I’ve been struggling for some weeks now to make sense of the powerful, well-organized  and surprisingly successful movement to ban the carriage horses from New York. I’ve worked hard at it, going to the city, poring through documents and websites, talking to some city officials on the phone. It is so difficult to sort through the emotion, rhetoric, arguments and distortions. This is about much more than horses, it is  a complex story about politics, the future of animals in urban life and in our modern world. It is, in many ways, a template and harbinger for the ways in which animals are seen through so many different prisms in America.  Whatever we think about the horses, they remind us of the seminal place animals have in our lives, of our great need to consider them.

Unfortunately, the carriage horse story is not just about issues, it is also a story of falsehoods, misrepresentations, the manipulation of images and emotions and statistics. I keep getting the feeling of a new kind of enraged, mostly digital media mob not much restrained by truth, which now influences civic policy and public opinion. To be sure, the city and it’s famously quarrelsome and combative media do not seem to care much about what happens to the carriage horses in New York –  ironically, horse and animal lovers outside the city seem to care much more. It is not a simple issue. The SPCA, the Humane Society, the mayor and most of the City Council of New York all believe it’s time for the carriage horses to leave New York City.

Almost every one of the horse and animal lovers I know and respect believe otherwise. So do I. It’s an odd position to be in, I am not usually on the same side of issues as the New York Post.

Yesterday I was finally able to gather some statistics that have begun to put this story in perspective for me, and I need to be honest, they were so shockingly at odds with what I was led to believe – and what so many people in New York believe  – that I was reluctant to accept them myself, until they were verified in several different ways.  Truth is important to me, it is hard to find it in a world so divided and politicized. When truth is pushed to the side, that is to me an injustice, no matter how valid the issues raised.

Here is what I have found: In the past 20 years, only one horse – Spotty, photo above – was killed as the result of a traffic accident in New York City. No human being has ever been killed in a carriage/traffic accident in the known history of the carriage horses. The only known fatality relating to carriage horses, according to the carriage horse industry and the New York City Transportation and Police Departments, occurred in the 1950’s when a drunk automobile driver plowed into some people standing by the carriage horses outside of the Plaza Hotel. When considering this statistic, it is important to remember that one of the main reasons for banning the carriage horses is the claim – believed by many in the city –  that it is no longer safe for them to be in New York City, given the traffic problems there.

Five or six horses have been injured in run-away incidents, or collisions involving taxis or cars. A couple have collapsed of heart and other illnesses.  Given the number of horses and rides and the time over which those accidents occurred, it would seem the horses of New York are safer than at any time in their  history in the city, when they were treated much more brutally, and died with much greater frequency. How strange they face urgent banishment when they have never been safer or treated better.

And here is the other side of this surprising statistic, one that surprised me even more:

According to Streetsblog and the New York Police Department, 15,465 pedestrians and cyclists were injured in the City Of New York in 2012, 155 people were killed in traffic accidents and that’s in one year, not twenty. It would be conservative to estimate that more than several thousand New Yorkers have been killed in traffic accidents during the 20-year period that one horse died from a collision with a motor vehicle.

If you think this staggering human toll – it just dwarfs anything happening to the horses, one way or another – might be a major story in New York, an urgent focus of it’s politicians, then this is why the issue of the carriage horses may be so difficult for many of us to get a handle on.

It is, in fact, difficult to grasp why the new mayor of New York has made removing the carriage horses a top priority in his new administration, promising in his inaugural address to move quickly to ban the horse carriage trade, “just watch us do it,” he vowed. He did not once mention the many thousands of New Yorkers injured in accidents in that speech, the scores killed, nor did he suggest that it was no longer safe for many people walking on the streets to live in New York City.  Statistically, the horses are about one thousand times safer than people. Why are the horses such an urgent matter when the lives of so many people are not?

One answer may be that there is no ideologically drive people rights movement in America, few, if any websites devoted to presenting images of suffering humans and the night to correct the causes of their suffering. We seem to accept that in our world, accidents sometimes occur, they are not always a sign of cruelty and abuse, sometimes, they are simply manifestations of life itself, for people, for animals. None of us live in a “no-kill” world, surely not the animals in the “wild” the mayor wants to send the horses too, out there they die often, brutally and young.  Within reason, we accept this idea of risk and circumstance for people, but not, it seems, for animals.

Spotty’s awful and continuing legacy is partly due to the fact that we don’t see photos of children and their families mangled and killed in automobile accidents, spread all over the Internet for months and years as examples of brutality and cruelty. When a horse is injured – (is there any kind of life for animals where they face no risks?) – their images will live on forever.  If we did see photos of children killed in traffic accidents the mayor would be giving very different speeches. I could find no websites devoted to saving New York’s citizens from the dangers of traffic in New York, no wrenching photos of the dead. An advocate for the ban of the horses e-mailed me last week, she said “just wait until the next accident, that’s all we need to get the horses out of New York for good!” I hope she does not get what she wishes for.

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Let’s pause to honor Spotty and his place in history. He launched a movement and may have doomed his fellow carriage horses to exile. Spotty was a five year-old carriage horse, he died on January 2, 2006 when he spooked and bolted on the way from Central Park to his stables, after crashing into a station wagon, he suffered severe injuries and was euthanized. If you explore the issue of the Central Park Carriage Horses, Google will quickly bring you to Spotty, he is the poster child for the animal rights movement,  a fixture on several of the websites created to advance the notion that the carriage horses are frequent victims of cruelty, abuse and the traffic and other congestion of modern New York. You can upload scores of images of his pain and agony on many sites for free as well as those of other sick and injured horses. As famous and popular an image as Spotty is on various animal rights websites, Spotty is the only carriage horse to die in a New York City traffic accident in the past 20 years, before that Chester in 1985 and Tony in 1990. That figure was confirmed by the New York City Traffic Department. I also studied the list of animal injuries offered by the Coalition To Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages, it goes back nearly 50 years and you can study it for yourself, it is confusing and quite misleading, it is not possible to confirm the accuracy of the list, the site’s advisers and staffers are kept anonymous for undisclosed “security” reasons .

When I began writing about this story, I was under the impression many horses were routinely injured and killed in New York City, I saw so many photographs of stricken, injured and dying horses – tough photos, hard to look at, images are so much more emotional and manipulative than facts and information. If you see enough photos of injured animals, portrayed in graphic detail, you will soon get upset and wish them and the sources of them to go away. You can see these images on sites like NYClass – a group spearheading the move to ban the horses, a group whose leader is a close political ally of the new mayor and a major contributor to his campaign. Another group – I hope people will go to these sites to make up their own minds about them and the horses – is the Coalition To Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages.

I want to say that the websites of the various groups campaigning to ban the horses were disturbing for me to pore over, not for the legitimate concerns and issues that spawned some of them, but because they seem to take no responsibility for the truth or accuracy of the information on their sites. For me, they lacked credibility, there was no specificity, there seemed to be no fact-checking or correcting,  no balance, no shred of empathy for the people or drivers in the carriage industry, no grasp of animals or their lives beyond rescue and abuse, no balance, dialogue, reason or accountability. There was so much knee-jerk thinking, such overheated writing, so much  wildly-beyond-the mainstream ranting and ideology and rhetoric that it is hard for me to believe they could seriously influence a mayor or public opinion in a city as diverse and sophisticated as New York. They make Fox News look like the New York Times.  I found the cruelty shocking, it was almost to the point of savagery. Cruelty is the absence of reason, of truth. I can’t really get past it, it is as unconscionable when applied to humans as it is to animals.

But take a look and see for yourself. The Internet has it’s flaws, it is a Godsend for the curious and open-minded.

On the NY Class site, founder Steven Nilsick assures us that the carriage horse drivers will all be offered jobs, mostly driving the new “vintage” $150,000 electric cars that are supposed to replace the carriage horses. Curiously, on the same site, Nilsick alleges – he offers no evidence for this – that the drivers routinely gouge tourists, over-charge and fail to report the income they receive. He also suggests that they chronically abuse the horses and mistreat them. He doesn’t explain why people who abuse animals and cheat and steal ought to be trusted to drive  tourists around in vintage electric cars. Shouldn’t they be in jail?

Nilsick also promises that each one of the horses will be sent to loving farms where they will not be permitted to work,  and be well treated and cared for.  The SPCA has also said it has commitments from horse farms and rescue facilities all over the country to take in every one of the carriage horses. This promise is simply not truthful or rational. The carriage horses belong to their owners, they are private property, Nilsick, the SPCA and other people who call themselves animal rights activists will have no say in the fate of these horses, they cannot simply tell the owners where they must go, according to every lawyer who has been asked. It stands to reason that people whose livelihoods have just been taken from them may wish or need to sell their horses. They are not likely to hand them over to NYClass or these largely mythical rescue preserves. There is little doubt among anyone in the equine animal world that most of these horses will be kept by the owners who can afford to keep them or be sold for slaughter. There are very few horse rescue farms to accommodate more than 200  large and healthy horses.

In the context of this debate – saving animals from the cruel abuse of work and human beings – there are numerous accusations, no convictions. How could the horse owners and drivers be chronically abusing these animals for years and there be no formal legal record or response, no charges or convictions? It is simply mind-blogging that more attention has not be paid to the fact that most of these horses will be killed in order to spare them from work and staying alive and necessary.

On these sites, there are many allegations of abuse, cruel treatment, intolerable suffering.   The most serious concerns about the horses seem to have been raised in the 1980’s, when new regulations and inspections were legislated by the City Council. In the past 20 years, I can only find one instance where police or any authority cited a driver for mistreatment or neglect – this was fairly recently for working a horse who had a foot infection. Many people on the animal rights websites – including the mayor, who recently liked the treatment of the horses to “waterboarding,” a form of torture used on alleged terrorists and prisoners of war – argue that it is cruel for the horses to work, their living conditions are inhumane and they are chronically over-worked and mistreatment,  they seem depressed and dispirited, that they live shortened lives. I saw no evidence of this, neither has hardly anyone who has visited the stables and looked for themselves. The actor Liam Neeson, who knows some of the drivers and who has lived around horses his whole life, says the horses he has seen are healthy and well treated.

I just can’t find any  concrete evidence to support these statements, it has just been repeated so often and with such authority it is not surprising many people have come to believe it – big lies work. The SPCA, which used to oversee the horses, has withdrawn, and now supports the banning of the horses, mostly because they oppose the idea of animals working and living in New York City. This decision has confounded many horse and animal lovers, especially those with working horses. But still, it is the most thoughtful and legitimate of the countless accusations thrown against the horse carriage industry.

I have no doubt some of these horses have been mistreated, as so many dogs and children are, there is just no evidence to support these claims of chronic cruelty and abuse. The Coalition To Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages offers “the top 15 reasons” why carriage horses should be banned on it’s website. I would encourage anyone reading this to read this list for themselves, from alleging the stables have no fire protection (I saw for myself this is not true) to cruelty issues being impossible to enforce due to underfunded SPCA inspectors (the NYPD has taken over the enforcement and regulation of the horses welfare) to economic and tourism issues. The coalition says the horses are smelling up Central Park, and under “economics/jobs” points out that many industries are outsourcing jobs to China anyway, so it makes little difference if the carriage industry is shut down. Besides, says the site, “it is not unusual for small business to be put out of business by eminent domain…businesses often have to fend for themselves.”

Thus is it fine for cities to put honest and hard-working people out of work and shut down businesses, and ban the use of horses to work,  it happens all the time.  Under “immoral industry,” the site argues that the carriages rides are a form of “entertainment” and thus exploitive and comparable to circuses and zoos. They likened making animals work to sweat shops and the use of child labor. There is a profound disconnection in this movement between the professed love of animals and empathy and respect for people, ultimately this has crippled the animal rights movement in much of the country, if not New York City.

If you real the sites set up to campaign against carriage horses, you will quickly understand the issue, you can see why most people associate the carriage industry with cruelty and abuse. Lots of money, well-funded attacks, demonstrations and political organizing, years of images of stricken horses and unsupported and unchallenged allegations have shaped this discussion and permeated the public consciousness. The media is one institution that might have challenged these most unsupported accusations, but that has not happened, I cannot find a single serious piece of reporting that deals with this issue. We are on our own, learning what happens to a civil society when information is handed over to partisan websites and cable news channels. I do sympathize with anybody who approaches this issue, the truth is hard to find, it is hard work, there is much rage and confusion, I want to keep looking for it.

There are human beings on both sides of this issue, I don’t want to ever forget that or succumb to the kind of shallow demonizing and distortion that I see everywhere in our civic world. The death of Spotty shapes the fate of the few remaining animals in New York, while the death and  injury to thousands of human beings goes almost completely unnoticed or protested. The people take their chances in an uncertain world, the animals must live perfect no-kill lives, grazing freely in the wild. Freud would be drawn to the human nurturing, victimization and attachment fantasies that now underlie the fate of these poor horses. The people shaping this debate are just like the political extremists we find elsewhere in the country – they are angry, unyielding, uncompromising, caught in their own bubble.They speak to the nature of our time.

The more disconnected and helpless we feel, the more we wish to create perfect worlds for the animals in our care, to rescue them from the very lives we all have to live. They are not our partners in life, but our helpless dependents. If we can’t feel good about the world we live in, we can feel good about saving them from the reality of our lives and rage at the people who live with them and profess to love them.