It might revolutionize the lives of animals and our discussions of their rights if the people who made decisions about their lives were required to have lived with them or know something about them, or at least consult the people who do. There are many striking things about the movement to ban the carriage horses of New York. One is the endemic ignorance about what working animals like the horses want, feel and need, the other is the irony of a social movement that claims to have great compassion for animals but practices extreme cruelty and callousness towards human beings.
The movement to save the carriage horses from New York City is a movement dominated and led by a mayor who has never owned an animal, a City Council President with a rescue cat, a real estate developer and animal rights advocate who made his fortune operating parking garages, and some outraged people living in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Most of the people who do know something about animals – farmers, behaviorists, vets, trainers, handlers, people who live or work with them – are almost universally appalled at the reasoning behind the campaign to shut down the carriage horse trade and their implications for other animals. If Buck Brannaman, for example, were voting on the City Council, we would be having a very different debate. Brannaman, Robert Redford’s inspiration for The Horse Whisperer, and the author of Runaway Horses, and other books, is one of the most respected and experienced horse trainers in the world.
He says pulling rubber-wheeled carriages on the flat streets of New York does not come close to being hard work for working horses, and is, in fact, quite good for them. These horses need to work and love to work. Does it matter that one of the world’s most respected trainers, one beloved for his compassionate approach towards training, holds this view?
It would also be good to have Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, two prominent scholars of American urban life, in on the debate about the horses. They wrote the book The Horse In The City, the best book I have read yet on the history of working horses in New York and elsewhere (I would also recommend Horses At Work, by Ann Norton Greene.) These books describe what the lives of carriage and other horses in New York used to be like and they make it clear the carriage horses working today have the best and safest lives of just about any working horses in American history, including those who helped build New York City
There have been all sorts of accusations made at the carriage trade in the city, but perhaps the most reasonable and plausible to many people is the argument that horses simply don’t belong in New York in 2014, the modern city and it’s clogged and fume-filled streets are simply too dangerous for them. That seems to be the mayor’s most consistently-argued rationale.
Researching this topic, I interested to read the work of McShane and Tarr but also that of famed biologist Jared Diamond (he ought to be on the City Council discussion as well) who studied horses in urban life.
Jared, an accomplished and universally respected scientist, found that working horses were the “perfect domesticable animals” to live in crowded cities and among people. They had dominance hierarchies, he said, that made them obedient, a pronounced tolerance for other species, genetic malleability (disposition), and herding instincts that made them want to stay put and easier to control than almost any other animal. It is important for me to note that very few dogs and cats have such perfect domesticable traits, and there are many thousands of them in New York.
Working horses like the carriage horses have never lived apart from people, their existence led directly to the enormous growth and wealth of human populations in areas of the globe where they could be easily imported. The horses have not really existed anywhere where there were not large concentrations of people. Human beings, say McShane and Tarr, could not have built nor lived in the giant, wealth-generating cities without horses, and horses benefited from their proximity to human beings. Their populations boomed, they were better fed than horses in the wild, better housed and sheltered and were protected by law from the animal cruelty that often afflicted their rural counterparts. Almost every other species of large grazing mammal – that is, every large animal without interaction with humans – disappeared while the working horses thrived.
The history of big city horses also exposes as false the idea that New York is more dangerous for horses than it used to be. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, according to McShane and Tarr, horses suffered terribly from overwork, exposure to heat and cold (few old photographs show any blankets on horses in the winter and there are many showing horses covered in snow and ice), horses were tormented by fleas, rats, flies and mosquitoes which swarmed over them and their stables and spread fatal illnesses. Carriage horses lived in filthy and disease-ridden stables, they were routinely burned to death in stable fires – there were no alarms, no ready access to water for fire departments.
There were no regulations governing their hours or medical care, horses were routinely worked until they simply dropped dead. Interestingly, New York City traffic was much worse 100 years ago, say all of the history books, as there were few police officers, no marked traffic lanes, red lights or stop signs, no paved roads. There were almost continuous and violent collisions and jams at major intersections.
Hundreds of horses died in New York City each year as the result of collisions with other carriage horses and carts, wheels falling off, attacks by dogs, even wolves. There were collisions, accidents involving runaways, wagons that turned over fell apart. Horses fell into potholes, tripped over cobblestones and fell into fetid pools of sewage, broke their legs – and were instantly shot – were crushed or run over, or died of injuries from infections, bites and the many epidemics that swept through the city’s stables.
The idea that New York City is more dangerous for them today than it once was is simply not true or supportable by any factual information. According to the New York Daily News, there have been six motor vehicle-horse accidents in New York since 2007. None was fatal, these six accidents involved a rotating group of 220 horses who made an estimated 300,000 round trips between their stables and Central Park.
In 2012, there were more than 68,000 automobile collisions involving 128,000 vehicles and 170,000 human beings with 271 fatalities, including 11,000 vehicle-pedestrian accidents, 3,639 bicycle-car accidents and 1,619 motorcycle crashes. There is no pending legislation to restrict or ban automobiles, trucks, busses, bicycles or motorcycles in New York City. In 1886 alone, according to the New York City Department of Health, more than 9,000 horses died in New York City from accidents, overwork, disease, fire or neglect. In the past 20 years, one carriage horse in New York has died as the result of an injury that occurred while working in city streets. Last year, two children were killed by falling trees in Central Park. It seems none of us can live in perfect safety and security.
The lives of the carriage horses not only made the city’s expansion possible, they sparked the very idea of protecting animals from cruelty, they are responsible for the movement and new laws to protect animals from disease, overwork and neglect. The purpose of these laws was to keep the horses safe and in the city, never to ban them or send them away. Nowhere in the long history of these animals can one find anywhere the idea that the proper life for them is to be removed from cities and human beings and sent into the wild, for most horses a death sentence. The mortality rate of big-city horses has changed radically in that time, the New York Carriage Horses – guaranteed by law to have five-week vacations, medical care and to be protected from overwork, exposure and unclean stables – are the safest and best cared for animals in modern history. Dogs and cats in New York City have few of these legal protections against exposure, unclean living circumstances, neglect, and disease.
If horses are going to survive in our world, writes Brannaman in The Faraway Horses, they need to learn how to work with us. “Someone must lay down the rules and then be persevering and disciplined enough to follow through.” That work cannot be done if horses can live only on rescue farms, forbidden to work with people, required by law to eat all day and drop manure.
So what, then is driving the movement to ban the horses? Many people say the real reason is real estate- the stable properties are increasingly valuable. I can’t speak to that, for me the culprit is really ignorance. Almost every statement that comes out of the spokespeople for the horse ban reminds us that these people do not know a thing about animals. The horses are lonely and need socializing. They are never alone or apart from other horses, not in the stables, not in the streets, not in the park. The horses are depressed and underfed. The horses are fed fresh hay continuously, and all day. The horses need to live in nature, in the wild, eating grass. These working horses have never lived in nature, in the wild, few horses anywhere are fed grass all the time, it is quite often unhealthy for them. The horses are abused. One carriage trade employee has been arrested for neglect in 150 years. The horses are in danger. One horse in the last 20 years has died in a traffic accident. It is cruel for animals to work. It is vital for working animals to work, essential to their health and survival.
There is a fantasized and emotionalized notion in this movement of how animals do or should live, a psychological, not a fact-based, drive to give them perfect lives, free from work, cruel and callous human beings, the realities of modern or urban life. This is recognizable to therapists, this is what humans want, it is not what animals want or need. They have their own interests, they are not piteous reflections of us.
The arguments for ending the carriage trade and banishing the horses to farms or some mythic preserves in the vanished wild simply do not add up, not in terms of reality, truth or history, not then and not now. It is this realization, I believe, that is finally stirring so much opposition to this thoughtless and unsupportable effort to ban these animals. Sometimes controversies tear us apart, sometimes they teach us things we need to learn and know.
And here is the truth or my idea of it: The more these animals have worked, the closer they are to people, the better they have done. They are not animals who no longer have a viable role in the life of New York City, they are by history, temperament and genetics the perfect animals to be in New York.