Am I up to this? Are you?

This, I suppose, is the question those of us who love animals and wish to keep them in our world face. Do we speak out for the real rights of animals and the people who love them, or do we succumb to this growing idea that politics are now beyond people like us, we don’t have the heart for it, the rage, or the money.  I believe we can save the animals in our world, and that we should. I believe that is the message of the New York carriage horses.

So this is the question: Will we let them take the horses away, and then the ponies, and then the elephants in the zoo, the llamas in the farmers markets, the chickens on the farms, the animals in the movies, the border collies in the field, the sweet Labs the good breeders breed.

Are we willing to do the hard and dirty work of keeping animals in our world?  I am not a political person, I am not a joiner of groups, one to lobby politicians, go to meetings, sign petitions, send out enraged tweets or nasty e-mails, shout them at people in the street. The people who call themselves supporters of animal rights have some great advantages over people like me and you. They know how to put up photos of starving puppies and fallen horses, and stir the hearts of good-hearted  and naive people, get them to send money. They know who to give it to..

They are not like us. Since they don’t really seem to like animals much, or  want them around, and they don’t live on farms, or know much about animals, they have a lot more money, time and energy than most animal lovers do. Animal people have never been any good at politics. They are happily interior and self-absorbed. They would much rather talk about their animals than talk to mayors. Perhaps that’s why the animals are vanishing from our world more quickly than we can even grasp.

I don’t know if I can do it. I am not someone who tells other people what to do, what animals they ought to have, where they ought to get them, what they should eat, whether they should go to the circus, take their kid for a pony, buy the dog they have always dreamed of, put their horse down then they think he needs to go. I would be happy to never meet a politician in my life, or talk to one.

Our political system is tailor-made for the people trying to take the horses away, to tell us we can’t have a dog if we don’t have a bigger fence or if we have a job. Politicians don’t listen to people like you or me, we don’t have money to write big checks to them. The system works for the angry people, for the well-organized, the fanatics, the loudest and the most vengeful,  for the joiners and lobbyists and self-righteous. For those who only see black or only see white, who life in the world of the “left” or the “right.”

Can it work for us, and our horses and dogs and outdoor cats and ponies, our border collies, our rescue dogs, and yes, our poodles and pain-in-the-ass Jack Russell’s?

Perhaps I can do it if you can, if we all do what we can. I can write, I can’t go and rage on Facebook all day. Perhaps you can do what you can and together, we can reclaim the real rights of animals and the true rights of the people who own and love them?

Before it’s too late. Which is getting to be. I don’t know for sure, but I think we are an Animal Nation, divided in all sorts of ways but united in one: we love animals and wish them to remain in our world, to live with us, to work with us, to lighten our lives. That can make a mighty roar. The horses in New York are already hearing it.

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The big horses have brought many gifts to human beings over time, the New York Carriage Horses have awakened many of us to an urgent and widening debate  about the future of animals in our world, the most fundamental question being: what are animals for?

There is little doubt now that the animal rights movement represents only a fraction of the American public when it comes to deciding the future of animals and setting standards for their well-being. They raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year, primarily from wealthy celebrities and from people affected by a continuous stream of images of abused, neglected and suffering animals. They contribute many tens of millions of dollars to political campaigns, they storming public meetings, shouting the nastiest slogans on the streets,  and are skilled at manipulating a  lazy and manipulable media.

In addition to being skilled at emotional opportunism and distortion and fund-raising, these groups are technologically savvy, they have a vast network of websites, blogs and mailing campaigns focused on upsetting people,  projecting animals as piteous and abused, and desperately in need of help – a/k/a/ money.  The animal rights movement may be one of the most disliked and feared social movements in the America, but they can bury almost anyone when it comes to getting people to part with their money.

The people who actually own their animals, love them, work with them and keep them in the world are the villains in this drama,  cast as the enemy, as callous or greedy or clueless abusers. Like the carriage trade owners and drivers a few years ago, they are mostly in shock, bewildered and confused by this onslaught against their way of life.

Owning an animal – I have dogs, donkeys, sheep, barn cats and chickens – is a personal experience, almost a narcissistic one. When animal people do talk to one another, it tends to be in a self-interested way: horse people talk to horse people, Lab owners talk to Lab owners, rescue people talk to rescue people. The horses are awakening us to the big picture, the one we  rarely see.

But it is becoming clear to all of us that we are at the crossroads, our way of life with animals is under fire, and in danger of vanishing.

Animal rights organizations – PETA, the newly radicalized U.S. Humane Society and A.S.P.C.A. – have formed a powerful coalition with an agenda that is now  startlingly at odds with the vast majority of people who love, live with, work with and own animals.

PETA’s motto is very clear.  I have always considered myself a supporter of animal rights, my steer Elvis was the Humane Society poster boy in their corporate farming campaign. But PETA’s motto is very far from my beliefs about the place of animals in our world.

“Animals,” says PETA, “are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any way.” As the carriage horse conflict demonstrates, PETA also believes that work, even for working animals, is a form of abuse. The result, as is also clear in the New York Carriage Horse controversy,  a well-funded, politically connected campaign to remove almost all domesticated animals other than house pets from our lives. They can only live in fantasy, in paradise, in the mythical wild, on rescue farms the property of the rich. They are vanishing from circuses, movies, many farms, private homes, research labs, county fairs, private homes and perhaps from the carriage stables in New York City.

It seems clear enough that if it’s abuse for working horses to work, then it must also be considered abuse for working animals like dogs to work.  Could it really be true that animals cannot live humane, regulated and meaningful lives in circuses or zoos, just as the carriage horses do in New York? More than 95 per cent of Americans eat food that comes from animals in one form or another.  Do they have a voice in the future of animals? Do the children who come every day to see the big horses in the park?

Our ideas about the lives of animals are not the same as PETA’s. Animals have always entertained us, lightened our lives and souls. They have always fed us, sustained and nourished us. They have always fired the imaginations of children, comforted them and opened their eyes to the wonder of the world.  They have always worked with us and for us, connecting us to nature and helping us to create our world. It would be a great environmental disaster to see them vanish, or have their lives defined in so narrow and joyless a way. There is no magic in the PETA slogan, no history, no compassion or understanding of the great and complex partnership with animals that has defined the human experience.

The New York Carriage Horse controversy has given us the best and clearest look yet at the war over animals and how it is growing and being played out in our political system. Last week, a new poll by the respected Quinnipiac survey found that the carriage horses in New York are more popular than the mayor seeking to ban them. More than 66 per cent of all New Yorkers oppose the mayor’s efforts to ban the carriage trade from New New York City. Twenty-six percent of New Yorkers want to shut down the industry. About 51 per cent of New Yorkers approve of the mayor.

At almost any other time in American political history that would be the end of it. It would be over.  Democracies are built on the notion of individual liberty and majority rule. In a polarized world, more New Yorkers agree about the horses than almost any other issue in the city.  But the movement that describes itself as being for the rights of animals is not interested in the majority view, nor, apparently, is the mayor. Animal rights groups in New York City gave $1.3 million to the mayor and other politicians in last year’s city-wide election campaigns.

Supporters of the New York Carriage horses  gave nothing to the mayor, they are not organized in any coherent way. It is difficult to find any other rational explanation for this agonizing conflict, which has already dragged on beyond reason or rationale.

In the face of  enormous and almost universal opposition,  the mayor promises to move ahead with the carriage trade ban by the end of the year. He and the animal rights organizations are not interested in what the public thinks, or what a platoon of vets, trainers, journalists and many private citizens have come to see in the carriage conflict: the horses are well-regulated, healthy, well-cared for and content. The carriage owners and drivers are victims of a great and continuing injustice.

There have been some cracks in the war against the horses. According to Crain’s Business Report, the two major groups seeking to ban the horses – N.Y. Class, and the Coalition To Ban The Carriage Horses – are at odds over the proposal to replace the carriages with vintage electric cars that cost about $160,000 apiece. N.Y.Class, which spent a half-million dollars building prototypes of the cars, is, according to Crain’s, wobbling on the cars – the idea has been almost universally ridiculed – and the new and emerging plan is to motorize the existing carriages and use them to replace the horses who once pulled.

It’s interesting, but once again no one seems to notice or care that the carriages – like the horses themselves – are private property, and it is not up to animal rights groups to refit them or decide what happens to them. Nor has anyone asked the owners or drivers if they would agree to such a plan and give up their carriages or drive them. This elitist strain – this dehumanizing of the people in the carriage trade as not being worthy of human contact – has become a hallmark of the campaign against the horses. That, and not really caring what anyone else says, feels or thinks. The mayor, a self-described progressive refuses to meet or speak with the carriage owners or drivers.

If they get the horses, then we are next. We are all on the list, every single person reading this.

This new idea about the rights of animals is also a new idea about the rights of the people who own them. The animal rights movement does not support the rights of animals, nor will it help them to survive in our world. I suppose we have to do that ourselves.  The animal rights movement believes that animals ought to be kept away from us, the horses pulling carriages, the elephants walking in the ring,  rescue dogs too, the ponies, the lions in the zoo, the border collies in the field, the old dog in the house of a lonely elderly woman who must keep him in a small yard.

The carriage trade is becoming media-savvy, learning the sad rules of contemporary politics, in some ways, doomed to become what they hate. They are setting up their websites, organizing quick-response media times, lobbying politicians.

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So that’s our choice. Am I up to it? Are you?  A life-long outsider, I am coming to believe in the idea of an Animal Nation, a partnership between people and animals that has marked the human-animal bond for many thousands of years. I talk to them every day, they do not want animals to disappear from the world. Our long and sacred connection to animals is a precious and sacred thing, it is now in peril. If the horses are banned in New York, they will never be seen again, yet another chapter in the awful and very familiar story of human beings and animals, another kind of slaughter.