As the horses wait for their drivers and carriages to come out, they stand quietly on the sidewalk, the street filling with busses, commuters and cabs heading into the middle of the city. I can only speak for myself, it lifted my heart to see these animals in mid-town Manhattan, they connected me to the natural world, a major reason I moved to the country almost 15 years ago.

Without animals in our lives, we are broken, a part of our own humanity is missing.  Being in New York City for just a few days, I felt disconnected from the natural world, from the animal world. Seeing how gracefully and patiently these large animals, working with human beings for thousands of years, adapted to this environment, as so many of their ancestors did, I did not feel as if I were looking at something unnatural, on the contrary it felt the most natural thing in the world. The horses had as much right to be on the sidewalk as I did, perhaps more. We need a new and wiser concept for understanding animals in our world, something more just and meaningful than banishing them from our midst because they get in our way while we destroy the world.