Two days ago, I wrote a piece called “Do Animals Have The Right To Die?” in which I spoke of a new movement spring from the Carriage Horse controversy in New York, and the idea of reclaiming the animal rights movement from the people who have abused the very idea by becoming one of the most feared, disliked and misguided social movements in America.
The piece went viral, shared thousands of times and provoked comment from all over the country. It is time for this discussion, finally, it is long overdue. It is far too important to be left to mayors and animal rights groups.
People are paying attention, thanks to the carriage horses. We are all beginning to understand that what happens to the horses can and will happen to us – our horses, cows, sheep, cats, our farms, our herding and working dogs, circuses, county fairs, carriage and pony rides, our choices of how and where to get our animals and how and where to live with them and die with them.
When I was in New York two weeks ago, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the holiest man in the Sioux Nation, the leader of the Horse Nation, thanked me for writing about the carriage horses. He told me the horses had called me, among many others, to speak for them and the plight of all of the animals in America who face harassment, banishment and extinction at the hands of feckless and money-hungry politicians and a movement that purports to speak for their rights but does not.
I am not one to believe I am called upon by mystical forces for such high-minded work. I believe my life has drawn me to it, my work has led me to the horses.
I believe the carriage horse and the swirling controversy around them has touched off a great awakening among animal lovers everywhere who are deeply worried about the future of animals in our world. New York is a great stage and the world is paying attention to the fate of the big horses.
This discussion began nearly a century ago when the author Henry Beston called for a “wiser and more mystical” understanding of animals, and he wrote of the ancient and sacred partnership between man and animals who share the joys and travails of the earth together. His call gave birth to the animal rights movement, which, in its modern-day incarnation, he would abhor.
Beston’s call has never been answered. We do not have a wiser or more mystical understanding of animals, they are becoming objects of human exploitation, creatures that exist to soothe us and make us feel good about ourselves, and as a club to batter human beings.
The animal rights movement has become increasingly strident and narrow in it’s view of animals. It sees them in the smallest of ways, primarily as victims of ever expanding and mostly imaginary notions of human abuse – the more abuse there is, the more contributions, donations and political power – and as helpless pets who need to live lives of narrow confinement, increasingly isolated from the developed world.
The country is polarized about animals, as it is about almost everything else. Politicians do not want to have a discussion about animals, and the institutions who should be facilitating it – the A.S.P.C.A. and the H.S.U.S. – have squandered their credibility, they have become combatants and ideologues rather than moderators or leaders.
Both of these once valuable and respected organizations – at various times the great friends of animals – have essentially been purchased by the cash rich and more extreme elements of the so-called animal rights movement. At the national level, both of these organizations are rapidly losing credibility and authority with people who love and live with animals. Like so many others I hear from, I can no longer contribute to them or support their work.
I got a lot of interesting comments in response to my piece, one of the most interesting from one of the more fascinating people in the New York Carriage Horse controversy. Eva Hughes is a former carriage horse driver who has devoted her life to fighting for the survival of her beloved carriage horses in New York. You can see her in the new video, “Save The NYC Carriage Horses,” narrated by Liam Neeson.
Hughes is a ferocious warrior for truth and for the horses, her increasingly popular Facebook Page, “The Famous Carriage Horses Of New York” has become a focal point of the carriage trade resistance to the long and bitter campaign against them. I admire Hughes greatly, she is that rare person in public life, an ordinary person who has found great strength, thoughtfulness and conviction in painful circumstances. She has never abandoned a cause many others would have run screaming from. She is standing up to some of the wealthiest and most powerful forces in New York City, at times almost by herself.
Eva and I see the world of animals in much the same way, I suspect. In our polarized world, words have symbols. “Animal rights” have become a noxious term in much of the animal community, thanks to the people who have co-opted the name. That is a shame.
Hughes is uncomfortable with my use of the term “animal rights,” and, characteristically, she has let me know. Like many advocates for animals, she believes it is improper to give animals the rights of man. “I think the distinction between “rights” and what treatment animals are owed by their stewards is an extremely important one, actually being the very taproot of the controversy itself. Essentially, man’s “rights” cannot be conferred on a class of beings who are not capable of understanding them…” Who delineates what those rights are?, she asks, under what authority? Animals don’t have rights, Hughes wrote, people have responsibilities.
She believes it is this very idea of animal rights that has threatened the carriage horses, it is not, she argues, a question of semantics.
Hughes suspects I am somewhat ahead of my time in using terms that have a very particular meaning now, especially in the conflict about the horses in New York. I laughed at that observation, I always seem to be out of my time in life.
Yet I do feel differently about the term “animal rights” than she does, even if we end up in the same place. Henry Beston – and me – do not define the rights of animals in the way that P.E.T.A., the A.S.P.C.A., or NYClass defines them. They are not the same as our rights, they are something very different. Without the protection of human society and the codified guarantee of certain rights, animals will perish from the earth, as the carriage horses might, our privacy and freedom in our lives with animals will be taken from us, and our lives with them will be altered or destroyed, dictated by remote politicians, pressured by unknowing bureaucrats, defined by social fanatics who seem to know nothing about animals and seek only to drive them from co-existence with human beings.
We have the right to accord animals basic rights because we are the ones destroying their lives and opportunities to work with us. If not us, then who? I am not drawn to the idea of giving man’s rights to animals, I am drawn to the awakening of a new social movement that wants to understand them in a wiser way and keep them alive, relevant, and with us. We built the earth together, we need them more than ever. Ironically, they need the most protection from the people who want to kill them and destroy their lives in order to save them.
Animals will have no rights and no welfare if they no longer exist.
In my community in upstate New York, many farming towns have what they call “Right To Farm Life” laws, enacted in recent years after newcomers and second-home buyers purchase property and then discover what it means to live in an agricultural community: the smells of manure, tractors in the road, the sounds and smells of cows, chickens and donkeys. To protect the farming way of life, hundreds of communities enacted laws giving farmers the right to live their lives, and protection from unthinking regulation and interference.
Many newcomers – especially those from New York City – have actually tried to ban the spreading of manure in fields because the smell bothers them. This reminds me of the animal rights demonstrators who believe the horses are being treated cruelly because they don’t socialize enough with the other horses or eat together in one place.
These “Right To Farm Life” laws have helped immeasurably in the farmer’s struggle – just like the horses – in a world what wants to eat their food but doesn’t want to understand anything about the reality of their lives. They protect the farmer’s way of life and the decisions he or she has to make to keep his farm operating.
In many respects the cultural civil war raging over animals in America is a conflict between the rural and agricultural world and the urban world, whose view of animals has shrunk to an understanding of all animals as if they were emotionalized pets – dogs and cats. The animal rights movement is essentially urban and disconnected from the natural world. The apartment dwellers shouting at the carriage horse drivers in New York seem to have no familiarity with animals at all, or any desire to touch them or get close to them.
I take a lot of photographs of the dairy farmers in my community, I have come to know and love many of them. They remind me of the people in the carriage trade in some ways, the horse people have their roots in animal-centered, agricultural communities in Ireland and other countries. Like the farmers, the carriage trade people are not media-savvy, they are too busy. They are not politically savvy either, thus vulnerable to feckless government regulators and bribeable politicians. They are the frequent targets of organizations that claim to speak for animals.
In New York, the carriage trade is fighting back, something farmers have never done, and they – Eva Hughes is on the front lines – are rapidly gaining public support, changing the dynamics of the discussion. They are also drawing support from animal lovers all over the country, people who are shocked and horrified at the nature of the campaign against them.
Can we leave the rights of animals entirely to private individuals? I don’t think so. But we do need to reclaim the discussion. I do believe society needs to consider according animal owners and their animals some basic rights as well as take responsibility for their care:
– Animals have the right to survive, not be ghettoized to rescue farms and preserves. If New York City had a “Right To Animal Life” law, the horses could not be taken from the owners by government fiat, taken from their owners, sold to rescue farms, or replaced by ugly electric cars, or banned because they leave some manure on the streets. No one has the right to take someone else’s animal away except under the most egregious circumstances, none of which have been proven or even alleged by the authorities in New York City.
– People have the right to keep and own their own animals. This is a right, a recognition of the human animal bond, one of the most powerful traditions in nature and human history. No one has the right to interfere with the relationship of a human being and his or her animal absent proof of extreme cruelty and abuse. In New York City, we are all awakening to the real abuse, that of government power, limitless wealth, and hate groups masquerading as progressive or humanistic social movements.
It is an abuse of power for governments to seek to remove animals from environments where they are safe and well cared for.
– Animals have the right to die, we have lost all respect for death. People have the right to end the lives of the animals in their care. Every animal cannot be rescued, every animal cannot live forever. Animals will get sick, have accidents, and they will fall, just as humans do. Beston’s idea was the right one.They are partners, not just our wards.
The life or death of an animal is an individual thing, a sacred matter between the animals and the human beings responsible for their care. People have the right to determine the fate of their animals, or animals will continue to disappear from the ordinary lives of humans. Government has no place intruding in this most personal of relationships.
Everything happens for a reason, and some good comes from even the most awful things. If the carriage horses spark the reclamation of a wise and mystical understanding of animal rights – Beston’s dream (and mine also, now) – then this agonizing conflict will have worth and meaning.
“You and I are on the forefront of this important social battle that is taking place right now in our culture,” Eva Hughes wrote, “not by design, but by virtue of who we are.”
Thanks to Eva for helping to kick off this discussion, which has already grown beyond the horses, even as their fate is yet unknown. This is a great way to begin the long and difficult discussion people who love animals will need to have with one another, animals deserve a better dialogue than the litany of cruelty, accusation and attack on display every day in New York City. I believe that people who love animals know how to love people, it is not possible to have compassion for one while hating the other. I can talk to Eva Hughes and she can talk to me, a jarring contrast to the shouting demonstrators who yell at tourists and children in the park.
Do animals have rights? Or do people have responsibilities? Or are both things possible and true?