The effort to ban the New York Carriage Horses is, in my mind, the most significant development affecting animals and people that I can recall, perhaps in my lifetime. It began as just another mindless campaign against working animals and the people who live with them and love them, but because it was in New York City, so grand a stage, it has become something much larger.

I was in New York City last week, and the proponents of the movement to ban the carriage horses are stunned at the ferocity and effectiveness of the opposition. The mayor is working hard to pressure members of the City Council to vote for his ban, but he is meeting enormous resistance. Public opposition to the ban – now at 62 per cent – has remained steady, despite a ferocious and increasingly hysterical and lavishly-funded campaign to shut down the carriage trade.

To date, this long and cruel and very expensive campaign against the horses has gone nowhere. All of the city’s fractious newspapers are opposed, as are unions, working people, businesspeople, the Chamber Of Commerce and the very powerful Central Park Conservancy. The ugly vintage electric cars that are supposed to replace the horses – animal rights groups spent more than $500,000 to design a prototype – have become a talk show joke.

There is, to me, the sense of an awakening. The people seeking to ban the horses will fail, I believe – if anything gets the horses, it will be real estate development – and animal lovers all over the country are waking up to the very real prospect that domesticated animals will soon disappear from our midst unless they organize and lobby and fight back. And they are. The carriage trade has lawyered up and is ready to go to court if they have to.

In Santa Monica, Calif., a beloved children’s pony ride operator named Tawni Angel is suing protesters who falsely accused her of animal abuse for defamation. She is asking the city council to reinstate her pony rides.  A judge says her case has merit, it is going to trial. In the Midwest, the S.P.C.A. was forced by a judge to pay nearly $10 million to Ringling Brothers Circus when it was discovered they had paid witnesses to say the circus elephants were abused. it was the end of a 14-year legal battle.

The horses have whispered to many of us, reminded us of their long and mystical connection with human beings, and their great work on our behalf.  They plead with us to listen to them, pay attention to them, speak for them.

They have reminded us of the sanctity of work for working animals, it is the farthest thing from abuse and cruelty. They have called to the people who know horses to speak for them, rather than disconnected ideologues who seem to have no understanding of animals at all.

This new social movement is gaining steam every day, it has so far blunted this assault against the horses – waged by a mayor, a millionaire, the real estate community,  and a large and vocal media machine – and fought it to a standstill. We see that we need a better understanding of animals in our world, we see that the task is to keep them among us, not to drive them away.

We seek a dialogue about the future of animals in our world that is conducted with a respect for truth, dignity, facts and compassion. Animals are being abused and exploited, their very rights used as a screen to batter and persecute innocent human beings. It is not progressive to take the horses out of their safe stables, and deprive the hundreds of people who work with them of their way of life and sustenance.

We seek to live with the animals we choose in freedom and safety as long as we care for them well and give them what they need. That right is in danger. The horses, as well and carefully treated as any animals in the world, are in great peril because people who know nothing about them are demanding to speak for their rights and welfare. It is wrong, it cannot stand.

We seek a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals, we seek every possible way to keep them among us and in our lives.

I met a woman in my local bookstore recently who said she had been buying books online, or for pennies until she realized one day that there would soon be no bookstores or new authors if she didn’t support them. So she and others have given the bookstore it’s best year ever.

This is the new paradigm. Once we see what we are losing, we rally to keep it.

Extremism in the name of loving animals is no virtue, and we see that the animals who have shared the world with us for all of recorded history are vanishing, never to be seen again on the earth. The horses have called our attention to this perversion of morality, this grossly inverted way of looking at animals that ruins and endangers their lives in order to save them from a good and safe life. New York City, famous for not agreeing on anything, have heeded the call of the horses, listened to their whispers and joined together to tell their mayor they want the horses to say, they love them, need them and appreciate them.

That they are being ignored and bypassed is an outrage, but their message is so strong even this fractious city has embraced it.

For people who love animals, this is our Lexington and Concord, our call to awakening, our call to arms. The horses have told us that it is not too late. People everywhere are donating money, sending messages, signing petitions to keep the horses in New York.

It is, it seems to me, the first major struggle in a long and complex fight.

So the ban against them has to fail. And it will. It is a struggle long overdue, it has just begun, the horses are our soldiers and our conscience.