It’s sad but not really unexpected news: New York Mayor Bill deBlasio plans to ask the City Council to ban the Central Park Carriage Horses as early as December 8, three weeks before Christmas, according to various media reports this morning. According to several City Council members, he plans to offer the displaced carriage drivers free “green” taxi medallions – worth about $6,000 and good only for giving rides in the outer boroughs – on condition that they purchase handicapped accessible cabs.
The carriage drivers have made it clear that they do not equate working with horse-drawn carriages in Central Park to driving cabs in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. They have said they will never accept an arrangement like that.
According to the Capital news wire, the legislation also stipulates that the stable owners cannot sell or give the horses – their private property – away to a slaughterhouse and would require documentation to ensure that does not happen.
Since more than 150,000 horses are sent to slaughter in America each year, that means the horses would have to go to private farms or to one of the many overwhelmed and struggling rescue farms in the country. The legislation will not be voted on for six months. I am no lawyer, but it is difficult for me to believe any court would support such a stipulation.
Christina Hansen, a spokeswoman for the carriage industry, texted me this morning:. She said they knew something was coming, but were not sure what form it would take: “We’re going to fight like Hell,” she said.
She means it, too. The carriage trade has been fighting like Hell for several years, and successfully. This has taken a brutal toll, but they are tough, battle-scarred, they know how to fight. I am sorry the mayor chose to ruin their holiday season and add to the struggle and anxiety that has marked their lives, especially since he took office in January and said banning the carriage trade was his first and most urgent priority. Could it have waited until after Christmas, I wonder? But then, the carriage trade people have been so dehumanized, there probably seems no reason to worry about their feelings or families.
In any case, the struggle is on. It is important, it will pit many animal lovers against unknowing politicians and the wealthy and increasingly strident individuals and organizations who claim to speak for the rights of animals. There is a great schism in America between urban and suburban people whose only experience of animals is having cats and dogs, and mostly rural people who live with animals and work with them. This deepening conflict has come to a head in New York City.
The mayor’s planned ban is contemptuous of democracy and the democratic process. Opposition to the ban has been overwhelming in New York, in a year he and his supporters in the animal rights movement do not appear to have convinced a single New Yorker that the horses are being mistreated, or that they are in need of rescue (which so many horses really are.) More than 66 per cent of New Yorkers told a recent poll that they oppose the ban.
There was not a single demographic – race, age, gender, borough, income – that supported banning the carriage horses. All three city newspapers have opposed the ban, so have the Chamber of Commerce and the Teamsters Union, the Central Park Conservancy, the Working Families Party and just about every child and tourist in the world. In a sane world, that ought to be enough. But it doesn’t seem to be.
The abusive and often dishonest claims and tactics of the animal rights movement in New York in their ugly campaign against the carriage trade has awakened and aroused many horse and other animal lovers around the country, who have been flooding the mayor’s office and City Council mailboxes with petitions and pleas to leave the horses alone. This is becoming a new social movement, one that seeks to treat animals and the people who love them rationally and with dignity. Outside of the animal rights movement, it is well known that work is not abuse for working horses or other working animals, including police horses, bomb-sniffing dogs at Amtrak, border collies and search-and-rescue dogs. The mayor of New York has never owned a dog or a cat or other animal, the City Council President – she supports the ban – says she is qualified to judge the horses because she has a rescue cat.
Beyond the overwhelming public opposition to the ban, platoons of veterinarians, journalists, Native-American leaders, behaviorists, trainers and equine rescue and advocacy groups have inspected the horses in their stables and at work and have stated they are healthy, well-cared for and safe. These horses, they remind us, are the lucky ones, they are not in need of rescue. But experts have no place in the bubble that is the animal rights movement in New York, the White Rabbit presides, the only people admitted seem to be those that know nothing about animals, and are proud of it.
The mayor’s campaign is elitist. Mayor deBlasio, who claims to be a national leader in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, refuses to visit the horse stables, meet with the owners or drivers, or negotiate the welfare or future of the horses. He describes himself as a proud member of the animal rights movement. He seems to assume that driving a green cab (not to be confused with the yellow ones) in the outer boroughs is the same thing for the drivers as riding their horse carriages in Central Park. When a carriage driver attended a public event with his young son and asked the mayor why he was determined to ban the horses, the mayor turned to him and said “because your work is immoral” and walked away.
Steven Nislick, the millionaire head of NY Class, the group spearheading the ban, has referred to the horse and drivers in New York as “random people,” and he was recorded telling one audience in Florida that he thought the horses would be better off euthanized than pulling horse carriages in New York.
(Buck Brannaman, the inspiration for Robert Redford’s “The Horse Whisperer,” and the most respected horse trainer in America, has said the horses in the most urgent need of rescue are not the carriage horses – he said their work was light and easy – but those left on farms and stables with nothing to but stand around and drop manure. Those, he said, are the ones to pity. Horses need work, says Brannaman.)
These are not the animals in need of rescue. The horses are, by every account, healthy and well cared for. Most of them are rescue horses themselves, purchased at auction. The carriage owners and drivers have not broken any laws, violated any regulations, committed any crimes. The assault against them is the invention of a small fringe of well-funded ideologues who have simply decided to reinvent definitions of abuse and mistreatment. There is no evidence that NYClass has saved or helped the life of a single animal, they seem mostly to raise enormous amounts of money by posting manipulative photos of injured animals and donating them to favored political causes and politicians. Like the mayor of New York and members of the City Council.
We need to reclaim the notion of animal rights. In this controversy, the groups who profess to speak for the rights of animals have lost their credibility and right to speak for the future of animals. They have not told the truth about the horses and their treatment. They have been caught in lie after lie, exaggeration after exaggeration. In many cases, they have simply invented incidents and accusations that have no basis in reality or fact. They have not accounted for the millions of dollars they have taken from well-meaning people and spent, and their campaign against the people in the carriage trade has been unconscionably cruel, abusive and insensitive. They appear again and again to be utterly ignorant of the real lives of real animals, thus have forfeited the right to speak for them.
I do not know the secret strategies of the carriage trade, they haven’t told me. My guess is that they will take it one step at a time. First, fight the ban, and if it actually is passed, then fight in court. They are threatened by powerful and wealthy interests – the millionaire founder of NYClass, who has spent millions trying to drive them out of business, the mayor, the City Council President, billionaire real estate developers eager to scarf up the West Side stables where most of the horses live, increasingly strident animal rights organizations who claim to speak for the rights of animals but do not.
I would imagine real estate development in Manhattan will engulf the horses before the mayor does, but the next six months will tell. People who love animals will have their cause, and will be called upon to represent it. The questions for us are elemental: do we want animals to remain in our world? Will we sit by as one animal after another is driven from our midst, only to vanish in the holocaust wiping out so many animals in our world? Will be silent as the rights and freedom and property of fellow citizens are taken from them?
This is not a right-or-left thing, it is a right and wrong thing. There is nothing progressive or humane about taking someone’s work, way of life and property away for no reason. Government exists to protect freedom and property, not take it away without cause.
Civil and political rights, according to Wickipedia, are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals, and which ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression.
The rights of the horses – to be safe and secure and continue their historic work with people – are threatened. The rights of the carriage horse owners and riders are being infringed upon by government in New York, and by wealthy private individuals and social organizations. They are threatened with the loss of their work, way of life, freedom and property without any kind of representation or due process or cause.
That is the very definition of a civil rights violation. If they can do it to them, they can do it to us.
The mayor, after a year of dissembling and dodging and equivocating, is finally coming out into the open, it appears, and making good on his surprising campaign promise. He was given a huge amount of money by NYClass for his mayoral campaign, many believe he really has no choice but to pursue the carriage trade ban. I believe this ban will fail, that he will find the horses powerful and worthy opponents. They have rallied their city and called up some powerful spirits to protect and defend them. They have called upon us to consider the way we treat one another, and the way we treat them and the earth. Animals do have a voice, and the horses are speaking loudly and eloquently.
For the sake of animals, this is a struggle that needs to happen, a debate that is overdue. Will animals survive in our disaffected world or not? Or will they be driven away, taking the wind and rain and thunder with them? Who gets to speak for the rights of animals, the people who own, love and work with them, or the people whose only vision is to take them away? I believe they belong among us, they have as much right to be here as we do. If there are ways to make them safer and healthier, then let’s hear them and talk about them and make sure they happen. That is what animal lovers do.
We need them, and they need us. In the next six months, those of us who love animals will get to find out who we really are and what we believe in. And whether animals can remain among us, or are doomed to banishment and extinction.