A good friend of mine – Jim – is always uncomfortable when he sees carriage horses pulling carriages through Central Park in the summer. He worries, he says, that the poor horses are just being worked too hard, that they aren’t having fun. One of Jim’s favorite things is to come to my farm and see my border collie Red herd our sheep, even on the hottest, most fly-infested and humid days. He never worries about Red, or whether he is having fun, or being overworked, or whether Red might be happier roaming some sylvan field in Ireland, sleeping out in the open pasture.
I asked Jim recently why he viewed the horse and the border collie so differently, since Red works so much harder than any carriage horse. I asked him why the grueling work of the dog in all weather under often brutal and very rough conditions is beautiful and inspiring to him, but the ancient work of the draft horse – pulling carts and carriages and hauling wood and goods – is disturbing. He thought about it for awhile, and he said he really had no idea, the border collies just seem so enthusiastic to him and the horses seem so reserved.
When Jim sees the horses in New York with their heads down, he worries that they are depressed. When he sees them with their rear right legs raised he thinks they might be lame. When he see Red with his head frozen to the ground, he thinks he is wonderfully focused, when he sees Red’s rib cage showing after days of hard and intense work, he thinks he is heroic.
Why, I ask, don’t you ever worry about Red? “I don’t know,” he says, “I loved Babe.”
The parable of the carriage horse and the border collie is important, especially in light of the raging controversy over the New York Carriage horses (my book “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World” was published in e-form yesterday for $3.99). We all view different animals in different ways, we all project our own ideas and feelings onto them, and the different ways in which we see animals helps explain why the work of my border collie Red is exalted and admired, and the work of the carriage horse is increasingly reviled as cruel and abusive.
Jim and I talk about this a lot, he is a curious and open-minded man. I explained to him that all working animals, especially animals like the carriage horses, who have been bred to work for centuries, live for work, it is their purpose. It is not so much that they love working – I don’t think border collies consciously “love” their work, rather it is their reason for existence, their genetics, their breeding and experience.
Border collies show what humans think of as enthusiasm – usually, this is arousal. Big horses are much calmer and more subtle. You have to know horses to understand when a carriage horses is content and at peace (their heads are down and their right rear legs are up, as a matter of fact.)
If you stand in the stables in New York, you can see the excitement of the horses when they see their bridles and harnesses approaching. Their snort, raise their heads and ears, their tails swish. They are going to work, fulfilling their purpose, I see the very same look in Red when we go out to the pasture. The horses quiver in excitement, they leave their stalls eagerly, they head downstairs to their carriages, I have never seen one refuse to go out, balk or hang back, dragged reluctantly out into the world.
Red does the same thing when he goes to work, he quivers, tenses, his whole frame and purpose, every gene in his body is focused on his work. Critics say it is wrong to work the horses for money, but people flock to herding trials to see the border collie work for ribbons and the glory of human trainers. Are the sheep having any fun? They sure seem depressed to me.
Border collies were not created to do therapy work, they were bred in the British Isles a century or so ago to herd sheep more effectively and save sheep and make more money for farmers. They are still primarily bred for that purpose, except in America, where more and more are being bred to be pets or emotional surrogates for needy humans. Is that really more noble than work, I asked Jim? I didn’t see it that way, he says.
In American culture, the plains horse has been glorified again and again in the western, guiding John Wayne and various heroes and soldiers to glory. I would pay a lot of money to see an animal rights group accuse John Wayne of cruelty and abuse for riding his big butt on a horse all over a movie lot for days on end to make money for studios. I bet those horses would have been tickled to live in a heated and air-conditioned stall and pull a rubber-wheeled light carriage over flat ground.
The American pony, the horse that lived in North America when the pilgrims and the work horses came, is long gone, sacrificed and slaughtered because Americans had no work for them. The big horses have never lived outdoors, they would have no idea what to do there, they would succumb to the elements and probably some predators, starvation and disease. They have always been stabled and worked with people. The carriage horses in New York are alive today only for one reason, I reminded Jim.
Because there is work for them to do. For animals in the modern world, that is the life saver. I never thought of that, he said.
I have lived with border collies, worked sheep with them and written about the for nearly two decades, they are my dog. I love them dearly, but no border collie I know on a farm has one third the cushy life of a New York Carriage Horse. None of them have hundreds of pages of regulations governing their work. The horses do not work in extreme heat or cold, as border collies do, They do not run themselves into the ground exhausted, as border collies do, they are fed fresh hay and water constantly, they work an average of six hours a day and get five weeks of vacation a year. They live, on average, twice as long as horses in the wild or on rescue farms.
My border collie Red just came inside after a brutal round of farm work in 93 degree heat with swarming and vicious horse flies, gnats and mosquitoes and belligerent ewes and lambs who butted him, kicked at him, made him work so hard his tongue was hanging off of the ground. Jim can’t get enough of it, he thinks it is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
He has been raked by barbed wire, knocked senseless by rams, run headlong into barn wood and brambles, cut his pads on sharp rocks (a painful injury for a working dog), lay still for long minutes while flies swarm his eyes. Does Red love his work? I don’t think he thinks about it any more than the horses do, it is simply what he does, what he lives for, what he is about. Following the carriage horse story, I expect demonstrators at the pasture gate any date demanding that I stop abusing my dog by working him and treating him so much worse than a carriage horse.
Red, like the horses, has no voice in this discussion. Dogs and horses do not make career choices, they are the product of years – centuries – of careful breeding, experience, training and social acclimation. There is this idea that the environment in NYC is somehow toxic for the horses, but there is no medical or other evidence to support that, it is mostly a human idea of what is pretty and natural. In the wild, sick horses die, freeze to death, are killed by other horses, starve. My farm is much more toxic than Central Park, Red navigates all kinds of dangerous things, from barbed wire to vicious horse flies to poisonous weeds and buried glass.
Unfortunately, they don’t make glorious movies about carriage horses the way they made movies about the western horses. Or the way they make movies about border collies. Just think of Babe, or the thousands of You Tube herding and trial videos (some of them mine), or the annual National Geographic story claiming border collies now know a million words and can translate six languages.
The work of the border collie is celebrated everywhere, and the breed has become emotionalized and personified, the way so many animals in America are. They can do no wrong, nobody looks at them and thinks they need to be saved from work. The carriage horses are personified also, but in the reverse way. The animal rights movement is surprisingly elitist, work is held in awfully low esteem, the big draft horses are not glamorous, pulling carriages usually stirs the hearts of lovers, hopeless romantics, tourists and kids. No animal rights groups worries about the work the border collie does – often grueling work solely for the ribbons of prideful humans. Nor do they reinvent the very idea of abuse in order to justify persecuting the people who own them – at least not yet.
Simple and honest, even historic, work is now considered abuse, in need of banishment and censure. How, I ask Jim, does one reconcile the work of the carriage horse with the work of the border collie? I can’t say one is superior to the other, or more noble or worthwhile. The border collie and the carriage horse both serve human beings at the highest level of connection and purpose. The horses provide jobs, connect humans to the natural world, help showcase New York’s beautiful Central Park, and the parks in so many other cities.
The border collie sacrifices himself for humans every day, engages us with their intelligence and enthusiasm, connects us with the natural world. But so does the work horse, with a much longer, richer and deeper history than the border collie. Maybe our problem is our short attention span.
Maybe Liam Neeson needs to make a movie about a carriage horse in Central Park who helps a family find good work in America, who lights up the eyes and hearts of children, who launches lovers on their path to love and connection, who brightens the city with their iconic charm and history. Maybe the horse could race off down a Central Park path and nudge a child out of the way of a rampaging eco-friendly, cruelty-free electric car. Maybe that would become a TV series, or a summer mega-blockbuster with special affects. (The horse could fend off terrorists, too). I can picture “Chester: The Superhorse,” a kind of Transformer horse who blows up alien spaceships, plows through skyscrapers, dodges tracer bullets and bombs. Let’s see the mayor try and ban “Chester: Super Carriage Horse,” those nasty demonstrators would be cowering under manhole covers.
The mayor would quickly find some other cause to focus on, the animal rights groups could go back to finding some elderly women to harass because they can’t walk their dogs often enough and don’t have tall fences, and some measure of peace might return to the animal world in New York.
In the meantime, Jim and I and Red will keep up our work, at least until the demonstrators arrive and wave their placards at the sheep and scream that border collies need to be banned from working with sheep and be rehomed to rescue pastures, where they can roam freely and without any kind of labor.