Facing mounting criticism for refusing to even see the horses he proposes banning from the city, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio Thursday finally promised to go and see the animals in their stables. He also promised that he wouldn’t change his mind about the ban, no matter what he sees there. This change was one of several signals – at least to me – that the winds are shifting a bit for the New York carriage horses.
Two weeks ago, I didn’t think there was much of a chance outside of legal action to block the ban. The horses and owners are up against the mayor, the City Council president, the Humane Society, the “A.S.P.C.A” and a well-organized and well-funded coalition of determined groups calling themselves animal rights activists, the same people who have defined and shaped public perception of this issue and who were virtually unchallenged for years. There has been a ceaseless barrage of accusations of mistreatment, greed and abuse, almost none of them substantiated in any way. I was quite surprised to learn that one horse was killed as the result of a traffic accident in the past 20 years, one person in the carriage industry charged with neglect in the past 150.
This week was different. The odds are still quite long, but not as long as they were two weeks ago. It looked like a rout, now it looks like a fight. That’s my meme of the week.
de Blasio’s statement, like most of his comments on the horses, reminded me once again of how unsure and tin-eared the mayor is when it comes to this issue. He never seems sure or clear, he seems to be following the lead of other people when it comes to the horses, rather than taking the lead. His statements don’t seem natural, or even sensible. He looks weak and oddly uncompromising even as he struggles to appear compromising. His newest pronouncement is just strange. Why go see the horses at all if nothing he sees will affect his thinking, or change his mind? What kind of meeting is it in which one side promises in advance not to listen to the other?
What’s interesting is that he now feels making a token gesture like this is necessary, before today it wasn’t. That’s an indicator of mounting pressure on him to re-think the way he is handling this issue.
The mayor has been widely criticized, even ridiculed, for saying banning the horses was a major priority in his new administration, given all of the other problems in the city. Then he unaccountably went on television and compared the treatment of the horses to “waterboarding”, a form of torture used on terrorists. Before that, he had pledged in his inaugural address to make the horses vanish quickly, “just watch us do it.” Most people were surprised and puzzled by his focus on the issue, and his curious certainty. I just don’t get the sense that this is really his fight, he almost seems to be fighting someone else’s battle.
This morning, I called a former colleague of mine, a political editor in New York, to ask her what was happening.
This is what she said: “You have to understand that the mayor comes from Park Slope, Brooklyn,” he said, “not just a progressive place, but one of the most knee-jerk progressive places in the country. Most people there actually believe that it is cruel for animals to work, their whole idea of animals is rescuing them, nobody has any animals there besides dogs and cats and they think it ought to be a crime to buy a dog from a breeder. They are ideologues, not animal lovers.”
Park Slope, she said, is where deBlasio has lived and formulated his political ideas for most of his life. “It’s a bubble, like Fox News or MSNBC, she said, everybody thinks the same way, the rest of the world is stupid or wrong. The mayor emerged from his campaign indebted to animal rights groups that gave him a huge amount of money and supported his campaign when nobody else did. He owes them big. He is truly stunned to learn that their idea of animals is a minority view, offensive to a lot of people. He didn’t know that everybody doesn’t think putting horses to work is a crime. As someone who knows nothing about animals, has never owned or lived with any and doesn’t really give a s—- about the issue, it’s not what’s really important to him. But he is now between a rock and a hard place, these groups gave him money and he promised to ban the horses. He really thought he’d be a hero, but he’s catching some real Hell – he has Liam Neeson up his ass. People are growing uncomfortable with the way this issue is being played out, at the power of these groups, their nastiness, the shutting down of a historic and law-abiding business for no reason, costing people their jobs. Publicity works two ways, it is a beast, it can eat both sides.”
The mayor, she added, is learning that absolutely nobody outside of Park Slope and the new City Council likes most of these groups much or listens to them or wants them to be making policy. People are also becoming aware that they might be about to kill a bunch of horses in the name of saving them. So the mayor is trying to put out the fire by going to see the stables, to show he’s an open-minded guy, but he isn’t savvy enough not to say it won’t matter what he sees, thus shooting himself in the foot again. It was looking like a rout, now it’s a brawl.”
The carriage horse industry seems also to be waking up, finding it’s voice, and defending itself more clearly and aggressively. One driver had a stinging op-ed piece in The New York Post detailing the “lies” about the carriage horses being told by some animal rights groups. A private foundation is funding a website for the carriage horse industry and the actor Liam Neeson – he has two very popular movies out at the moment – has emerged as the Carriage Horse Industry’s most potent weapon.
The mayor’s hard place got harder this week when Neeson, a popular, articulate, actor – one could hardly ask for a better spokesperson – wrote the mayor a letter citing a Quinnipiac Poll that found that sixty-one percent of New Yorkers want the carriage horses to remain in the city. That is a very difficult number for a politician to dismiss, and it is a surprising number in view of the mostly unchallenged avalanche of accusations and bad publicity surrounding the carriage horses for years. I would have guessed only a handful of New Yorkers wanted the horses to remain the city – the horses have been a punching bag for years. I guess I’m not as much of a freak as I thought, not so different than many New Yorkers as I thought.
Neeson is a powerful advocate for the horses, he is a lifelong rider and horse lover, he is close friends with a carriage owner and often visits the horse stables. He knows horses and he knows how the horses are being treated. He has said the effort to ban the horses is “criminal,” that the horses are well-cared for and content. Neeson is an impressive spokesperson, charismatic and clear, he steers clear of wild accusations and unsupported assertions. He also knows horses well, which seems to make him unique in the city’s discussion of their future.
I think there was a shift in the carriage horse conflict in New York City this week, you could feel it in the stories, positions, decisions and statements around this deepening collision of values. There were for the first time some columns and stories – NPR, AP, The New York Post – suggesting the effort to ban the horses was not a foregone conclusion and that the horses are not being abused. There is a new consensus building slowly it seems, and from the bottom up, a new meme: the horses are well-treated. The reporters belatedly coming to stables unannounced are not finding that the horses are suffering horribly, being abused, dying young and living in filth and danger. I wonder if that idea is not beginning to take hold.
I have no crystal ball, I have no idea whether the people who call themselves animal rights activists and the mayor will send at least some of the horses out to rescue farms or join the 155,000 American horses sent out to Mexico and Canada to be slaughtered each year. But the winds are shifting. It is does not, in fact, appear to be a rout any longer, but a fight. People feel very strongly about the role of animals in their lives, and most people who love animals want to keep them around if possible, not send them away.
It is just possible that the carriage horses will trigger the kind of debate about the future of animals in our world that might be their true legacy.