I love our changing landscape, it speaks of life itself, and of change and growth and love. A month ago, a pony appeared in the pasture and then, Maria rode the pony and now, in the morning they take a walk around the pasture. This morning, I released Fate from her herding work when I saw her staring out at Maria and Chloe on the other side of the field. “It’s okay, girl,” I said, go on, and in the way of the border collie, to whom one can sometimes just speak, she took off and joined this new walk. It was the first time, and Fate came and sniffed Maria, then sniffed Chloe, and a new ritual had begun.
It was beautiful in it’s own way, the changing landscape reflects life itself.
In the last few years, I’ve been a wakened to the rise of a new social movement in America relating to animals. For years, animals were seen as beasts of burden, and often treated poorly. Then the animal welfare movement appeared to work for a more humane view of them. Then the animals rights movement arise to give animals the same rights as people. Our view of animals has evolved inevitably, in ways that are good and ways that are bad.
It’s time for another change. History, climate change, culture and politics cry out for a new movement on behalf of animals, I think it is happening, I like to call it the Saving Animals Movement.
The animal welfare movement was overtaken in the 1970’s by a new sensibility, a new way of looking at animals. The animal rights movement has become a movement to separate animals from people, make it ever more expensive, difficult and fraught to live with them. It pits the people who care about animal rights against many of the people who love animals and live and work with them, often in the most hateful and abusive of ways.
These movements seem spent to me in our time, they do not reflect a new or wiser understanding of animals, they have been overtaken by great change, from climate change to outrage at the growing abuse of innocent people who love animals and seek to live and work with them. They have also failed to respond to the growing dangers faced by animals, who are vanishing from the world at a horrifying rate.
I have been drawn to the stories and heroes victims of this new awakening: The New York Carriage Horses, the elephants in the circuses, Tawni Angel and her Santa Monica Pony Rides, the farmer Joshua Rockwood and the many good farmers under siege from the false and increasingly hysterical idea of animals and abuse that has arisen in recent years.
Our love of animals has turned into a brutal campaign against them and the people who wish to keep them among us. The animals are suffering, they need to be saved. So do the people who love them. Animals cannot have any real rights if the people who live and work with them have theirs taken away.
For a generation now, animals have been elevated to an irrational and unrealistic status in our culture, they have not only been equated equal status to human beings, but given superior rights, consideration and compassion. Many people now believe that it is cruel for animals to work, exploitive for them to entertain us, abusive for them to provide work and food for our families.
It seems that no animals are safe with people, no work is proper or humane, every person who works with animals is a suspect, not a savior. Every incident of cruelty is distorted beyond meaning or reason. Every good or human act with animals is ignored or dismissed. The animal world has become an Orwellian circus of secret informers, kangaroo courts, lawsuits, conflicts, fanatics and ideologues, pliant and ignorant politicians. The people who know animals best have been pushed to the margins of chaotic debate.
This doesn’t work any longer. Animals and people deserve better. And time is running out, we have to do better.
The new heroes of the Saving Animal movement, people like Pamela Rickenbach of Blue Star, the people in the New York Carriage Trade, young and idealistic farmers like Joshua Rockwood, animal lovers like Tawni Angel have fused elements of other cultures – the animal welfare movement, the animal rights movement, the countless humans who have loved and worked with animals – into a new understanding. They are suffering, they are fighting back.
Animals are not idealized or emotionalized in the new order. Emotionalizing them and distorting the reality of their lives does not save them, it mostly makes people feel better about their disconnected lives.
In the new way, animals are treated well, connected to humans, they are necessary, they are truly saved and given a lasting future. So are many of the people who need animals and wish them to be a part of their lives. Animals in the Saving Animals movement live far from the horrors of the corporate and industrialized animal farms where nine billion animals live in suffering. Joshua Rockwood’s animals go to slaughter for food, but while they live, they range freely on open and lush ground, they are pasture fed, they are killed humanely.
No factory farm animals has such a life.
At Blue Star, animals are rescued, given the best medical care, fed the best grains and hay, given shelter. Homes are found for horses in need, work is sought so the horses have meaning and health and purpose, the animals are known and loved each day. This is what it means to save them, not simply drive them away.
And people are also given a chance. The new social order believes in saving people as well as animals, treated both with love and dignity.
The animal rights movement has failed to grasp or respect the extraordinary bond between humans and domesticated animals like horses, their need to work together, to provide sustenance for one another. To be together. This is what saves animals, what keeps them in the world. As the need for loving homes for domesticated animals like horses, dogs and cats has skyrocketed, it is becoming more and more difficult, expensive and threatening for people to adopt them. There has never been a greater need for people to save, adopt and work with animals, it has never been more cumbersome, fraught – even dangerous – or difficult.
A movement to save animals would work to make it easier for people to adopt and and live with animals, not more difficult. Abuse is not only only prism with which to see animals and understand them, it is just a part of their, not the whole story.
People who work are denied dogs and cats, so are the poor and the elderly, all people who need animals who need them. Farmers everywhere report secret informers spying on them and their work, routinely calling the authorities for the most spurious and ignorant of reasons. Joshua Rockwood faces trial and jail because his water tanks froze in -27 temperatures and because he stored his food at his home rather than his farm, and because his barn was not heated.
In many cases, the people accused of abusing animals and treating them cruelly are the ones who understand animals the best, and have done the most to save them and keep them in our world. The idea of animal abuse has been distorted beyond reality, increasingly used as a club to separate people from animals, abuse them and deny them their rights, and take animals away from people.
The contemporary idea of animal rights no longer works, for people, or for animals. It is rife with conflict, anger, it has little to do with the real lives of real animals. It has become in too many cases a politicized, extremist and hysterical fringe movement, ineffective at saving animals or giving them better lives. It is a new kind of Inquisition, a new kind of witchhunt.
The idea of animals rights seems to always mean taking animals away from people, even if they have nowhere else to to, they end up suffering or dying or becoming extinct. Almost anyone familiar with horses or animal rescue understands that the New York Carriage Horses would be in great peril if banned from their safe and healthy work, there is simply no place for 200 enormous and powerful draft horses to go in our world. Yet the mayor of New York City was willing to kill them rather than save them.
There is little understanding that the elephants being driven from the circuses are being sentenced to almost certain death, as are the horses and other animals who were once used in movies and films, now have no work to do or people to care for them. Everyone wants to be against the abuse of animals, few people are willing to take responsibility for them.
We take the incidents of abuse, and then turn them into the entire reality of the human-animal bond and the lives of all domesticated animals everywhere. We forget that in America, animals are being treated better than any animals in the history of the world, and at unprecedented cost. We keep animals locked up on crates all of their lives – the cruelest kind of animal abuse for many animals like dogs – and we congratulate ourselves on our “no-kill” nobility.
We spent billions of dollars on animal health care and deny it to millions of people.
We have lost all perspective, and forgotten the most basic rights for animals – to be cared for and kept alive in our changing world. The idea of returning animals to the wild is no longer relevant in a world where the natural habitats of animals are being destroyed by people, human development, greed and climate change.
Animals not given work, not living with people or seen by them, are simply vanishing from the earth. They have no place and no future. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that half of the animal species in the world have perished since 1980. I have come to see and believe that the greatest dangers facing animals in our world are climate change, runaway human development, the overpopulation of humans and the animal rights movement.
It is time for a new way of understanding animals, for a Saving Animals Movement. (SAM) They don’t need human rights, they need people, work to do, a commitment to keeping them in our ever expanding urban and suburban environments, if they are to have any place on the earth to be. Animals are not people, they are not like us, they do not need what we need. The New York Carriage trade has almost miraculously found a way to keep big working horses healthy and content and loved and profitable in one of the most densely populated environments in our country. That is not a reason for them to be targeted and persecuted and banned, it is a reason for them to be celebrated and honored and supported. Think of the animals who could be saved if we followed their model.
Think of the animals who could have been saved with the millions spend on trying to ban the carriage horses. A Saving Animals Movement would use the money collected honestly and humanely, not on politicians and fund-raising marketers, but on the many animals are are being abused and need help.
Joshua Rockwood is facing charges of animal cruelty and abuse, he has a 90 acre farm where cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens roam freely, have plenty of food, are well cared for, monitored and tended to every day of their lives. They are raised with great environmental consciousness, their healthy meet is sold to local people. Joshua Rockwood deserves support and assistance, not persecution and humiliation.
Tawni Angel gave rides to the children of Santa Monica every weekend, hundred of them rode the ponies, the only animals they ever saw in their urban lives. Investigation after investigation found the ponies were healthy and well cared for, yet she was driven from the Farmer’s Market, her livelihood taken from her, her ponies facing an uncertain future without the work they did so well and successfully. Hundreds of children begged the City Council to keep the pony rides, they were ignored, animal rights demonstrators claimed giving rides to children was torture for ponies.
I believe Blue Star Equiculture is the future of the Saving Animals Movement. Every day, they save the lives of truly abused and hungry horses, they offer sanctuary to the retiring horses of the carriage trade, they work to being animals and people together, and they work to give people a chance to learn from the horses and be healed by them. (You can help them here.)
So the focus of some of my writing is becoming more clear, the different elements of my work are coming together in my mind. This awakening is slowly revealing itself. These are the heroes, martyrs, visionaries of the new movement, the Saving Animals movement. I believe they are awakening people to the real danger animals face, it is not only abuse and mistreatment, it is the lack of a role or purpose or work for them in the modern world.
The animal welfare movement failed to see the future, the animal rights movement has squandered it’s mandate and become trapped in it’s own rigid dogma. It has sadly become a fringe hate group without answers for people or animals. If animals are to survive in our world, it can only be in conjunction with people, that has long been their story, especially in the time of great turmoil for Mother Earth. We cannot love one and hate the other.
Saving animals means loving them and loving people, living in harmony and partnership. It means taking an honest look at ourselves, understanding the sources of our deep dissatisfaction, learning how to treat one another with decency and compassion. That is the message of the horses, the dogs. It seems to me in my work this past year or two that we have constructed a system around our beloved animals that has suppressed our openness to what is good, true and beautiful.
That is what animals are about – the help us to be good, true and beautiful. They make us better people.
Animals call to us to never exploit them to batter or hurt people, we have all been given the gift of creativity, the opportunity to respond with the grace that lives deep within our hearts, but is so often buried there. No one has the right to take animals away from us, no one has the right to turn our hearts to hatred and rage in their name.
We are all being asked to leave behind a period of anger and self-destruction, to make a new start. It is clear – just watch the news – that we are not there yet. Few of us feel we are part of whole community. But I feel I am seeing a new beginning, our common destiny is awakening many of us. Perhaps this will be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, for a joyful celebration of life, rather than the tearing down of it. If we can save the animals, perhaps we can save ourselves.
Buford is 20 years old, he was nearly dead from starvation when he came to Blue Star Equiculture in Palmer, Mass., he spent every minute of every day with Izora an old draft horse who died on Saturday. It was piercing to see them together, Buford would not let her out of his sight, they even slept next to one another. Last week, Izora died and Buford cried for days, he searched for her and made wrenching sounds of loss and suffering. But over the weekend, Sonny, a young pony who came to Blue Star last year – and was also starved – became Buford’s companion, he says with him, watches over him, comforts and quiets the sweet old horse, one of the most beloved and loving animals on the farm.
What do animals feel, what do they know and suffer? I don’t know, but I see things with the horses that are very powerful. Buford and Izora were one of the most touching stories I’ve seen in some time.
Today, Maria came up to Buford and he seemed to welcome her, to stand close to her. Sonny stayed with him, it did lift the heart and touch the soul. These stories are the daily wonders and miracles of Blue Star. You can see them every day if you join the herd.
Mithra underlined this quote from Thomas Merton in his book “Thoughts In Solitude,” and read it to me as we walked in the Blue Star garden.
“Living Is Not Thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside of us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way as we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.”
Mithra Katalunga, the college student living alone this summer in the magical garden at Blue Star Equiculture that he and the big work horses have conceived, nurtured and planted, is reading Thoughts In Solitude by Thomas Merton, the Trappist author and spiritualist who has meant so much to me. Mithra reads at night, in the twilight between work and sleep.
Merton is a good companion for him, as he was for me. I believe Merton is largely responsible for my move to the country, my embrace of solitude, my struggle to find a spiritual life.
Mithra, who is 24, is far ahead of me spiritually when I was his age, and far ahead of me now. I visited him again at Blue Star in Palmer, Mass., today, I believe we were both very happy to see one another. We have made a connection.
His garden has grown and blossomed behind imagination, it is beautiful and varied and beautifully tended, he walked among the plants and vegetables and flowers today with much love and pride. Mithra, who is from Sri Lanka, tended his gardens as a child with elephants.
Like so many people who come from the real world of real animals, he is baffled by the idea that it is cruel for animals and people to work together. He expects animals to always be a part of his every day life. They big horses have plowed every inch of his garden.
Mithra is returning to Sri Lanka when he graduates from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst next Spring. He says is going home to start a soil revolution in Sri Lanka, to share what he has learned at Blue Star and help the people in his country understand soil conservation and maintenance and think differently about their relationship with the earth. I’m sending him Pope Francis’s new encyclical Laudato Si, about climate change and it’s impact on the poor and the Third World.
“A soil revolution,” Mithra says. “A new love of the earth.”
Mithra was drying out his tent and clothes, he was soaked last night by a heavy rainstorm. His loves his garden, he is preparing himself to return to school soon and live a different kind of life. He took Maria and I on a beautiful tour through his garden, you can hardly see the end of it, he picked some wonderful tomatoes for us to eat.
We talked about the Thomas Merton book and he showed me a passage he had underlined, one I had read and loved myself. I feel a powerful connection to Mithra, he is a pure spirit, full of love and openness and generosity.
“The Good Man comes from God,” Merton wrote, ” and returns to him. He starts with the gift of being and with the capacities God has given to him. Her reaches the age of reason and begins to make choices. The character of his choices is already to a great extend influenced by what has happened to him in the first years of his life, and by the temperament with which he is born. It will continue to be influenced by him, by the events of the world in which he lives, by the character of his society. Nevertheless it remains fundamentally free.”
Mithra is a good man, he has reached the age of reason and has began to make the choices that that will shape the rest of his life. While his peers lose themselves in tablets and cell phones and drown in distraction and debt and worry and acquisition and greed, he has chosen a different path, a different kind of life. A life of service to people and to the earth.
He spent the summer under the stars in a small orange tent, wedded to solitude the the earth. He has a cell phone he rarely turns out, and the clothes on his back, and a plank of wood he uses to keep a detailed history of his garden. He has a friend, a woman who has helped him in the garden this summer, and she is leaving Blue Star for California. I asked him if he was sad about her going, and he said he will miss her, but no, she is not a possession to mourn, their time together is a cause for celebration and gratitude. It would be easy to complain of the heat and rain and bugs – most people would – but he does not ever feel sorry for himself or speak poorly of his life.
Mithra is eternally grateful to Blue Star, he says. The horses have given him meaning and strength, the farm has given him a chance he might not ever have had anywhere else. “This is one of the things I am so grateful to Pamela (a founder and co-director of the farm), he says, Blue Star gives people chances. Mithra recited gave a list of people Blue Star has helped, lives the farm has changed. There is a spirit about the place, he says, that is powerful and good.
Mithra’s garden is a sacred place, I feel a sense of worship there. In return for the beautiful quote he gave me, I will send him one from “Laudato Si,” he and Pope Francis would much love and appreciate one another. Mithra is the hope and future of the world. “I have to teach change,” he said, “young people are open to change, older people are often not.” But sometimes they are, I corrected him, the old and the young both need a chance.
The young, I know, cannot comprehend the old, and perhaps rightfully blame them for what they have done to the world. But we can change. I have been given a chance also.
“Many things have to change course,” wrote Pope Francis, “but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with anyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.”
Mithra is on the long path, he is helping us to change, to understand our mutual belong, our shared future. He learned this at Blue Star, he says, and was given the chance there to live this change, because this is the message of Blue Star, the point, why this small farm is so important to the world, why it is the future, the new way.
Our harsh world runs and hides and quarrels and argues and kills, but there, the shared future is a daily practice, not a dream. People and animals setting out on the long path of rebirth, harmony and renewal. People do not hurt one another there, they support and help one another. Nobody there has ever posted a cruel message on Facebook, or would think of it. I am grateful to know Mithra and am proud to count him as my friend. He says he wants to spend some time on my farm, we will be grateful to have him here.
Mithra is a good man already. He has reached the age of reason and has begun with the gift of being. He is embracing the capacities that have been given to him. He has built a sacred garden and is going to start a revolution.
