A few days ago, a message was posted on my Facebook page from a New Yorker named Craig Sheldon, it was about the New York Carriage Horses. I don’t know Craig but I feel connected to him, as sometimes happens on Facebook, he seems grounded and compassionate to me, free of angry rhetoric and argument, a rational man in search of the right thing to do.
“I think what has got me passionately worked up on this issue is the same sense of injustice,” he wrote. “That these people who know nothing about horses claim to know what the horses want and what is best for them. And the ultimate injustice – one that literally brings tears to my eyes – is that even if by some amazing feat, the 200 plus carriage horses were rescued, 200 plus horses who desperately need rescuing – won’t be, and will go to their death. This is an injustice that we must fight.”
That is an injustice to be fought, for sure, there is more than one to this story, and here is another: if the horses are banned, 300 people and their spouses, children and families will lose their work and way of life, their bread and sustenance, even though they have done no wrong, broken no law, committed no crimes. A much loved 150 year-old tradition will be broken, one of our few remaining connections to the natural world in our greatest city will be broken as well. There will be another sad victory for money and mechanical things over the animals of the world.
And the great park, built for the horses, will be despoiled again.
A large and growing casualty list – horses and people – will rise from a needless controversy that should never have been and is not about the welfare of animals, but human egos, money, ignorance, and displaced rage.
When humans are both arrogant and ignorant, horses will die.
I believe that decent men and women will always fight injustice and Craig’s message focused my attention on one particularly tragic element of the carriage horse controversy.
The cruel and unnecessary death of animals might be expected to arouse and enrage the true supporters of animals and animal rights. But there are some – including the mayor of New York City – who are so blinded by their fanatic pursuit of the carriage trade that they seem not to see, or perhaps not to care, that if the New York Carriage Horses are banned, a lot of horses will die both brutally and needlessly.
Animal rights organizations – some of whom have marched all over the land to break open fences and doors to free meat chickens from farms and rats from laboratories – will not cross the street in Central Park to keep hundreds, even thousands, of horses from being killed as the result of this controversy. In fact, they are working feverishly, raising money desperately, working around the clock to kill them.
Horses will suffer and die because horses that are well cared for and not in need of rescue – the carriage horses – may be taken from their homes and lives and people and sent away to a dangerous world mostly because a millionaire “animal rights” advocate in New York decided one day that work is abuse for horses. The many horses in this country that are starving will be left to their fates.
And here is why this happened: Steven Nislick, the founder of NYClass, decided last year to give a lot of money to the city’s new mayor to support his election campaign and ban the horses. The mayor took the money and promised to enact the ban. If this is not legal bribery, it is surely a corruption of the civic soul and purpose.
As Craig realizes, this fight is not really about a better life for horses, it is about horses that may die, and make no mistake about it. Some will. That’s what is making Craig Sheldon crazy. He is not alone. It is there for everyone who cares about animals to see, if they will only look.
The animal rights groups advocating a ban on the carriage horses insist that every single horse already has a place waiting for him in a horse rescue facility in the United States. They refuse to say where these facilities are, who is running them, what horses would go where, how they will get there, what kind of care they might provide to giant work horses. Nor will they say who will pay for their care, or how well funded they are. I can think of only one reason why these groups refuse to disclose the names of the alleged rescue farms eager to take the carriage horses. There aren’t many, if any. And even if there are, horses will die. Every carriage horse that goes to a rescue facility will cost the life of another horse that can’t get in.
Here is the problem with their claims:
– More than 150,000 horses in America are sent to slaughter each year in America, all to Mexico and Canada, (animal rights groups successfully lobbied clueless politicians to shut down the closer and more humane U.S. slaughterhouses) often on long, brutal and horrendously cruel journeys to an inhumane end beyond anything any carriage horse has suffered in New York City. Equine rescue associations estimate that there are more than 100,000 horses – and many donkeys – on waiting lists in America for horse rescue farms and preserves, it takes, on average, between one to two years for the lucky horses to find a place, the vast majority – 150,000 – go to slaughter.
The road to slaughter for the horses is brutal, often occurring in hot and crowded trailers and boxcars traveling long distances for days in heat or cold without adequate food and water, the horses are jammed into crowded corrals and stalls, killed in frightening circumstances by having nails drilled into their head. Their death is neither quick nor painless. Could it really be so that the carriage horses would be worse off in Central Park than on those trailers? Why would any rational animal lover wish to cause an animal to die like this, even one single horse?
There is a great crisis in the equine world now, people are abandoning horses in record numbers because of the struggling economy and the rising cost of hay and veterinary care. Horse rescue facilities are struggling to handle this equine holocaust in a time of dwindling resources. Horses are starving and freezing and dying of exposure and illness all across America, many are desperately in need of rescue, food, shelter and medical care. The horses cry out to us, and our humanity and compassion, to stop such needless suffering.
Against this backdrop is the lunacy of the New York horse ban. Some of safest horses in the world, the well-fed, healthy, profitable (which often means good care) and intensely regulated horses of New York will, if they are banned, be taken from their homes and removed from their work and the city and sent out into this maelstrom.
“We can’t take these carriage horses,” Eugenia Cunningham of Finger Lakes Horse Rescue in New York told me on the phone yesterday, “we have no room and no money for these big horses, and if we had room, these are not the horses we should take. We would take old and sick or starving or abused and beaten horses. These horses appear to be sheltered, safe, supervised and well fed. None of them appear to be beaten or starved. We have a year long waiting list, a year at least for horses who are desperate and dying. Those big horses are not the horses that should go to rescue farms, they are not ill or in imminent danger of dying. They need one or two large bales of hay every day, that’s three times what sick old horses need. If we took them, we could never afford all the hay a 2,000 lb horse would require year-round and your gentleman Facebook poster is correct, if we took these healthy horses, many other horses would die because we could not take them. I can take three horses for every work horse. Lots are dying now, it is an awful time for horses.”
Abuse is a crime, not the opinion of animal rights organizations in New York. If you care to see photos of true abuse and understand what real abuse means to animals, (be warned) you can see these posted by the Land’s End Horse Rescue Farm. The truth wants to be free and deserves to live.
As Eugenia and everyone else in the horse world knows, there are very few horse rescue farms with enough grass or lots of extra money to feed big work horses, especially these days. Most are broke and begging for money.
More than a dozen horse rescue farms in New York State have closed down this year already, many more across the country. One New York newspaper estimated it would cost more than $20 million to feed the New York Carriage horses for the rest of their lives – reporters talked to several hay suppliers – and that is assuming that hay and feed and medical costs do not rise in the future.
I told Eugenia that the Clinton Park Stables in New York feeds 78 horses with 20 tons of hay every month – plus feed and medical care – and that the carriage horses eat between one and two bales of hay each day. “I know very few horse facilities that can take on healthy horses that eat that much,” she said. “I sure can’t. The horses that need rescue can’t eat that much, usually.” The California Equine Association says that big draft horses eat between 500 and 600 bales of hay each year.
Beyond that, there is the question of who owns the horses, who gets to decide where they go. The animal rights groups seem to think they have the right to seize the horses and then force the carriage trade to sent them to rescue farms where they will do nothing but stand idly around all day.
They also think the drivers ought to cheerfully accept being forced into driving “eco-friendly, cruelty-free” vintage electric cars, which cost about $160,000 apiece to manufacture. The mayor and his animal rights supporters are reportedly proposing legislation that would forbid the carriage trade owners from selling the horses anywhere where they might be asked to work, as they have been bred to do and been doing for many centuries.
Lawyers and free citizens with property might say otherwise. The horses are private property, many are among the most valuable things the people in the carriage trade own, if their work is taken from them, and their livelihood, many may need to sell the horses in order to receive some income, others swear they will never give their horses up.
But the carriage horses – and the horses everywhere that are actually needy – will certainly be in a dangerous and vulnerable position if they are banned, no one can guarantee safe lives for them, or even survival. It is utter fantasy – an especially dishonest one – to claim that none of them will suffer or be killed, sold for slaughter, or sent to places that might go under or cannot take care of them for the rest of their lives.
If they were simply left alone, they all could live, the average life span of a carriage horse is over 15 years, Eugenia says few of her rescue horses live half that long. The logic of the mayor and his supporters says horses need to die in order to be saved. None of these horses needs to die, or cause the death of another animal.
For me, human suffering is as or more important, it has been lost in the furor over the horses. If the ban is executed, hard working, law-abiding , tax-paying people will be out of work, they will need to find a way to feed their families, and quickly – few of them have lots of money in the bank. Some will surely sell the horses, I could not blame them. Many of these people have ties to the horses that date back hundreds, even thousands of years in Europe, Africa and Asia. The idea that they are animal abusers because they work with horses is a disgraceful slander.
So there it is, this surreal moral cloud, the controversy from Wonderland, the mayor as the White Rabbit, the animal rights officials playing the Queen Of Hearts. Yes, Your Majesty, the horses will be saved, but first, let’s kill them and lots of others to do it so they will not be abused. This is the great injustice Craig and others speak of, in which horses die awful deaths in order to be saved from safe and healthy and productive lives. And all this in the name of animal rights, of loving animals.
These are not the horses that need to be saved, these are not the people who abuse animals.
I appreciate Craig Sheldon for caring about injustice, when horses die like this, the heart is right to cry. And decent men and women are called to account.
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My new e-book, “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World,” is now available everywhere digital books are sold for $3.99.