A Pennsylvania crop farmer messaged me a few weeks ago to say the secret informers of the animal world had called the police a year ago because his draft horse lay down to take a nap. The police came to his farm, seized his horse, arrested him, put his picture on television, called him to trial. He was acquitted on every count, three veterinarians said his horse was healthy and well cared for. He is taunted every day on Facebook and by mail, called a murderer and torturer and abuser.
His reputation, he says, is lost. His farm is in danger. So, he says, is his horse, he cannot afford the $16,000 in fees the rescue farm is charging in boarding fees for caring for her. He will have to pay his lawyer $22,000 first, and he does not yet have that money either. I asked him what advice he had for other victims of this kind of hate. He said there is nothing for it but to stand strong against hate and not be defeated by it. His story is true. He asked me, on his lawyer’s advice, not to use his name until the final paperwork is finished on his arrest. He is considering a gofundme campaign to help him keep his farm.
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I have always believed that animals need protection and some codified rights to protect them against the greed, callousness and deprivations of people. I belonged to several animal rights organizations, contributed to them, rooted for them. In the 80’s and 90’s, I began to sense a change in many these groups, it seemed to me they had evolved in a troubling way, from organizations peopled by animal lovers seeking to protect the welfare of animals, into something disturbing, something angry and cruel and increasingly destructive. The new ethos of animal rights, it seems, was separating people from animals, not bring them together and treating both with love and dignity.
Something that seemed to be more about hating people than helping animals.
Today, I see victim after victim emerging at the hands of the new and quite hateful ideology adopted by animal rights groups, including, sadly, the A.S.P.C.A. and the U.S. Humane Society. Elderly women with cats, poor people who can’t build tall fences, farmers with cows and pigs, farms with working dogs, working people who can’t be home all day, carriage horse drivers, pony ride operators, people who train animals for movies.
A number of these organizations, including NYClass, the group spearheading the carriage horse ban, have formed a broad and very wealthy coalition of what can only be called hate groups, by every definition of the term.
(Hate group activities, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing. According to Wikipedia, a hate group is an organization or movement that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society.)
A generation ago, the ethical issue was how to protect animals from people. Today, a new and very clear moral and ethical issue has emerged for society: how to protect people from the people who say they protect animals.
If you traveled to Glenville, N.Y., as I have, and met Joshua Rockwood, as I have, and walked around West Wind Acres, I am certain you will find it as unimaginable as I do to see this young, conscientious, family-loving, honest and idealistic young farmer accused of 13 counts of animal cruelty and neglect, his life upended and disrupted by trials, hearing, police raids and legal fees. His crime was being unprepared for the coldest weather in recent American history. None of his animals died or took ill, he got them all through it only to find himself accused having frozen water systems, an unheated barn, lack of available feed. His farm was raided by the regular and animal police, three of his horses were seized.
His animals were never starved or dehydrated, they were and are fat and healthy. In a rational world, the police or is neighbors might have come by to help him out, rather than ruin him and seize his property. In this new and very Orwellian world, people in authority, supported by a new culture of animal policing, are trying to destroy his farm, his work, his peace of mind, and send him to jail.
If you go to New York to see the carriage horses and their drivers, you may experience a similar kind of wonder and shock. The horses, by every account and expert testimony, including that of the police, who work for the mayor of New York, are healthy, content, loved, safe and well cared for, things very few animals in our world can claim. The carriage drivers have embraced a free-spirited way of life and work, they seem to love their horses and their lives and their non-corporate, outdoor work very much. They are not office people, they love their lives in the park.
I have not yet met one who would endanger it by harming a horse while being endlessly harassed and followed by people with cell phones and video cameras who hate them very much, and say so in every possible way. The carriage trade is peopled largely by immigrants from agricultural cultures. Their business is popular, successful, and well regulated, a testament to the American Dream as it was once practiced and exalted.
What is this controversy really about? Why has this happened? Does the mayor of New York and his city government really have nothing better to do than to run down this yellow brick road at the behest of people who seem to live and work on the very fringes of civil and civilized life, and who know nothing about animals? Do they have the right to sponsor hate?
All over the country, farmers, pony ride operators, circus trainers, animal movie trainers, the poor, the elderly, people who like to take their dogs to ride with them in cars, homeless and needy people whose only companions are animals, working people without the money to buy fence are living their own nightmares, as Rockwood and the carriage drivers are, at the hands of this new animal inquisition, which posits that any risk or danger facing animals trumps the rights and treatment of human beings.
There are people who abuse animals, and many laws for prosecuting them. But there are many people now being persecuted, their animals and work and way of life taken from them because they have been targeted by hate groups, outside of the law or notions of civil conduct.
And here is some truth to ponder, you can check it out for yourself. Just as not one single carriage driver has been accused of abusing horse in the two years of this ban campaign, there is not a shred of evidence that Ringling Bros. Circus abused or mistreated a single elephant, at least not in modern times.
In fact, there is is a great deal of evidence that they did not. In a year or two, most of the Asian elephants in that and other circuses will pay for this new kind of hysteria with their lives, scores of trainers and good people who loved working with the elephants will lose their work and way of life.
In New York City, there is evidence that people can stand strong against hate and win. Hate is taking a beating, look at the news, it is falling out of fashion, the campaign to ban the carriage horses is falling apart, the horses are safe for now.
What have we learned from this? How do you fight organizations and communities of hate when you or someone you know or care about is targeted? I am sorry to say it is happening more and more. When I saw the trouble the carriage horses were in, I knew my concern was partly selfish. If they could do this to them, they can do it to me. And they can, of course, do it to you.
What can you do if the hate groups come for you? For your cow standing out in the snow? For your sheep-guarding dog sleeping outside in the winter? For your horse taking a nap by the feeder? For the elephant whose life depends on a job in the circus, and who is much loved? For the pony operator who makes a living giving rides to children? For your cat who hunts out of doors? For the farmer who water tanks freeze when the temperature plunges well below zero, or whose horse takes a nap? For the homeless man whose companion dog is seized and euthanized without his knowledge or permission? For the carriage driver in cities all over the country who find themselves sudden targets, or the horse lovers accused of torture and abuse for selling pony rides to kids?
Some lessons from the front lines in New York:
– Don’t hate back. I am proud of the carriage trade, they have endured continuous hatred and harassment and intimidation for some years now, this round led by no less a figure than the mayor of New York City, elected to protect their freedom and property. They have been picketed, spit on, yelled at, falsely accused of awful crimes, their customers frightened and intimidated, their buildings vandalized, several drivers kicked or attacked. They have not in general, as Martin Luther King urged, let any man pull them so low as to hate him.
They have not initiated a hate campaign of their own, or raged back at their tormentors. They kept the counsel, did their work, let the very beautiful and affectionate horses speak for them. They found a perfect spokesman in Liam Neeson, the actor, who had the courage and credibility to be the first well-known figure in New York to stand up for them, and to tell the public that the horses were healthy and well-cared for, that the campaign against them was a sham.
Neeson, who grew up in Ireland and was raised with horses, also called out the mayor of New York and virtually accused him of being a coward for refusing to visit the horse stables or talk to the carriage drivers. He drew reporters to the stables for the first time, and many journalists were shocked to see – no one had bothered to come and look before Neeson – that the stables were clean and the horses seemed quite healthy.
The carriage trade got help. The Teamsters Union lobbyists were key, they went to bat for the drivers, who are members of the union. The mayor refused to meet with them, but they patiently and courteously met with members of the City Council and helped defeat the legislation that would have banned the horses. (Today, farmers are getting help online, just ask Joshua Rockwood.)
The carriage trade saw all along what is becoming more and more apparent as the campaign against the horses – doomed for now – drags on. This is not a rational political movement, they do not negotiate, confer, listen, learn or change their goals and strategies. Fanaticism is a virtue in this culture. Defeat is affirming, not discouraging. There is no point in arguing with them, exchanging enraged messages on line, following their every outrage or argument. They cannot be defeated in the traditional democratic way, because they are not democratic. They do not debate, they reject any kind of science or expertise.
They do hate. To hate someone is to dislike them intensely or passionately; to feel extreme aversion for or hostility towards them. Hatred is dehumanizing, thus the carriage drivers have been accused of bigotry, drunkenness, thievery, cruelty and abuse, of being exploitive and uncaring thugs.
Just this week, a spokeperson for NYClass said the treatment of the carriage horses was equivalent to slavery and the holocaust.
So the carriage trade looked outside of the raging argument for support. The mayor wouldn’t speak to them, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t speak. Facebook and Twitter gave them a way. They went directly to City Council Members, they came belatedly to grasp the importance of the Internet, they paid more attention to blogs and social media, they presented the very human side of the carriage trade people to try and blunt the relentless dehumanizing of them that was going on in the New York media, the portrays of them as greedy thugs and abusers.
They reached out to people who would listen, rational skeptics, critics, horse lovers, veterinarians and behaviorists, outsiders, animal lovers, people who knew horses, people who lived with animals. They opened up the stables to anyone who wished to come and take a look and many people did – neighbors, vets, horse lovers, tourists, writers, reporters.
Many of these people rallied to the carriage trade, they offered moral support to the carriage trade, sent them money, wrote letters to New York politicians. It was a new kind of grassroots awakening, fueled by new technology, over the heads of the screamers and politicians in New York City.
This was said to have a genuine impact on the mayor, who seeks to lead a national progressive political movement. People all over the country wrote Mayor deBlasio to say that removing horses from the world and putting them in peril is not progressive, neither is putting hundreds of honest and law-abiding people out of work for no reason.
The carriage trade found good lawyers, consulted them, listened to them.
Hate is a corrosive things, it consumes the victims as well as the haters. Since I began writing about the carriage horses, I have gotten my share of angry and often hateful messages from people who claim to love animals, but who seem to hate people. Surprisingly, some of the worst messages have come from supporters of the horses themselves. They were fearful and resentful of an outsider like me, they were convinced I was making lots of money writing about the horses, or that I would eventually turn on the carriage trade. They spoke in the hateful and unrelenting language of the animal rights people.
I was surprised by these messages, some were hurtful, drawing on very ugly, even bigoted stereotypes. But I understood that these were the victims, not the messengers of hate, they had been fighting for so long, and were angry for so long, some – very few – had become what they had been fighting for so long.
Hate is a virus, and so is compassion and dignity. You can see this on the news with increasing frequency these days. Tolerance and acceptance can be powerful, hate causes many problems but solves none. There has not been one single meeting of all of the people involved in the carriage trade – the mayor, the owners and drivers, the animal rights activists. Only the carriage trade has said they would talk and negotiate.
How can any issue be resolved in this enraged and one-sided a way? How can the future of any animal be considered or resolved?
The victory of the carriage trade in New York is good news for people who love animals. Good news for people who wish them to remain in our everyday lives. Good news for visitors, tourists, children and the many city residents who love to see and touch and ride with the horses. Animals are powerful spirits in the lives of humans, they heal and uplift us, we need them as much as they need us.
It is also, on our biggest stage, a great victory for the vanishing animals of the world that these horses were not driven out of their very safe homes to slaughterhouses and rescue farms. We can keep animals in our everyday lives. It is also, as it happens, a defeat for the hateful new kind of discourse that has polluted our civic culture.
I think of the Pennsylvania farmer, and of the hate that has entered his life. He says Joshua Rockwood’s story, which he has followed on my blog and online, has given him hope. He says he is inspired by Joshua, who is standing strong. The people who have threatened and invaded his life do not speak for everyone, he now knows. He is not alone, as he feared he was. There are good people in the world and they will help, given the chance.