There is much talk in New York City these days about cruelty to animals.
I do not live in New York City and most of my blog and book readers – scattered all over the country and some of the world – do not live there either. We watch – transfixed and sometimes appalled – from a distance, as the controversy grows and deepens, spins and winds through the great city.
The horses have called down the wind and the thunder over their future, just like the Native-Americans always said they could. The carriage horse debate is a living thing now; it began as a squall and has become something of a hurricane. It sucks more and more people into it every day and gets bigger and louder.
The arguments rage, the protests, accusations, tweets, counter accusations, blogs, interviews, bumper stickers, videos, Facebook warriors, nasty e-mails, pages, petitions, phone chains, links and pledges, demonstrations, placards and slogans, editorials, polls, donations and signatures, blogs and website rant and boil. All of this over the fate of the New York Carriage Horses. It is no longer a local story, but a great battle of differing values.
For centuries, the great philosophers – Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes – have wondered what it really is that separates human beings from the animal kingdom. Not surprisingly, it was Mark Twain who came the closest to answering the question.
Human beings, he wrote, are the only animals capable of immorality. “Man is the cruel animal,” he wrote. “He is alone in that distinction.” That is the real story of the New York Carriage Horses. There is great cruelty, much abuse. But it is not against the horses.
It is the humans who are the cruelest animals.
Every day my readers message me about the horses from all over the country – on Facebook, in e-mail, sending links and blogs. And in the five months that I have been writing about the carriage horses, I am struck by how many of those messages say the same thing. My readers are a diverse bunch, they have all kinds of different opinions on everything. But not on the carriage horses.
“I don’t understand the hatred I see” e-mailed Jane Kirkland from Oregon. “Why is the movement against the carriage people so cruel?”
“It is hard to grasp this,” wrote Joe from Denver, “the attacks on the carriage horse people just seem irrational. They don’t seem to know a thing about animals.”
Good people can – do – disagree about whether the big horses ought to be in New York City.
I believe that they do, but I understand that there are different ways to look at the world. The future of these animals in our cities and towns is an important subject, it ought to be debated and discussed before the horses, like so many other animals, disappear from our world.
Most of my readers and me have been talking about animals with each other for some years now. I have animals who are pets and some who are farm animals, I live and write on the boundary between the two cultures; I share my life with animals, all of its travails and joys. My work and blog have drawn many people from both worlds, farmers and breeders, rescue groups and animal rights and welfare advocates.
We have conducted a rich and open dialogue together for a long time; we are figuring out to do it, even on the Internet in 2014. People can still disagree with one another in a civil way, perhaps not in Washington, maybe not in New York City. Too bad for the horses. My websites and blog and open groups are anger-free zones, safe places. It can be done.
More than anything else, the people who message me have mirrored my own very disturbed feeling about the controversy, above and beyond the arguments themselves.
Why is this discussion so cruel, why is the campaign against the horses so personal, so implacable, so ideologically rather than fact driven?
The carriage owners and drivers are being systematically dehumanized. The assaults on them are mostly demonstrably false and hurtful. In the last week or so, I have tried to leave some of the arguing behind – there are plenty of other people slugging it out – and am working to try to understand the context, on why this is happening and is so ugly. For me, it is a time to try and be useful, not loud.
One reason this issue is unfolding in such an intense way is that the carriage horses have become the Battle of Bull Run in the deepening cultural, civil war between people who have pets and people who have animals. It is the first great struggle of an inevitable conflict.
A conflict between between agricultural and urban people, between people who live with animals and people who live with pets; between people who see animals primarily in terms of creatures to be rescued, and people who see them as partners in our lives.
It is a conflict between people who believe animals should live perfect lives without struggle, work or danger, and people who believe they share the travails and comforts of their lives with human beings.
The story of Tony Salerno, the driver of Spartacus, the horse who fell down last week when his carriage tipped, is a symbol of what is so troubling about this story: the demonization of human beings, a sad feature of human history.
Salerno, an experienced owner/driver well-liked and well known for his effusive personality and his affection for his horse, behaved nothing short of heroically last Thursday, by all accounts but one. He got the tangled harness off of Spartacus; he calmed him, got him safely to his feet, made sure the horse was not hurt, and that no human was injured. He righted the carriage and took the horse back to his stable, made sure he was all right, and sat up all night crying.
To understand the rhetoric of dehumanization, imagine if PETA held a press conference about a gay or African-American man or woman was involved in an accident with a horse and said he was less than a real man, or she less than a woman. Twitter would have exploded with outrage and denunciation, the mayor would be knocking over reporters to get to a microphone to distance himself.
Why is it all right to say this about Tony Salerno, whose only crime was to be a working class immigrant? Because African-Americans and gays and women have fought for their right to be human, Tony Salerno and the carriage drivers have had their humanity taken away. They are only beginning to understand what is being done to them, since the carriage horse controversy in New York marks the first time in recorded human history that work has been considered abusive for working draft horses.
To apply the rhetoric of enmity, you must first take away the human being.
In a different world, Salerno would be going to City Hall this week to get a medal for acting so calmly and professionally and for preventing harm or injury to any living thing. But the mayor of New York, who seems not to be the mayor of all the people but only some, is an animal rights activist who could not acknowledge that Salerno did well.
The mayor watched from the sidelines as Salerno was pilloried in the most irresponsible way by several animal rights organizations as a greedy and callous person and by a mysterious witness who talked like a PETA demonstrator. Palermo was called an animal abuser, described as something less than a man, someone who only cared for the carriage, not the horse, as a liar and person without morals or feelings.
The carriage people, mostly Irish and other immigrants to America, have lived under this cloud and these awful circumstances for years now. They have been called all kinds of names, many obscene and some personal, accused of all sorts of animal cruelty, forced to live in uncertainty, subject to continuous and very personal attacks, threatened with the loss of their livelihood as well as their animals. They mayor refuses to meet with them, developers are drooling over their stables, the naive think work for work horses is horrifying, and they the target of well organized groups with enormous amounts of money. Every week, demonstrators gather in the park to call them murderers and torturers, thieves and heartless abusers.
How to make sense out of this?
If you step back a bit, the story behind the story becomes clearer. I have studied attachment theory for years; we all use animals in different ways and for our own needs. I have border collies and Labs for a reason; I have rescue donkeys and chickens and dogs for a reason; we all use animals for our own purposes; we view them in the ways we need to view them, we get the animals we need. Almost all of those reasons and purposes come from our own pasts and emotional histories.
We are all mythmakers; we need myths and stories to explain who we are, to paint portraits of ourselves, to heal our wounds and justify our existence, our origins and our destiny.
The abused animal has become one of the most powerful myths in our disconnected culture, millions of people have embraced it to give their lives meaning and purpose, and a sense of morality in a valueless time and status in a world where ordinary people have little power. It is a pathway to community, identity and connection – and a chance to do good – in a fragmented world. But with this movement, one of the oldest and most enduring myths in human existence – Joseph Campbell has written about it a thousand times – has been reborn: the rise of the demons and monsters.
In the animal world, especially the animal rights world, the demon of myth is the abuser. He is everywhere, lurking behind every corner, in every home, on every horse carriage. He is the demon resurrected, he is not only evil, he justifies being evil.
Narratives about human monsters and demons without mercy or morality have gripped the human imagination from the cave dwellings to the New York Carriage Horse Controversy. The drivers have become a myth for the animal rights movement. They are no longer human beings who might or might be wrong in their views, to be talked to or negotiated with – they are monsters, to be treated without empathy and mercy.
It is dangerous to view a human being as something other than human, because it justifies any lie, abuse or cruelty against him or her. If someone is not human, we are not bound by any moral laws or restraints in our treatment of them. We can say anything about them, call them the most offensive names, accuse them of the most dreadful things, even take their work and their private property away.
In critical moments of life and conflict, wrote the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the rational forces that resist the old mythical conceptions are no longer certain of themselves. “In these difficult moments the time for myth has come again,” he wrote, “for it is never very far from us.” Unlike animals, myths are never far from human consciousness; they have never really been vanquished or subjugated. Myths are always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for their hour.
The dehumanization of people is almost always preceded by what is called the rhetoric of enmity. Human beings – African-Americans, Jews, Serbs, the Irish,Native-Americans, Mexicans, Rwandans, many women, Gypsies, gays – have all experienced the rhetoric of enmity, they know exactly what it is, they recognize it instantly.
It always begins with the use of language and rhetoric as a weapon in which human beings are reduced to stereotypical myths. They are lazy, immoral, greedy, somehow not human or less than human. They are inferior, devious and furtive, untrustworthy, without the traits or right to join the community of moral and righteous people.
This rhetoric is the dominant and most shocking characteristic of the animal rights groups and their assault on the carriage trade. They do not simply disagree about the horses; they detest the people who own and ride them, even the people who pay to ride in them. Their protest signs are filled with accusations of cruelty, abuse, indifference. Over time, the campaign evolves, it is no longer about the horses, everyone can see that, it has become an angry demon of its own, it exists without reason or restraint.
I was rendered nearly speechless at a Central Park demonstration one Sunday afternoon by animal rights protesters watching three women and a young man scream obscenities at a carriage driver and three visibly frightened children riding his carriage with their European parents.
“Murderers go home,” they shouted, “greedy people go home! “F—— A——-s! Go home!” The demonstrators charged at the horses, poking placards in their faces as if to startle them, perhaps provoke an accident with children, one much better publicity wise than the feeble story of Spartacus’s falling down and getting up.
There was something eerily familiar about this scene for me. As a reporter, I traveled through the South during the racial troubles of the 70’s, and I saw this kind of hatred in the faces of people a number of times. They were indelible scenes to witness, they spoke of the worst traits of human beings, I have never forgotten them, I never expected to see them in Central Park on a peaceful and beautiful Sunday.
Was I really seeing this again, I wondered, in a demonstration over horses aimed at people trying to make a living by driving carriages that belonged to other people? But then, the dehumanizing of people is all about the loss of perspective, the myth of the monster dies in the presence of perspective.
The rhetoric of enmity has a long and meticulously-documented history. The subhuman is not really human at all, they do not deserve respectful disagreement or dignity. You have no need to meet with them or negotiate with them, you can accuse them of anything at all with no proof of any kind, even the harshest names in front of innocent children. They are lesser beings; they exist on a lower rung of the great chain of being.
When animal rights groups held their press conferences after the fall of Spartacus on Central Park South, they quoted the visitor from Oklahoma who said she saw a group of men – “if you can call them that,” saying they had to protect the carriage first, as it might cost them money. The driver held the horse on the ground, keeping him in needless pain. She said it was the worst case of animal abuse she had ever seen. She said Salerno made the horse, who she said was limping, go back to work. She said a bus spooked the horse. There is no evidence of any kind that this description of the incident was true, there is much to suggest it was not.
The animal rights groups did not know or care that the driver barely spoke English. They choose to make Salerno less than a man, less than a human, because it served their principle – to drive the horses and all of the people around them out of their work and a way of life.
I know some of these people; they are familiar fixtures in the animal world; I have interviewed them for articles and for research on my books. Therapists would quickly point to their anger and rigidity as the classic symptoms of people who bring their own histories into their activism, who project their own anger and sense of victimization and childhood fantasies onto animals.
This rage is a common and rapidly growing phenomena as people lose touch with real animals and project human neuroses onto pets like dogs and cats and then, to all animals. In a sense, we are using them as living trash cans, dumping our stuff onto them, a new kind of abuse, conducted under cover of loving animals. We turn them into damaged versions of us, then insist they are too fragile to live anywhere but in no-kill shelters and on rescue farms.
It is the presence of demons that turns these quite unsuspecting animals into objects of rescue, symbols of monstrous abuse, and thus, of human heroism and human worth. Then, the rage: the protesters are not attacking humans; they are simply exposing and rooting out demons and monsters, taking their work and their animals away from them. The animals are then given perfect lives – no work, no connection with people, a sylvan existence in the wilds of nature, on beautiful rescue farms with endless fields of green grass.The fantasy becomes complete. The animals, saved from the demon human beings, get to live the lives we never got to live.
For the drivers and owners of the horses, the moral challenge is to never become the demons who are attacking them. I think it is among the most difficult things to be cruelly and unjustly attacked and hold one’s sense of well-being and spiritual ground. If the danger to the horses is largely imagined, and almost completely unproven, the danger to the people in the carriage trade is all too real. They are being abused.
One day, the placards will find their mark; someone will get hurt. There will be enough money to buy a ban from the mayor and the City Council. A stable owner, exhausted by years of conflict and harassment, will finally accept the millions of dollars being offered by developers. One day they may all lose their jobs, their income, their homes. One day their horses may be taken from them, forced onto rescue farms where they will eat and drop manure for the rest of their lives, or to slaughterhouses, where 155,000 horses a year go every year.
It helped for me to go back and re-read Mr. Twain, a shrewd observer of human nature, and to take his idea and place it in the modern context of the carriage wars in New York City:
Man is the cruel animal.
He is the only animal that deals in the atrocity of atrocities, war.
He is the only animal that for principle and ideology will march out..and help to injure, lie about and attack strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.
And in the intervals between attacks and campaigns will wash the blood off of his hands and rinse the lies from his tongue, and work, with his mouth only, for the love of animals and the brotherhood of man.
We all make our own myths; we all choose our own. Joseph Campbell called up on us to choose our individual myths wisely, our myths determine who we really are and wish to be.
Here’s mine:
“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world,” he wrote. “We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can chose to live in joy.”