30 September

The Carriage Horses Secret Plan: A Christmas Story

by Jon Katz
Secret Christmas Plan
Secret Christmas Plan

Well, here it is, just another day at the farm, the carriage horses woke me up at 3 a.m., they revealed to me their secret plan for Christmas, I must admit it is inspired, heartfelt and pure genius. I will share it with you.

The horses have no secrets from the people who love and support them. And they preach forgiveness and understanding for the people who do not. The carriage horses are great admirers of Charles Dickens, as he was of them, and they adhere to his call in A Christmas Carol to remember that Christmas does not come but once a year, but is carried in the hearts of all of us every day that we live.

If it is difficult to imagine New York City without the carriage horses, it is impossible to imagine Central Park without them at Christmas.

I talked to a member of the New York City Council yesterday. He has become a secret supporter of the New York Carriage Horses. He said a very well paid lobbyist for one of the animal rights groups seeking to ban the horses came to him in frustration on Monday and asked why he will no longer vote for a ban on the horses. “I don’t believe the horses are being mistreated,” he told the lobbyists, “but beyond that, we are just days away from the Christmas season in New York, the busiest shopping season and tourist season. Do you really think we ought to vote to put 300 people out of work just before Christmas, disappoint tens of thousands of tourists and others who ride the carriages in Central Park during the holidays, and then send the horses away from their homes and people, possibly to slaughter just before the Christmas season? Is the mayor mad?”

The horses are channeling Dickens, I think, they intuitively grasp the Christmas season and the Christmas spirit – what speaks to Christmas more than big and beautiful horses with bells and hot chocolate and blankets doing their good and ancient work in their carriages trotting proudly through Central Park, shrouded by the lights in the park and on the great skyscrapers, at Christmastime?

The horses plan to have wreaths on all of the carriages, bells on their harnesses, big blankets in the carriages, maybe even some sparkly colored lights around the carriages. There is much irony in the carriage horse story. Many of the carriage drivers do show the Christmas spirit all year, many  do different kinds of charity work quietly and generously. Some meet with ill and physically disabled people in the park, I have seen many give free rides to poor children who can’t afford one – you can see this for yourself if you stand by the carriage line any day. (The animal rights groups call the drivers greedy animal exploiters, but if you go on the blogs of the animal rights groups, you will see a lot of money being solicited and collected every day, mostly over the backs and bodies of horses whose accidents and illnesses are exaggerated, misrepresented or exploited constantly. And at great profit. Photos of stricken animals are one of the best fund-raising tools ever.

Nobody knows how much money these groups raise, or what, precisely, is done with it.  There is hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbyists, marketers, lavish hotel fund-raising dinners, web designers and $500,000 just for prototypes of those hideous cars that absolutely no one in New York ever wishes to see in their beautiful park. But there is apparently little or no money to be made off the poor and truly needy horses starving on impoverished farms all over the country, which is perhaps why there are no photos of any on the animal rights blogs.) The horses that do not need rescue are in peril, those that do are ignored.

Spiritually connected to Dickens,the horses secret Christmas plan follows the story line of A Christmas Carol, the connections are almost eerily close.

Mayor Bill deBlasio can play Scrooge, he wants to send safe and well-cared for horses away to rescue farms and slaughterhouses just before Christmas, he will not speak to the drivers or visit their stables, he seems eager to put hundreds of people out of work and try and force them jobs they do not want and would hate. What a cold holiday they and their children would have.  These people can play Bob Cratchit, the victim of Scrooge’s cruelty and tirades and cheapness of spirit and purse. The children who come to ride the carriages can represent Tiny Tim. The mayor who calls himself a progressive does not seem to care about the children who love the horses, the tourists who ride in them, the good people who drive them.

He does not seem to have the Christmas spirit in his heart, nor do the angry people who have conducted this especially cruel and abusive campaign and who shout insults at the drivers and the people who ride in their carriages every week. The city council member is right. Imagine banning the horses before Christmas?

“Merry Christmas! ,” deBlasio can thunder at the next City Council meeting…. “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented against you? If I would work my will … every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas,” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
***
The mayor and his supporters in the movement that claims to speak for animal rights have always underestimated the power of the horses, as is becoming evident. The mayor’s pledge to banish the horses in his first week has stretched into an embarrassing and agonizing nine months as support for the ban in the New York City Council and elsewhere has collapsed.
 I would put the wreaths on the carriages tomorrow.
 In addition, the charity and good nature of the drivers ought to be shown to the world, even though they seem determined sometimes to keep it secret.
 Perhaps this Christmas, it is  time to invite several hundred ill, impoverished or disabled children to come to Central Park for hot chocolate, a chance to nuzzle a beautiful horse and go for a ride in the great park, see the skyscrapers looming up in the sky. Let’s see the mayor ban the carriage horses and stop the children from taking their rides. Let’s see him put these families at risk at Christmas, destroy a law-abiding and beloved institution whose members have broken no laws, committed no crimes, done no wrong. It is not a crime to work with horses, or to drive their carriages, the carriage trade carries the spirit of Christmas in New York just as much or more as the Rockefeller Center tree or the beautiful windows of the grand department stores.
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  Christmas looms, it belongs in this ugly debate, to soften it and remind us of our duty as humans to be good to one another, as well as to our animals.  Christmas is woven into the park, the horses, and the many visitors to the city, they have a right to be heard.
Norman Vincent Peale might have been speaking of the park when he said that Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful. It is a gentle and forgiving time, the horses call to us to forgive their tormentors for their cruelty and abuse, to understand that the people who are trying to ban then are doing good as they see it, and do not grasp the great harm they are inflicting. Christmas is Christmas, they need to be forgiven just as Scrooge did and was.
I think the carriage horses and their drivers will seize on the Christmas spirit to remind us of what they mean to people who love animals, to people who love New York City, to people who love the idea of Christmas. It is that time very soon, and what great testament to the Christmas spirit for these beautiful animals and the honest and hard-working people who work with them to remain in the city and the park. A Christmas gift for so many people.
  We know now that there is so much at stake in this painful controversy. The future of the horses, the future of animals in our world, the right of people to live freely and in dignity and to keep their sustenance and property. As Christmas approaches, we can all celebrate the great triumph of the horses this holiday season over people who use animals to batter and hate people and who have lost touch with the natural world.
 Charles Dickens was prescient in many things, he may well have the New York Carriage Horses in mind when he wrote this of Christmas:
   “I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on their journeys.”

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