The carriage horse story has been challenging for me, somewhat surreal. I see myself as mostly within the mainstream of political thought, I am that independent voter who is sometimes accused of being on the “left,” sometimes on the “right,” it is just where I want to be, dodging labels, thinking for myself, considering things as they arise, changing my mind constantly, staying away from the extreme edges on either side.

It is confusing, somewhat isolating, to be so far apart from so many leaders, people, institutions on this question of the carriage horses, it has never happened before, not in my writing about animals. This has truly become a David vs. Goliath kind of struggle – the horses against the mayor, the City Council, a network of angry and vocal animal rights organizations, powerful political supporters and donors of the mayor and council members, the increasingly politicized SPCA and Humane Society.

As I read yet another online onslaught against the horses last night, this one yesterday from the Humane Society, I found myself back on the familiar and disquieting turf that has almost consumed me these past few weeks, the noise-to-truth ratio is not high: another Jeremiad pointing out that New York is too dangerous for horses – but not pointing out only one horse has been killed in 20 years; more patronizing assurances that the carriage drivers will have first crack at driving those eco-friendly vintage electric carts, even thought none of them seem to want to do that or have been asked. The column also points out they don’t have horses in Beijing (suddenly a model of urban planning and environmental aspirations, maybe horses there would choke to death), so New York doesn’t need them either.

There were the by now familiar slick and disingenuous assurances that none – not a single one –  of the horses will  suffer or be traumatize, harmed or killed in the transition, there is murky legislation in the works to protect them. Of course any lawyer knows the horses are private property, no one can guarantee their future or their fate, surely not the Humane Society.

The Humane Society is not speaking for me, or for my animals, I know them and love them in a different way..
This is all too familiar, the party line, it is the same stuff, one site parroting another, all over the Internet: the horses are abused, suffering cruel treatment, time to get rid of them.  There will be no cost, nothing will be lost, no one will suffer, the horses will live happily ever after on those rescue farms and preserves, we will all be happy in our humming electric carts. How simple. Why doesn’t that make me  and so many other people happy?   I went to be bed feeling unsure of myself – that is quite a bit of formidable opposition, it is arrayed against me too, really. Is there something I am not seeing, feeling?

I remember walking into the Clinton Park stables, on the alert for cruelty and abuse, but being overwhelmed by a sense of magic and mystery, of history.  The smell, the sounds, the big, quiet horses, the leather and harnesses, the beautiful old carriages, the New York faces and Bronx and Brooklyn accents, I thought off all the men and women I met as First Responders, I wanted each on of them to be the ones who come for me when I was trapped under the bus. Some people see abusers there, I saw the faces of the working people of New York, their accents as thick as their smiles. Some people would see only an old building with small stalls and not enough grazing space.  I saw something quite different.  You could feel the magic all around the horses and the people who ride them, the stable boys brushing the aisles, hauling hay, the old building oozing history. It was in the breathing of the horses, their gentle quiet, in all the faces of the people, in the sunlight streaming through the windows in the old building, in the ramps and bales of hay.

This a way of life, the way some people who don’t wish to spend their lives driving electric carts around parks have chosen to live. It is a hard life, hard work, harder for the people, I think, than the horses. This is a great country because it is the kind of life people could choose and if they paid their taxes and didn’t break the law, could keep. It doesn’t seem to be that kind of country any longer. It is suddenly, and for the first time in thousands of years, a controversial life.  The horses have not changed but the way people see animals has.

So here are all of these righteous and angry people telling them their way of life is no good any more, they are cruel and inhuman, they have to give it up and drive eco- carts around. Is there any way to live an individual life with magic in polarized, politicized America, where everyone – animals too – must live cautious and corporate lives centered on safety and security, at the mercy of so many ideologues on the left, on the right, determined to force everyone into one kind of funnel, one way to live? Must we all see animals as piteous and dependent creatures whose only purpose in the world is to forage on rescue farms? Must we all live corporate lives?

I wondered, until this morning, am I that much out of touch with the truth, have I drifted somewhere I ought not to be going?

Then, as often happens, one of you reached out to me, sensing my discomfort and confusion, and took the trouble to send me a wonderful message reminding me of who I am, affirming my conviction and determination to keep speaking up about this carriage horse thing, this utter misperception of what it means to live with animals and love them, of what is really in their interests. One has to fear for animals when you realize it is the Humane Society that has fallen off the wagon, no longer protecting them but politicizing and emotionalizing them. They do not speak for me or the many hundreds of animal lovers reaching out to me and pleading with me to keep writing, to send my columns to the mayor, to newspapers in New York. I understand that I am not just arguing for the horses and their owners and riders, I am struggling to keep some magic in our lives, in our world. We need a better, wiser and more mystical concept of animals than this, we need to find ways to keep them in our lives, not drive them out.

Early in the morning, I received this message from Brooke Lowry, it was so beautiful and touching it brought me to tears, sitting up in bed, reading it on my Iphone as the sun came up through the window. She stands in her truth, reminding me to do the same.

“I am not sure if you are aware,” she wrote, but back in 2007, the Claremont Riding Academy on West 89th St on the Upper West Side closed its doors. The building itself had housed horses since 1982 when it began its life as a livery stable. I was last there in 2006, for an hour-long hack on the famed Central Park bridle paths on the back of a horse named Gillespie, who I had ridden once or twice a year for several years’ running, each time I visited the city. I had no idea when I slid from his back that hot summer morning and bid him goodbye that it would be the last time I’d see him, the last time I’d ever be able to enjoy an early morning ride through the park, to see the skyscrapers of the city rising out of the early morning mist all around me while hearing the rhythmic cadence of steel-shod hoof beats in my ears. I grew up around horses, but those early morning rides in Central Park were something special, an experience that I feel so fortunate to have had, even as I mourn the fact that I will never experience it again. What is worse, future generations of New Yorkers will not have the experience either.”

I thought as I read this, who speaks for Brooke, for me, and the thousands of troubled and bewildered animal lovers,  in all of this righteous posturing and arguing about the horses? Does the Humane Society consider us as well? Does Brooke seem a person who doesn’t care about horses and their welfare, who would support a system of cruelty and abuse for them? Unlike the people who call themselves advocates of animal rights, unlike the city’s mayor, who has never had an animal in his life,  Brooke grew up around animals, and like me, she still feels the magic in them, the wondrous mystery of being around them, of experiencing even the most urban of environments with them. Of course New York City could make room for these animals, make them safe, give them the living conditions they deserve. A city that build Central Park and the great subway tunnels could easily do that.  But not if their only use is to be rescued, and banished and exploited so that we can feel righteous and impose our own narrow notions of life and animals on other people.

Brooke wrote that while she is not a conspiracy theorist,  she came to believe that the beautiful stables where the horses were stabled, a beautiful one of Romanesque architecture,  was closed not because of it’s deteriorating condition but it’s property value. The building, which was supposed to be converted to condominiums, is now a school of performing arts.

“There was only one Claremont,” she wrote, “and now it is gone, and the bridle paths are empty. For all its many charms, the city that I have visited so often over the years, and love so much, has lost some of its luster and, to me anyway, is a less magical place that it once was. How much less magical will it be without the carriage horses? I can’t even imagine.”

I don’t think imagination is part of this debate, Brooke, I don’t see any magic or compassion coming from the mayor and the groups lobbying for the horses to go. There is no magic in eco-friendly vintage electric carts. I read Brooke’s letter, and think of others like it, written for years beyond today, recalling the magic of beautiful horses standing along the entrances to Central Park, riding lovers and visitors and animal lovers through the park, seeing the magnificent skyscrapers of the city rising out of the early morning mist while the rhythmic cadence of the steel-shod hoof beats ring in their ears. What if the park itself had not been built, preserved against greed and development, isn’t it also an anomaly in Manhattan, didn’t so many fight to preserve it?  Rides on horse-drawn carriages offer the kind of memory that people carry throughout their entire lives, people come from all over the world to experience them. They represent the magic and mystery of animals and the city. What will today’s visitors recall about their cart rides?

“Anyway,” Brooke wrote, “thank you, Jon, for writing this, for going to the stables, seeing it for yourself, and reporting what you experienced. It may not change anything, but if nothing else, it has, hopefully educated the people who were not too busy being indignant, and the beautiful photos you took of the horses and the drivers will last forever, even if the horses do not.”

I thank you, Brooke, you have reminded me why I became a writer, you inspire me to keep writing about the horses, and you speak poignantly of the vanishing magic in the tense and fragmented world, so vital to so many of us, so much a part of our experience with animals and with New York. I suppose some people worship righteousness and others magic, and maybe it is so that the one can never hear or understand the other. I am  happy to stand for the horses and for the right of the people who own and ride them to keep their work, their way of life. I can’t think of a more American thing.

I am not close to the mayor, I have no powerful friends in New York, I have no wish to be published in the New York Times.

I do believe what I write may change something, there is always the one person out there – you are one of them – who understands the power of magic and can make a difference. If the horses are driven from their New York, much of the magic in that city will die with them, that is the mystery of the animals who live and work with us, it is their legacy, their gift to us.  It is my hope to be one of the people who make a difference. I am no good at quitting, I also see those mists and hear those steel-shod hoof beats and remember the faces of the drivers handling their horses. It is what I felt walking through those stables, one person can see cruelty and abuse, I saw an ancient and powerful bond between people and animals, I thought it so wonderful to find it in the midst of the harried concrete city.

Like Brooke, I love the animals I live with, I see how much meaningful work and connection to people means to them, and to the hundreds of people who come to my farm every year to see, touch and feel them. I know the horses belong in New York, precisely because it is so crowded and over-developed, no people anywhere need it more.

You can ban magic and banish it, it just cannot be killed, not even by mayors, indignant websites and people whose souls have been drained from their lives. There are so many of us out there who still feel it in our love of animals, we are connected to one another, we are powerful, too, not just the angry people on their websites, chanting their nasty slogans, writing checks to politicians. I asked Brooke to stay in touch, I told her we needed each other.