Tomorrow, Monday, Maria and I are going to New York City to stand with our brothers and sisters in the animal world, the New York Carriage Drivers.
If you meet the members of this very diverse group of men and women, the first thing that may strike you, a thing that sets them apart from many other people in our world, is that they love what they do.
Driving a carriage horse is not simply a job for them, it is a way of life, it is something they love to do. In modern day America, individuals who love their work, who love what do, who are grateful for their work are increasingly rare, they are precious to me, they remind us of the enslavement that comes from doing work we hate for people who don’t care about us in places we don’t wish to be.
You can see this love of life in their faces, you can hear it in the stories they love to tell.
These are immigrants, sons and daughters of the American Dream, they are also the sons and daughters of immigrants who set their own hours, work outdoors in one of the world’s most beautiful parks, where horses have pulled carriages for more than 150 years in peace and safety and won the hearts and spirits and good memories of countless residents, visitors, lovers, children and animal lovers. They work outdoors, free from office labor and corporate constriction, they are almost all following in the footsteps of parents, grandparents, ancestors.
On the eve of Christmas, the city’s mayor and his very wealthy friends in the animal rights movement are asking the City Council to banish this world, to take it away forever. The lives of the horses are stake, but so much more is at stake as well, so much more may be lost if the carriage trade is banned from New York.
The people who seek to ban the horses know not what they do. This is a dreadful mistake that can never be undone. If the horses are banished from New York, they will never been seen in the city again, a generation of children will come of age in the great city not knowing what a horse is like or even looks like.
The carriage drivers, writes Pamela Rickenbach, a former carriage driver and the co-director of Blue-Star Equiculture, the retirement and rescue home of draft and work horses, are carrying the burden of utter uncertainty about the future.
“Will it be the end of life as they know it? For so many of them, it is all that they know, all they do, all they want to do. A way of life, legacy, heritage, culture, tradition from so many different countries. New York City stands to lose a precious and deep garden of humanity.”
Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Sioux Nation, came to New York to see the horses last summer. Horses, he said, are being driven away everywhere. They are no longer loved or respected or needed. This is a betrayal of humanity and animals. They are our ancient helpers and friends, our cousins in the sacred hoop of life. We need them in our lives, in our world.
The people who seek to ban the horses say the horse must be given their freedom. But freedom from what? It is not humane to take working animals like horses – or border collies – away from their work and force them into meaningless lives without purpose, connection. It is not humane for draft horses to spend their lives standing in pastures and dropping manure. This is the new abuse, the exploitation of animals for the emotional gratification of humans.
It is one thing to fight for safer conditions for the horses, for green space, for traffic lines, better signs, less traffic in the park. It is quite another to seek to ban them from the city. This is not protecting the rights of animals, it is about taking away their most basic right: to live and work and survive among us. Animals that live and work with human beings thrive, animals that do not are vanishing rapidly from the earth.
I am not a carriage driver, I cannot stand in their shoes or in their carriages, but I can go to New York and stand with them and share the grief and loss at seeing a culture destroyed in this thoughtless, cruel and profoundly unjust way. No democratic government has the right to take away the property and culture and tradition of honest and hard-working people who have committed no crimes, broken no laws, violated no regulations.
I am grateful that the carriage drivers are finally rallying in public to save their jobs. The mayor refuses to speak with them or meet with them, no member of any animal rights organization has ever visited their stables or asked to speak with them. They have been dehumanized and abused, and they remind us that it is not possible to love an animal and hate human beings.
I have learned this year that the horses have powerful spirits, they are calling me and many others to pay attention to their plight and the plight of the few remaining people who keep them to their ancient partners: human beings.
I believe their call for help is being heard, I am grateful for the opportunity to go to New York City and stand with my brothers and sisters in the animal world: the carriage drivers, the keepers of the carriage horses.
I go as well to honor our culture, our freedom, our own sense of decency and fairness. This is the call of John Locke, the philosopher who invented the idea of liberty and democratic government, one of the founders of our very idea of democracy:
“All mankind being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”
Tomorrow, a new social awakening. The carriage drivers ask us to remember who we are, and who we wish to be.