I’ve read a score of reports, messages, blog posts now from horse lovers, neighborhood residents, veterinarians, reporters and other first-time visitors to the carriage horse stables in New York. Just about every one had the same response I did after I warily approached the stables and most of us used the same language to describe the experience:
Something is wrong. This is not what I expected.
For me, what was wrong emerged quickly: It isn’t the horses who are being abused, it’s the people who own and drive them.
We all braced ourselves, I think, preparing to see some sad things. There was an image in all of our minds of emaciated, exhausted, neglected, and lonely animals, those were the words, the images we had all been reading and hearing for so long and from so many places it didn’t really seem possible or likely that it was not true.
After all, don’t leaders lead, don’t journalists investigate? I don’t believe I had ever seen or read a single good thing about these horses or the people who owned or rode them. We humans are porous and naive creatures, we believe what we are told, all kinds of notions come right through our skin, especially in the manipulable world of new media.
What I found about this story was very different. It shocked me then, and shocks me still. It is instantly obvious, the facts are there for the gathering, anybody can do it, see it, lots of people are. The horses are fine, better than fine, there is something awfully wrong with the story we have been told and are being told still.
It is the people who are being abused, not the horses.
It is perhaps one of the great moral conundrums of our time and the mystical world of animals that a supposedly moral and progressive political movement and ideology preaches compassion for animals while building their movement literally over the battered psyches of human beings. People who are almost totally innocent of any proven wrongdoing, other than seeking to live their lives honestly and legally and in the way they see fit, the way their fathers and mothers and grandfathers have lived their lives for generations.
What is abuse anyway? Think about it carefully as you read it.
l. to use wrongly or improperly misuse or abuse one’s authority.
2. to treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way; to abuse a person, a horse; to abuse one’s eyesight.
3. to speak insultingly, harshly, and unjustly to or about; revile, malign.
In the past 150 years, only one person in the carriage trade has been accused of abusing or neglected a horse, and he has yet to be convicted. A curious veterinarian who came to visit the stables recently – she was concerned about the horses – not only found that they were healthy and well cared for, but that there was enormous support and peer pressure among the owners and drivers to care for them especially well. It was not only the right thing to do, she found, they also knew their livelihood depended on it. There were five separate city agencies monitoring the horses welfare, she added. The stables were clean, there was fire protection, air conditioning and heat, the horses were fit and well exercised, there was plenty of room.
They were the most watched-over animals to be found anywhere.
But take a moment, and look away from the horses, and instead at the lives of the people who own the horses and drive them in carriages. And think of their families.
– They are threatened with the loss of their traditions, work and livelihood by a governmental authority that is seeking to ban them from the city where they have worked for more than a century with no legal evidence or even accusations of criminal or regulatory wrongdoing.
– They face legislation that would not only close their stables and businesses, but would also seize the animals they depend on for their livelihood and would dictate where the horses – their valuable and private property – must go, in this case only to non-working rescue venues where they would have no monetary value at all and never work again, cruelty in it’s own right for working animals.
– They are told by a government authority – pressured and influenced by wealthy political donors and private organizations – that they must give up their way of life and work they love and instead accept work they do not want or wish to do – driving electric cars through the park where they now drive their horses.
– They are subject of frequent demonstrations where they are chanted and shouted at, called murderers and abusers, told to leave the city. They are attacked and insulted online and in various websites daily. Drivers are regularly insulted by name during protests, their accents, teeth and clothing the subject of ridicule. Tourists, potential customers are shouted at and intimidated, called “greedy” and “murderers” and told to shun the carriage rides, licensed by the city and given permission to walk in Central Park.
– The owners and drivers are regularly and for years accused in interviews, on websites, pamphlets and political campaigns and demonstrations of abusing animals in the cruelest ways, of neglecting them, starving them, keeping them in filthy and overcrowded cells, denying them proper medical treatment, working them to death, driving them in “torture wagons,”, working them in brutal heat and punishing cold, of denying them warm blankets and rest and food. None of these charges have been proven accurate or proven at all, or been made in a formal or legal manner, none of those accused have ever been given an opportunity to formally deny the charges or respond to them. Of the 4,000 complaints of animal abuse made in New York City last year, not one involved a carriage horse, owner or driver.
– The mayor and the City Council President – along with the animal rights organizations seeking to ban them – have refused to meet with the carriage horse owners or drivers or speak to them, the human beings in the carriage trade are treated unjustly and spoken about harshly, they are the target of threats, accusations, uncertainty and the threat of extinction, unemployment, the disruption of long-standing family traditions, and expensive litigation. Several years ago, a driver was kicked and abused by an animal rights demonstrator who believed his horse had been abused.
By every legal and dictionary and literal meaning, the people in the carriage trade are being abused. By every legal and literal and accepted meaning and definition, the horses are not.
Imagine what might happen if any animal were treated in this manner – if a driver was caught kicking a horse – the media and civic and animal rights uproar would be quick and deafening, the perpetrators would be shut down and hounded out of business, just as the government is seeking to do with the carriage trade. How is it that abuse is awful when directed at animals, moral and progressive when directed at people? it seems morally acceptable to the animal rights organizations and civic leaders like the mayor of New York to treat these human beings in a manner that is legally and provably – unlike the accusations against them – abuse in the literal, not symbolic, meaning of the term. In declaring that that he is “proud” to be a member of the animal rights groups spearheading the move to ban the horses, the mayor is endorsing the abuse of human beings, putting the weight and authority of the government behind it.
I have loved the work of Woody Guthrie my whole life, I have not the slightest doubt that he would be standing with the carriage trade people, not the millionaires, developers, politicians and angry people who are massing against them.
And if you talk to the people in the carriage trade, and look in their eyes, you will sometimes see many of the signs of abuse that we know to look for in animals who are mistreated, but do not see in the carriage horses: wariness, anger, anxiety, skittishness, exhaustion, mistrust and uncertainty. It is a wonder they haven’t blown some electric car models to bits. Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine yourself being targeted in this way for months and years.
What has become so clear to me, to Liam Neeson, to veterinarians, horse trainers and behaviorists, curious and hard-working journalists, three out of four New York City residents, horse and animal lovers all over the country, is that this is not an issue of animal welfare, it is a question of abuse of power and of fairness. It is a question of right and wrong. To be driven out of business, hounded out of your life, shouldn’t you at least be proven to have done something wrong?
I am a student of moral philosophy, it has guided me through so many difficult decisions and choices. Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest moral philosophers, wrote that whatever the source of moral knowledge might be – divine commandments or human reason – every sane man carried within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong, and this regardless of the law of the land and regardless of the voices of his fellow-men.
I heard this voice within me a couple of hours after I first walked into the Clinton Park stables, saw the horses, met the people who owned and cared for them. This is wrong, something is wrong. I do not know of a sane man or woman who has come to see for themselves, looked for the truth themselves, and reached a different conclusion than I did. I believe it now more than ever. Everything I see, hear or learn about reaffirms it.
Moral conduct, wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, depends on the intercourse of man with himself – not the websites of advocates and ideologues and the messages on Facebook, not what others think or what we are told to think. It certainly is not a matter of concern with the other, but with the self, not of meekness but of human dignity and even human pride. It does not matter what others think, it matters what I think. The standard is neither the love of some neighbor nor self-love, but self-respect.
And this is what the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights but who abuse people, and the mayor to whom they gave so much money, are doing to the people who work and live in the carriage trade of New York, who own and drive the horses: they seek to take away not only their work and livelihoods, their traditions and ambitions for their families, their histories and dreams, the love of their lives, they seek to steal their sense of worth and pride, they are treated harshly and without love or compassion and are denied even the self-respect a victorious general accords to a vanquished army – the dignity of acknowledging their humanity, to negotiate face to face.
Abuse of power by authority is perhaps the worst kind of abuse, much more dangerous than the abuse of animals. Animals have little power over us, mayors and city council members have a lot. Abuse of power can wipe out lives, destroy 300 jobs and historic buildings and a way of life and the lives of most of the horses in a flash, with one single piece of legislation purchased by angry people with a lot of money who say they love animals but who use them to batter people.
I looked into the determined but also anxious and sometimes hopeless faces of the carriage horse drivers, abused month after month, day after day, living in a cloud of hostile and cruel uncertainty, and then I read the anguished writings and postings of their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. Make no mistake about it, they are brave and guarded, they are hurting and concerned. I see in their faces and hear in their words the very awful sight of abuse revealed.
I see puzzlement and the loss of faith in a system that ought to work as well for them it does as for millionaires or dogs and cats and horses. Is it really a moral position to preach compassion for animals while people are treated so cruelly and maligned so relentlessly? Can people who abuse people really love animals and claim to know what is best for them, and presume to decide their futures and their fates?
The people in the carriage trade or not saints or angels, they are not perfect or without fault. I have no doubt they have done good and they have done some bad, just like me, just like you. And that horses sometimes fall ill and die, just like me, just like you.
The humans involved in this painful conflict are not demons, they are just people, they work hard, they love their families and animals, they commute to work, save up college money, wish to live in peace, pay their bills and plan for their futures and those of their children. These are basic rights for humans, they are being denied then without any proof of wrongdoing, any kind of due process or the most basic tenets of fairness. It is not right. This is not a partisan fight, a left-right fight, a cable new fight. It goes well beyond that. Every sane or moral man or woman is called upon when it comes to the carriage horses to tell right from wrong and also to do right and avoid wrong.
Abuse is wrong, just as wrong when it is done to people as when it is done to animals, one is tied to the other, no movement that practices such cruelty and anger can ever be trusted to care for animals. It is never justifiable, can never be condoned, especially by government, not when it is done to animals, not when it is done to people.
When I rode with a carriage driver in New York last week, he said he believed the carriage trade would prevail against the overwhelming forces organized against them. One of the reasons he gave was the horses. I wasn’t sure what he meant then, but I am beginning to see it now.
The horses do have a voice, they are being heard and felt, they are calling attention to the issues of right and wrong surrounding their future and the lives of the people around them. I’m beginning to think they will, in fact, turn the tide. They are. They speak for themselves in their own way, they speak to us of what abuse really is, and what it isn’t.
I am having the strangest dreams, hearing the horses, receiving messages from them. I am either losing my mind or finding it. I think of the horses and then I think of the extraordinary invisible power of animals written about by the Hebrew mystics, and many Native-Americans, a power they believed resided in all living things, a transmissible spiritual energy capable of being exerted according to the will of its possessor, human or animal, animate or inanimate, a power, according to the Kabbalah, that can even overcome the faithless quarry.
I believe the horses will resolve this painful confrontation, they will point us to the truth, to right and wrong, I think the whole controversy is a message from them, these animals are making a last stand for their history and their kind and for the people willing to keep them in our world in the great city. They are exerting their great will on me and so many others, they are calling out. How strange to say and believe it, how wonderful to feel it and hear it.
For me, the issues are clear and strong. The power of the carriage horses is that the struggle around them has served to awaken us to stop the abuse of human beings in the name of animals, it will do no just service to the cause of either.
It is wrong.