidable array of politicians, groups that call themselves animal rights organizations, real estate developers and manipulable journalists shaping the future of the horses. The campaign to get rid of the horses has been going on a long time, it is loud, well-funded and well-connected, it got a huge boost in the city’s recent mayoral election. The new mayor meets with these groups frequently and regularly attends their fund-raising dinners. Some of them were among his largest campaign contributors.

It is become apparent that the purpose of this coalition is not to improve the lives of the horses or make them safer but to ban them from New York, where they will most likely face death or confinement in the largely mythical “rescue” farms believed to be somewhere out there. When I was a political reporter, I often heard the phrase “the fix is in” used by politicians, it means sometimes there is only the appearance of making a decision, the decision has already been made. In New York City, there is not even the appearance of making a decision about the horses. “It’s over,” the mayor said in his inaugural speech. The best hope of the carriage horse industry – and the horses –  may now be a good lawyer.

For me, the drama of the horses is the natural evolution of the way we have come to see animals. For most of human history, animals have worked side by side with humans, there was concern for animal welfare, but the fact that animals had worked and lived alongside of human beings in confined spaces in urban areas was never considered controversial. The carriage horses ancestors would have been content to live in their stables and under the conditions in which they live.

It was clear what animals were for. In recent years, that prism has changed. As Americans have become isolated from one another, disconnected from family and religious institutions, as they have become more mobile, gotten divorced more frequently, become disappointed in politics and pressured by economics and technology, spent more and more hours alone in front of screens, they have turned to animals for emotional support and connection and unconditional love.

This is good for people, but has greatly narrowed our view of animals, the way we see them, the roles they might have in our lives today.

If horses could bat their eyes at humans, offer them the appearance of unconditional love, and figure out how to crawl onto the couch, there would be no talk of banning them, there would be new laws making apartment couches bigger and banning trucks from residential streets. The mayor would be among the first rushing to pass the new legislation.

Thus the issue of the horses is historic, a template possibly for the future. If this is New York City’s solution, what is Cleveland and Phoenix or Miami likely to do? Our view of animals has changed radically, we have shed history and, since so few people making these decisions live with or near real animals living real lives, the discussion has been co-opted by it’s most extreme and least knowledgeable elements.

For many isolated and fragmented Americans, the purpose of animals has become their rescue. There are few organizations devoted to keeping animals in our lives, and they have very little money,  there are thousands devoted to rescuing them. The animal rescue movement, almost non-existent a generation ago, has become one of the largest, most dedicated, active and communicative (the Internet is the mother of this movement) sub-cultures in American life. Many Americans now see animals – dogs, cats, horses – almost entirely through the prism of rescue. It is increasingly common for people to see their dogs – to need to see their pets –  as “abused” and to attribute all kinds of behaviors and training issues to mistreatment, even thought researchers have said abuse in America has been greatly exaggerated. In addition, some of the ideologists of this movement see work by animals for humans as abuse, an idea that would have stunned human beings throughout their history on the earth.

Animal rescue is a worthy cause, I have rescue donkeys, sheep, dogs, chickens and cats. It is also a way for people to feel good about themselves, and to justify cruelty and abuse towards humans. It is society where we often feel helpless and powerless, the rescue of animals is a way to feel virtuous and superior to other people. This idea has become so pervasive it even unites the “left” and the “right,” who seem to agree on nothing other than a love of dogs and cats and often, a desire to rescue them.

Instead of talking about how to find ways to keep animals in our lives, to find roles and space for them, we are arguing about who is abusing them the most, about how to rescue them from human beings. That is the tragedy of the carriage horses, because the human beings willing to own and care for them and ride them are their only real salvation. The true animal rescuer sees that the horses do not need to be saved from their riders and owners, but from their rescuers. That is the true meaning of animal rescue, of animal rights.

Contrary to many accusations and reports and stories, there is simply no real evidence that the carriage horses  are being chronically abused and mistreated, legally or literally. The travails of life – accidents, illness, old age – are not measures of abuse, but life itself. The dogs of New York suffers mistreatment much more than the horses, no one is moving to exile them. An old tradition, a way of life, a meaningful role for beautiful horses is about to be destroyed, it is unlikely that the circling real estate developers will want to build spacious areas for animals to live in New York in the wake of the horses departure.

This morning, I put a photo of my border collie Red, covered in snow, up on my blog. Scores of people thanked me for it, wrote admiring messages about Red, were once more touched by the focus and fidelity of this remarkable animal. Once more, I thought of the horses, if a photo like that of the horses working in a storm appeared, there would be an uproar, it would be considered cruel. The carriage horses are not allowed to work in cold or heat, that is considered abusive, one of the reasons they need to be rescued from the allegedly cruel and evil carriage riders and owners. Does this really make sense to anyone who thinks about it?

It is, of course, the horses and other animals who will pay for this diminished, patronizing new view of animals. We cannot just see them as piteous, abused and dependent creatures, they are our partners on the earth, fellow prisoners in life itself. We cannot exile ourselves from one another, it is a death sentence for animals in the modern world. Dogs in New York City have made this transition, so can these horses, who have worked and lived in New York for hundreds of years. We have no right to discard them like more debris from the developer’s wrecking balls. If animals are only for rescue, but not for working with humans and living among them any longer, then we have failed in our sacred obligation to find a wiser, truly humane and lasting understanding of them and their roles in the modern world.