Photo by Nina Galicheva
My heart took a jump when Pamela Rickenbach of Blue Star Equiculture send this photo of my friend and her husband and lover Paul Moshimer and I, taken last year by the photographer Nina Galicheva at Blue Star in Palmer, Mass. Paul and I had an easy friendship, we clicked from the beginning in our all too short time knowing one another. He took his own life six months ago.
It is had to look at that photo and not cry. We were both smiling in pleasure at our friendship, we were trading buttons and slogans.
Yesterday I wrote about the failed vision of the animal rights movement, and I wanted to write about Blue Star separately, and will in the coming days, because I believe Paul and Pamela have the most powerful and true vision for the rights of animals that I have yet seen in our fragmented and complex world. Blue Star is the right sequel to the idea of a new vision for animals.
Paul was saddened and puzzled by the increasingly vicious and personal attacks on he and Pamela by people who called themselves animal rights activists. I believe these attacks contributed to his decision to end his life. He didn’t understand that it was very necessary for some of these people to hate Blue Star because it was the antithesis of the animal rights idea, it’s failed vision.
Paul and Pamela’s idea was to keep animals in our world, not remove them. To understand their needs rather than selfishly exploit them for our own emotional needs.
Hundreds of big and beautiful draft horses are alive and living and rescued and healed and working amidst people who love them and care for them.
Blue Star does not persecute farmers or frighten and alienate animal lovers, they work with them, educate them, help them to understand animals, find good and safe work for them to do. They do not look for the evil in people, but give the good a chance to live and grow. Animals cannot survive without people, and people need animals, and part of the broken vision of the animal rights movement is it’s heartbreaking failure to look for ways to bring people and animals together, rather than separate them and promote hatred and conflict.
In our world, work for animals means life and survival, not abuse or cruelty. Work is the salvation of so many animals, especially the big working horses.
Paul and Pamela understood how to keep animals in the world, and to treat them and the people who love them with care and dignity and respect. They showed us the new way. Theirs is the vision of the future. If we do not keep animals among us, we will forget them, our children will never see them, we will never get to know and understand what they really need. They continue to disappear in frightening numbers, as they already are. The animal rights vision for animals has failed. It serves no purpose to blame or pummel them.
It is up to us to fill the void.
For this beautiful vision, Paul and Pamela suffered greatly, and I am grateful that Paul’s suffering is at an end, and grateful that Pamela’s strong and brave spirit is healing and inspiring and offering us a powerful vision for the future of animals. I meant to write this later, and I will, but the photo of Paul she sent me just opened me up and I needed to say this now. Thanks, Pamela, for sending me this photo, and thanks Paul, for helping me see the future of people and animals in this new and inspiring way.
I am writing about it, Paul you were living it. Pamela is living it now. Check out Blue Star. Support it if you can. It may change the way you look at the world.