A great day for working animals, for the idea of animals remaining in our world. I confess to being near tears as the mayor of New York City tucked his tail between his arrogant and elitist legs and ran from the New York Carriage Horses. I got a bunch of very lovely messages from carriage drivers, thanking me for writing about them.
I will be honest, and I am not being falsely modest, I have very little to do with this victory. The people in the carriage trade have been courageously – and very much alone – fighting for their lives for years. They remained steadfast, calm, civil and savvy. They overcame a media and literal onslaught against them, hired good lawyers – Norman Siegel and Ron Kuby and listened to them. The Teamsters Union stepped up and saved several hundred jobs and 200 horses from what almost surely would have been an awful fate. The people seeking to save them make it clear they were happy to kill them to do it.
As one political analyst wrote, the New York Daily News attached itself to the mayor’s leg and hung on, exposing one lie after another about the carriage horses. Journalism, very slow to awaken to the true meaning of this story, finally came alive, at least in one corner.
What was my role? My reporting instincts kicked in and I very much enjoyed digging out some facts and truth about this story, I think I did make a lot of people think about it who were not really thinking much about it. I was one of them. As to the impact of that, it was not very big in New York City. The mayor and the City Council are not readers of my blog, as far as I know.
When I entered the story, the carriage trade was embattled and discouraged. Nobody gave them a chance, the mayor and his millionaire buddies – this is a strange kind of populist – had made destroying them their number one priority. Liam Neeson began their comeback, using his celebrity to focus attention on the very big lie behind the mayor’s efforts to ban the horses – they were not being abused, they were content and well treated. I think just about every New Yorker understands this now.
Today, they were celebrating in their carriages. I urged each one who wrote me to plan a party. I will come. The mayor ought to be ashamed of himself, this was a low point in his tenure. He lied and lied, and never had the guts to meet with a single carriage driver and give them the dignity and decency of a face-to-face-talk.
Do not expect any wisdom or humility to infect the animal rights activists in New York City, their power is also their downfall – they can’t learn, quit, listen, or change. That is a fatal combination of flaws in cultural and civic history.
I am very proud of my role in this, but I also have no illusions about it, I was not a deciding factor in this campaign, the drivers and their representatives did an astounding job for themselves. You can speak truth to power, and you can win. They have suffered greatly, they deserve every bit of credit and glory there is in this moment.
A lot of you supported the carriage drivers and horses and I thank you. You did make a difference, your letters to the mayor were read and considered, you made hundreds, if not thousands of visits to New York to ride the carriages, I heard from so many drivers about how those visits boosted their morale and gave them strength and support.
You mattered. You are mattering again for Joshua Rockwood. I think we are in the vanguard of a new movement, a new way of understanding animals and thinking about them, a new and more humane way of keeping them in the every day world. We don’t have to ban them to give them good and safe lives, we don’t have to banish animals from the world and from their work because some have been mistreated.
And most importantly, we don’t have to use animals as a screen for battering and abusing people. That is the awful moral failing of the animal rights movement, a supposedly moral movement. It is not moral to harass innocent people, to bribe politicians to do them harm, to take away their jobs, to push animals our of our lives and into oblivion. We need a better way than that, a better understanding of animals.
The horses have sparked something larger than them, and i am proud to be writing about that.
This week, the mayor of New York City, who said banning the New York Carriage Horses was his most urgent priority, the first thing he would do upon taking office, on “Day One,” has surrendered.
He says he still supports the carriage horse ban, but that the animal rights activists pursuing it would have to get the votes they needed in City Council by themselves, he was essentially moving on to bigger and more winnable things.
Political observers in the city said it was clear that he was leaving the issue behind, and now clear that he was unlikely to ever pass such a ban in New New York City. It is also clear, they say, that he has much bigger and more difficult issues to face than removing a popular and well-regulated industry from the heart of the city.
The struggle altered my writing life, I was drawn very powerfully to the issue, and deeply troubled by the suffering and mistreatment of the carriage trade. I was profoundly shocked to learn that the claims of abuse directed at the carriage drivers were almost all entirely false or invented. It was just wrong, from beginning to end.
In New York, the country’s biggest stage, deBlasio’s withdrawal from his arrogant and ill-considered vow – the activists gave him wagonloads of money for his campaign – was an especially significant milestone in the deepening conflict across American between people who have pets, and people who have animals. It was also a staggering setback for the movement that goes by the name of animal rights, which spent many millions of dollars on the ban, and ran a long campaign against the carriage trade that was as hateful and abusive to people as it was dumb and unsuccessful.
From the beginning, the campaign was marked by lies, exaggerations, distortions and by personal harassment and cruelty. The mayor’s vow to ban the carriage horses sparked a nationwide effort to make work with horses in America illegal. If the ban had succeeded, the animal rights drive to remove domesticated animals – horses, elephants, ponies, dogs – from work with people and drive them to rescue farms and preserves or slaughterhouse would have been greatly advanced.
Two years ago, it seemed inconceivable that the carriage trade could win. They faced a multi-million dollar campaign against them, complete with marketing firms, direct mail programs, millionaire developers, expensive and sophisticated blogs and websites, and a multi-million campaign to pour money on politicians and lobby City Council members. Real estate interests drooled over the stable properties and the animal rights activists had raised unlimited funds, mostly from people online who thought they were saving animals.
It turned out to be a rout, but for the other side. The transparently false campaign against the carriage trade has collapsed of it’s own immoral weight.
The mayor and his allies even spent more than a half-million dollars to built a prototype of a disastrously ugly vintage electric car they argued ought to replace the horses in Central Park, where they have worked safely and have been much loved for more than a century.
From the beginning, the campaign was marked by a pointedly ugly kind of elitism. The mayor refused to meet with the carriage drivers or owners, he refused to visit the stables, or meet with any of the lobbyists or representatives of the carriage trade. Demonstrators harassed the drivers, followed them with video cameras, insulted their customers. Their plan was to force the drivers into jobs driving green taxis in the outer boroughs without ever speaking to them.
The support of Liam Neeson, the actor, was essential in drawing some attention to the misrepresentations of the animal rights groups. When the actor said he knew the horses were loved and well cared for, he had many friends in the carriage trade, 200 reporters were present to record what he said. It was the first time almost any of them had set foot in a carriage stable.
Also critical was the skilled and disciplined lobbying effort of the Teamsters Union, which represents the drivers. The Teamsters offered a pretty sound argument for the power and relevance of unions against very big money and power. It’s hard to imagine too many other entities that could have stood up to so much concentrated power.
The Teamsters campaign was a model of discipline, clarity and persistence, mostly out of sight and behind the scenes. They did their job, they saved a lot of jobs, helped keep food on a lot of working-class tables.
The carriage trade hired two experience lawyers and public brawlers, Norman Siegel and Ron Kuby, and listened to their advice.
It’s a big victory for animals and people who seek to save them and keep them in our world. I believe the horses have triggered a new social awakening, a new sense that animals are being driven from our world by people who claim to be representing their rights but know little or nothing about them. They have also called attention to the growing brutality and vigilante ethos of the animal rights movement, which has become extreme and detached from reality. A movement to save animals ought to support the people who live and work with them, not persecute and harass them.
It is becoming ever more fraught, even dangerous, to own and work with animals in America. Just ask the scores of farmers being harassed and persecuted for failing to meet the impossible new standards of animal rights and welfare being increasingly forced upon them. If you work, aren’t rich, are elderly, it is ever more difficult to adopt a dog or cat in America, this at a time when millions are euthanized because there are not homes for them. A true animal rights movement would make it easier to bring animals home, not more difficult.
The carriage horses were spared an almost certainly awful fate, the mayor and the activists insisted that they would all find good homes on horse rescue farms, but they would never say where the farms were or where the $24 million it would take to feed them for all of their lives would come from.
A rational world would see that the carriage trade has become a model for keeping domesticated animals in our everyday lives. A score of respected veterinarians and behaviorists have examined the horses and testified to their good health and good care. There was an Alice In Wonderland quality to the animal rights people, almost everything they said turned out to be false or the opposite of what they claimed. The carriage horses are are among the luckiest horses in the world, not the ones who are abused. It is not abusive for big draft horses to pull light carriages through Central Park.
So the horses delivered a big victory for the new Saving Animals Movement, in two years, the mayor and the people seeking to remove the horses did not change a single mind in New York City. More than two thirds of the city’s notoriously fractious residents agreed on keeping the horses, all three newspapers supported them, so did organized labor and the Chamber of Commerce.
Everywhere, animals are vanishing from our world, the result of climate change and a skewered and dogmatic view of animals rights. Keeping 200 horses in the everyday life of New York is a powerful thing.
We can keep animals in our world and give them good and meaningful lives among people, even in crowded urban environments. Now, another significant struggle in the animal world, the effort to save Joshua Rockwood, a Glenville, N.Y. farmer and his farm from the same ethos that sought to ban the carriage horses.
Joshua Rockwood has been charged with 13 counts of animal cruelty for struggling to keep his animals warm and watered in the brutal cold wave of March. Although none of his animals died or suffered, his farm and sustenance are threatened. I believe we will have two very powerful victories in the Saving Animals movement this week, Joshua is seeking $16,000 to prepare his water systems and shelter for this winter. The horses have changed the dynamic of the struggle over the future of animals.
The animal rights movement has squandered it’s mandate and moral authority through it’s arrogance, cruelty and rigidity. There is a new movement, it is the Saving Animals Movement, you can help Joshua win another great and seemingly impossible victory here.
Thomas Paine wrote that he loves the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. It is the business of little minds to shrink, he wrote, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct will pursue his principles unto death.
Paine would love the man who is Joshua Rockwood.
He smiles in trouble, he has gathered strength and dignity from distress, and grown brave by reflection. He and his family have been sorely tested this year, and his heart is firm, and conscience determined. Joshua is not a man who asks for help easily or often, but he needs some help now and I am proud to offer some and to encourage others to do the same.
He is fighting for his reputation, his family, his farm, his future. I believe every farmer or animal lover in the world has a personal stake in helping him to triumph in the time that tests his soul. I ask the hard-working farmers of the world and my brothers and sisters in the animal world to see themselves in his story and join the new social awakening for a better understanding of animals and a greater love of animals and people.
Joshua is struggling to move forward with his farm and his life and is seeking help and support for improving West WInd Acres this winter. You can help support his new gofundme project here.
Joshua has decided – after much reluctance – to move forward with his plans for improving West Wind Acres farm. He wishes to build four energy free tire-tanks and build an eco-friendly, inexpensive and innovative Greenhouse Shelter for his pigs, horses and cattle. He is asking for $16,000 to be raised through the crowd-sourcing site gofundme to move ahead with his farm before the next harsh winter.
As always, Joshua is fully transparent, he offers a detailed accounting of what he needs the money for and what he needs to do with it on his gofundme project page. Earlier this year, he raised more than $58,000 in legal fees to help contest the accusations against him. Much of that money is already gone, justice is expensive in America. If he goes to trial, that money will all be gone in a heartbeat. I believe it is essential that Joshua not be discouraged or defeated by his struggle to clear his name and return his attention to farming.
Joshua wants to expand the facilities on his farm and make sure that he is prepared for the coming winter and for what meteorologists say will be increasingly brutal winters in the Northeast United States for the foreseeable future, a result of climate change. This will enable him to have more animals, house them efficiently and comfortably, and to grow his food business, something that has been disrupted and challenge by the assault on his farm and life.
More than 200 farmers and friends and neighbors showed up at Joshua’s preliminary hearing to support him. Almost to a one, they said it could have been them. I know it could have been me. I don’t have a heated barn, and my water tanks and water lines froze during that hard time. I have had sheep whose ears were mildly frostbitten in severe cold inside of a barn. In a rational world, Joshua might have been helped, rather than persecuted.
I will be honest. I suggested this project to Joshua some weeks ago, he seemed to be discouraged. I sensed he was struggling. He resisted, several times and for some time. He said he had already asked for help, he didn’t want to do it again. I am relieved he changed his mind.
Joshua is a victim of the growing national hysteria – at times an Orwellian inquisition – over animal abuse. The term has lost any real meaning as it is being arbitrarily and ignorantly redefined. There is a growing disconnection separating many Americans from the natural world, from farms, and from the real world of animals. At times, the animal rights movement has gone too far, lost touch with perspective, reality, and humanity. Animals are paying for this with their lives, the people who live and work with them are being persecuted. We need a better understanding of them than this.
Joshua loves his animals and treats them well. None of his animals died or were taken ill during this winter, which saw the worst cold wave in modern times. Almost any farmer or animal lover in the Northeast could have been charged with similar crimes. He is a victim of government and police overreach, the secret informer system of the so-called animal rights movement, seeming conflict-of-interest and blatant opportunism.
The American legal system is hard on ordinary people. It is long, chaotic and very expensive. Joshua and his family are struggling to deal with the cloud hanging over his head. He could go to jail, but he is fighting back and he is confident he can come through it with some assistance. I am committed to helping him to get through this ordeal, for as long as it takes and as often as he needs assistance.
I am confident he will emerge victorious and vindicated, he is not animal abuser, he is no criminal. He is a good and conscientious farmer, an idealistic young man living in a world where the government and people who say they support the rights of animals are abusing human beings in their name.
What more can we ask of our young people than they return to the land, run an honest business, grow healthy food in a humane and ecologically sensitive way? Do we really wish to persecute them, put them out of business and sent them to jail?
I can tell you from the heart that I know Joshua well, I have spent a considerable amount of time with him, been to his farm a number of times, seen his animals more than once in many different contexts. I see how serious Joshua is about farming, he is up all night studying books, watching videos, browsing online, he could bore the hair off of a dog talking about rotational grazing and nutrition, he spends every waking minute thinking of how to improve his farm, make it stronger, more efficient. His dream is to produce healthy food from well cared for and pasture fed animals for local people.
We can help him keep that dream. I have written a dozen books about animals and lived with them on a farm for years, I can assure you he does not deserve to be in this position, and every citizen who cares about justice and freedom has a stake in helping him. I would not support anyone who treated animals cruelly.
By now, the government and prosecution should have long realized it’s blunder and walked away from this case, they have already offered to drop almost every one of the counts against him, Joshua has refused, he says he will not admit to doing one thing he has not done. Since the raid in March, the animal police have not once returned to his farm, a strange decision if they believed the animals there were in danger.
In March, his 90-acre farm was raided by the secular and the animal police, three of his horses were, in effect, stolen from him as I see it, he was charged with 13 counts of animal cruelty and neglect, almost all of the charges relating to the bitter cold wave that swept the Northeast in late February and March and sent temperatures plunging to -27 or, in some cases, lower. Joshua was charged with having an unheated barn, the police thought two pigs might have some frostbite on their ears, and having water bowls and streams that had frozen.
Since much of his food and feed was stored a mile away, he was also charged with not having enough food on the premises. Three of his horses were impounded for having mildly overgrown hooves, also common in winter, and the rescue farm that took them is seeking tens of thousands of dollars in boarding and administrative fees for their return. The prosecutor wanted jail or a high bond, Joshua was initially deemed a flight risk, a man with a farm, hundreds of animals, a home, two children, and a wife.
Six months later, Joshua has yet to have a hearing on the criminal charges or a trial. He spends much of his time in meetings, worry and preparation. His life has been upended. His wife refuses to let their children play outside alone, for fear someone will photograph them and try to seize their children. The arrest has interrupted the steady progress West Wind Acres was making and distracted him from his ambitious and careful goals for improving the farm.
I am not a lawyer or a prosecutor, I was not present when the police raided his farm, although I was there soon after. I imagine he may have made mistakes and was not fully prepared for so savage a winter. If that is the criteria for animal cruelty, they better built much bigger prisons. The town of Glenville, N.Y., which is prosecuting him, saw their own toilets frozen, raw sewage spilled over the Town Hall and police departments during that same time. No one was arrested or charged. Two veterinarians visited his farm just before the raid and pronounced his animals fit and hydrated.
This is a gross injustice, and I hope we can help remedy it. We need to save the animals in our world, most would be fortunate to live under Joshua Rockwood’s care. While nine billion animals suffer and die in corporate industrial animal farms, it is Joshua who has been targeted by secret informers and who stands to lose his dreams and his sustenance. I believe we cannot and should not let this happen. You can help him here.
I believe in the social contract, put forth by John Adams and John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. As soon as any man says of the troubles of another, “what does it matter to me?,” then the state can be given up for lost. Joshua Rockwood does matter.
We store some toilet paper in a shelf at the rear of our bathroom, we thought one or two had disappeared. But we couldn’t find them anywhere, and it wasn’t exactly a major crisis.
Fate likes to visit each of the wastebaskets in the farmhouse every day and empty the contents on the floor, where she thinks they should be. So I suspected her. We have been playing border collie chess for some time, moving the baskets, lifting them up, closing and locking doors. Fate is mischievous and wily, she noses open doors, waits for us to forget, chews things out of sight. I found bits of chewed up toilet paper here and there, but no toilet paper, and I could not catch her in the act.
She never does this stuff when we are looking.
Fate stashes stuff all over the house, rawhide, bones, under chairs and behind cabinets. I was reading in the living room yesterday and Maria was out and I forget her, it was quiet. That made me suspicious, and I got up and tiptoed into my study. Busted. She was lying on the floor, quietly chewing on one roll – the one on the right and when I leaned over to pick it up, the other one, the one on the left, was visible under the sofa in my office, where the pirate dog had stashed it.
We have moved the toilet paper to a higher shelf. Fate is a she-devil as well as a pirate. She put on her “who-me?” look.
Every once in awhile – not often – I get a message complaining about typos or grammar. The heartbreaking ones are from the retired English teachers, they are sweet and very civil but they are crushed when they see dangling participles, run on sentences or spelling errors. I have a nasty psychologist who sends me jeering e-mails about typos, she insists she has a full and meaningful life, she calls the people who like my writing “mindless groupies.”
I get messages from one or two from men who call me “dude” and complain that I need a proofreader. I think they are proofreaders.
It’s interesting that these messages are so few and far between – grammar is not held in the regard it used to be and most people slide right over my errors. I believe in transparency, though, and every now and then I like to explain my policy on grammar, typos and language.
When I started the blog in 2007, I made some major decisions about it, some of them prescient. I reasoned that most writers blogs were simply commercial tools to sell books, they weren’t creative entities in themselves. I decided mine would be an honest and open blog about my life, it might or might not sell books, but the blog itself would become valuable and important. I think this was, so, it took a long time and a lot of work – and photos – but I am proud of it.
Most of the writers I knew failed to produce successful blogs, and the reasons, I decided, were that they spent an hour or two correcting them for every hour they spent writing on them. They simply couldn’t present words and thoughts to the world that were not perfect, and either there was little on their blogs, or posts so infrequent people drifted away from them. They got so wrapped up in proofreading they couldn’t write. I also thought the polished writing on many of those blogs was stiff. I had the sense lots of the people writing them disliked blogs, they refused to send anything out into the word that was not perfect in every way. And all of the public interaction made them uncomfortable.
Writers have always worked and written alone.
I ought to say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I was never good at grammar, spelling or punctuation. I gave my teachers fits, even those that thought I was a good writer. But beyond that, I decided my blog would be more successful and relevant if I spent more time writing than correcting and proofreading. That was a good decision. Because there is almost always fresh content on the blog, it has grown steadily – about four million visits a year. It has become as valuable and central as my books, in fact, my blog is my book.
I post frequently, four or five times a day sometimes, and if I paused to thoroughly proofread and check for typos and grammar, I would get little published. Many people want blogs, but they think about them as an interruption in their real work. And lots of creative people were and are snobby about blogs, they think they are beneath them. I have come to see that my blog is my real work.
It also may sound strange, but I want the blog to be real and authentic, many of my posts are done out of events as soon as they occur, and I don’t want them to seem polished or smoothed over. Like the blog itself, they are meant to reflect real life, and the new and kinetic energy of the online world.
The new writing is informal, direct, sometimes challenging. I am at home in it. It is sometimes good, sometimes ordinary, sometimes bad. But it is me.
I have never equated good writing with good grammar, I think the two have little to do with one another. For me, good writing is about narrative and emotion. I am a story-teller. I do have a grammar program, but it takes awhile to get to it and review the changes and re-post it. I would rather spend my time writing.
I review most pieces two or three times after they are published, and by the time I am done, I catch many of the typos myself. Often, those changes are not re-posted to Facebook, where many people now see my blog.
So that’s my typo policy. I apologize to those of you who get upset by it, but it’s not going to change. I’d much rather write and take photos than correct the things I have written.
