If you love animals, you will never have a clearer choice to make than the one New York City is about to make, between iconic work horses and fake vintage electric cars.

Here we are, once again, this time in our greatest city, preparing to choose one more time to drive animals out of our world to make room for machines and buildings and the ugliest and most  dispiriting of human ideas and creations.

We have made this decision so many times. We have now driven most of the animals away and most of them are gone from the world,  and we are ruining the earth as well. It would seem that we have learned nothing, being progressive in New York City sounds a lot like being a mall developer in New Jersey.

In the deepening and  painful controversy between the New York Carriage Horse Trade and the people who claim the title of animal rights advocates, I’ve tried hard to think and write mostly of the horses and speak on their behalf – Liam Neeson can speak for the carriage trade and the animal rights groups can speak for  themselves.

The horses desperately need to be spoken for. The carriage trade has a vested interest, the animal rights groups claim to be their protectors, but they have lost much credibility  with me  and with many others. They have little respect for facts, they seem to know nothing about horses or animals, and they are crueler to people than anyone has been to the carriage horses.  The people in the carriage trade have told me no lies I know of, they appear to understand their horses well and love them very much.

They City Of New York appears committed to a course that will banish the horses from New York forever and most likely send them away to either eat hay and drop manure for the rest of their lives or go to awful deaths in foreign slaughterhouses,  as more than 155,000 horses did last year alone. Somewhat shockingly, they and the city’s mayor have also decided – without asking them –  that all of the carriage horse drivers will go to work driving fake vintage electric cars. “No one is losing their livelihood,” says the Executive Director of NY Class, who seems to assume the carriage drivers will be happy in the new work she and her group has chosen for them.  Above is a model of the vintage car commissioned by NYClass, the group spearheading  the proposed horse ban. NYClass spent $12,500 to have the model made. The cars would cost roughly $150,000 each and would all, the group proudly proclaimed, make that wonderful “oooaoogah-aoooogah!” sound.

Reading this, I was wondering how the Executive Director of NYClass would feel if the city and the carriage trade banned her group and decided she would go to work for a shipping company in New York harbor. No one would be losing their livelihood, after all.

It is a remarkable thing to me that these groups, which profess to care about the horses more than anyone, do not grasp the difference between a draft horse and an electric car. Small wonder they believe it is cruel for working animals to work. If these cars look familiar to you, it is because there are a number of very similar ones at Disney World and Disney Land. Disney also loves to evoke the past rather than preserve it, the choice New York City seems to be embracing.

I love Disney theme parks, but I would not have considered their faux American Main Street evocations a model for New York City’s Central Park. It does not seem to me that the park needs fake vintage cars to evoke an atmosphere that is already one of the most beautiful  – and authentic – in the world.

This is a very big decision not only for horses but for human beings, for all of the people reading this, and for all of the animals they know and love. In the sorry history of people and animals – the carriage horses are a rare and lucky exception –  what New York City decides to do with the horses will be a seminal decision, one that will reverberate everywhere people still live with animals or might wish to. If New York City gives up on the horses, many other cities and communities will follow. It will be a powerful statement that animals cannot survive in cities, have no place there any longer. Is there any more important place for animals to remain and be seen than in urban America, where people have become so disconnected from the natural and animal world?

Make no mistake about it,  this is a vote for mechanization over the natural world, for technology over nature, for machines over horses. There are many things New York City could do to make the horses lives better than they are now, and there is no real evidence they are not good. The city could designate horse lanes as they have bicycle lanes, they could insist that real estate developers build spacious and modern stables in exchange for land. There is no medical evidence to suggest the horses are suffering from respiratory issues from breathing the same air New Yorkers and their dogs and cats are breathing every day. Only one horse in 20 years has died as the result of city traffic.

These very viable and plausible steps would eliminate almost all of the arguments against the horses remaining in New York, save the quite new and very radical idea that it is cruel for working animals to work, a disheartening and profoundly ignorant argument. The New York Daily News reported this week that it would cost the city tens of millions of dollars to buy out the carriage owners medallions, and then there is the purchase of those eco-friendly cars. (I wonder when horses stopped being eco-friendly, and became bad for the environment?)

Traffic lanes would be a lot cheaper, developers rather than taxpayers can afford new stables. If the mayor spent as much time trying to save the horses as he has trying to banish them and put hundreds of people out of work, the city might have already sent the most stirring imaginable message to true environmentalists and animal lovers all over the world: we are committed to animals being safe and present in our city. We will not banish them to disappear from our consciousness or die. We will not choose cars over animals.

That is a headline that would get me weeping. It is my idea of progressive.

This week, a television actress –  many celebrities are drawn to the idea of animals rights without, apparently much of an understanding about what it means – said she hopes the horses can return to the natural world when they are free. She does not seem to know that humans have already destroyed the natural world of the horses, as we are trying to destroy one of the few remaining worlds the carriage horses have, miraculously right in the heart of New York City.

Draft and working horses have never lived in the natural world, never lived apart from human beings, never lived out of stables. They were bred and imported to work with people, and that is their world. Most of the rescue farms where some of the lucky ones would be sent are really nothing more than larger stables with fences, they are not lush and spacious places. For these horses, carriage work is the natural world, and if we take it away from them for yet another moving mechanical machine in one of the world’s most visible cities, we are sounding a death knell for the very idea of animals remaining in partnership with human beings in the modern world.

Some simple questions for people approaching this issue;

– Would you rather ride in an electric car or in a horse-drawn carriage?

– Would you rather celebrate your love or new marriage in a fake vintage car or in a horse-drawn carriage?

– Would your child or grand-child rather see a horse or ride in an electric car? Ask him or her. Children are our future and the keepers of magic in our world. They have a right to be heard.

– If you visited New York City, would you prefer to see a vintage electric car or a Percheron horse? Does a vintage electric car have any meaning or connection with Central Park,  where the horses have worked for 150 years, and which was designed in great measure for carriages and their horses?

– if you walk in Central Park, would  you rather see a horse-drawn carriage and listen to clip-clop of horses hooves, or hear the “aoooogah-aoooogah” horn of an electric car?

– Look at the photo at the top of this post, and at the bottom. Which would you choose to be in your life, to see and think about? Which is needed more? Which is in dire need of being preserved?  Is anyone going to rush home and record in their journal their magical ride through Central Park in an electric car, painted to look decades older than it is? Why try and replicate the past when it is walking in the park every day?

And perhaps most importantly, if you live in New York City, do you accept the idea that these horses must vanish from the your sight and that of your children forever, to disappear to the farms of rich people and overwhelmed rescue preserves, or, much more likely, be sent to slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada?

I love animals, as do almost all of the people reading this,  and my wish is for them is to remain among us, not to follow in the awful history of so many of their predecessors because we don’t have the will or courage or insight to take the steps to make sure they survive among us. Animals that don’t work with us perish, that is the awful legacy of humans and animal history. We have lost so much of the natural world,  we have cruelly abused the animals we could not find a use for. Rescue is an emotional impulse and good deed, it is not a role for animals to enable them to survive on the earth.  For them, the rise of the human race has been nothing less than a holocaust.

My hope for the Central Park Carriage Horses is that they can be a landmark chapter in a very new and different kind of story, my prayer is that they be spared the two kinds of deaths awaiting them: the death of the slaughterhouse, or the equally cruel  path to invisibility and oblivion. Both are the paths to extinction.

This, for sure, is a genuine test of our will to give animals the rights they deserve, the most fundamental being the right to exist with us and not be driven away, as so many other animals have, to make room for cars and houses and condos and malls.

There is no simpler or clearer vote for animals, no more important or meaningful choice than the one New York City is about to make between vintage electric cards and the New York Carriage Horses. Every animal in our lives, in the world, is waiting for our choice. The horses need is for us, they cry out to us to choose them for once.