Valentina and her mother drove from Jersey City, New Jersey to touch a New York Carriage Horse. Valentine does not speak English yet, nor does her mother, but her Aunt Sofia spoke some to me. She said Valentina is adopted, her birth mother died several years ago, her father lives in another country now. She had a cat, but he was killed by a truck outside of her apartment. Sofia said she warned Valentina not to touch the horse, but Valentina ran up and grabbed him before she could stop her.

What did she say about the horse?, I asked.

“She asked if she could kiss him on the nose?,” her aunt said.

If you wish to understand the carriage horse controversy, I would suggest  you do what the carriage drivers have been asking the animal rights demonstrators to do for years – touch one of the horses. None of the demonstrators has ever done it, but all of the children do.

Some of the horses love it, some tolerate it, but so many people do it,  it is commonplace. Where else in the great city could a child do something like this? There is something quite magical about the horses, touching them will change the way you feel about them, and for good. Valentina knows this, her aunt was horrified when she was told the city is trying to ban the horses.  Children seem to know this intuitively, they come up and touch the big horses all day, and many of them do kiss them on the nose.

I asked Sofia if she knew that the city was trying to ban the horses, and she was shocked. “What a stupid thing to do!,” she said, and she asked me not to say a word about it in front of Valentina. I did not. In the end, Valentine was too shy to kiss the horse on the nose, but she told he aunt she wanted to touch him near his heart, because she loved him so much.