“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe..”  – John Muir

There are many powerful ideas hovering around the fate of the New York carriage horses, they challenge us to discover our humanity, our empathy and connection, our connection to the natural world. The horses do not exist apart from the universe, apart from nature, apart from the future of animals in our world, or from our own future. They can not be singled out to meet the needs of arrogant and disconnected human beings. When we remove them from our lives, from our existence, we find that they are attached to us, our children, Mother Earth, the natural world and the universe beyond.

It was the Sioux who first warned that as the animals went, so went their way of life.  They talk of a great dream, a great dance in which the horses foresaw their slaughter and extinction from their world. One day, they predicted, they would be needed again, and they would return.

When the horses left, the world of the Sioux fell apart and has never recovered. The horses remind us that they are not apart from us, they are us, they are our partners in the world, their fate is our fate, we can not single them out by themselves, we will find they are hitched to everything else in our world.