There is a deepening sense in and around Glenville, N.Y. that Joshua Rockwood’s arrest last February by local police on 12 counts  of animal cruelty was a mistake, a miscarriage of justice.

When farmers and animal lovers like Joshua Rockwood get caught in the increasingly irrational and hysterical net of the movement that claims it supports the rights of animals, but does not, there is very rarely a feeling of fairness or thoughtfulness in  media coverage.

Joshua can testify to the horrific experience of having a mug shot broadcast all over TV and the Internet while people who knew nothing about him or animals were quoted day after day calling him an abusive monster and torturer in front of his friends, family, and community. When he was essentially cleared of all of the changes, there was only one reporter in the courtroom.

Reputation and peace of mind are easily taken away, but not easily returned.

As a former journalist and one who loves the practice of journalism, I was pleased to have been sent the writing of columnist Chris Churchill of the Albany Times-Union this morning, it wasn’t just that he saw through the quite obvious injustice of the charges. He was direct,  balanced and thoughtful about the story in the way journalists are supposed to be, and increasingly, are not.

Animal rights issues are not subjects reporters have learned to be nuanced or thoughtful about, it’s just too easy to put up grainy photos of animals who don’t look good, people soak it up, politicians bask in the glow of loving animals. I confess to feeling quite lonely when I started writing about Joshua Rockwood’s case, I did not see my conclusions and beliefs showing up much of anywhere else.

Many very angry people pointed that out to me every day.

When I became a reporter, my editor told me my job was to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted. I don’t see that idea reflected very often in the cultural diaspora we call the media and very rarely in coverage of issues relating to animals. As it turns out, blogs are gaining in influence. They matter now.

Churchill was one of the very few mainstream local journalists to question the arrest when it happened, or even think much about it.

“I’ll make my opinion clear right at the start of this one,” Churchill wrote in the Times-Union this morning. “Joshua Rockwood should never have been charged or arrested. What happened to him was a clear case of government outreach – however well-intentioned. And although all of the charges have been largely dismissed, the stench of this case will linger.”

Good reporters are like that, they have sensitive noses for things that don’t smell right.

I can’t speak to the intentions of the police or prosecutor. Mostly, both just seemed to be pandering to the mob,  ignorant about the real lives of farmers or animals.

But I do imagine the case is significant, and will shape the way we think about what the abuse of animals really means and the need for prosecutors and police officials to not simply parrot and reflect extreme notions of the animal rights movement and seek a healthier balance when they make their decisions. This is a very real conflict, this struggle between people who have pets and people who live with animals, and government ought to understand both sides.

The Times-Union is the biggest newspaper in the region and in the state capital, so Churchill’s column matters. Since the trial, the district attorney’s office has defended its prosecution of the case in a muddled and half-hearted way. They don’t seem either chastened or shaken by the drubbing they took, but insisted they were acting in good faith.

The assistant prosecutor who was at the court hearing told one reporter the case was “just.” People with animals are responsible for taking care of them, he said, and Joshua didn’t make sure his water tanks didn’t freeze in – 27 temperatures. The reporter, quite typically, did not ask him why the charges were dismissed if they were just, or why Rockwood’s many cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens are still living with him on the farm and have never required treatment of any kind or been removed.

I wanted to ask him why the police didn’t ask Joshua if he needed help, rather than hauling him off to jail to be booked and post bail.

The young, red-faced prosecutor may have been delighted to get away from his stinkpot of a case – the police just do not look good here – but he did raise the right issue: what is “just” in a case like this? To be just means to act in a way that is morally right and fair.

There is no simple consensus about justice when it comes to the world of animals and their rights. The animal world is in the midst of a fierce and deepening conflict between the animal rights movement and people and farmers like Rockwood or the New York Carriage Drivers or so many others who live and work with animals.

The animal rights movement was founded on the idea that animals and people are equal and need to be treated in precisely the same way. If you had running water last winter and your horse or dog or cow doesn’t, even for a few hours, then you are a criminal. If your bedroom is heated, and your sheep sleeps in a cold barn, you are torturer and abuser.  People with pets generally have never seen a horse or elephant or carriage horse, they support the idea of animal rights but have  no idea what the real lives of animals are like.

A horse on almost any farm is safer and healthier than almost any horse in the wild, subject to predators, savage internal rites of survival,  disease, starvation and intense elements. Any one of the nine billion animals trapped in the mostly horrid industrial animal farms in America would be happy to live on Joshua’s farm, to range freely and eat grass and high quality grain.

We have lost perspective when the town of Glenville sends a police squad out to Joshua’s farm and commits to spending many thousands of dollars in a false and hopeless cause. There is nothing just in that. “It’s not like we want to do that,” one Glenville police sergeant told me last year, “we all have better things to do.”

In our time, animal politics and media coverage of animal-related issues are largely shaped by urban and suburban people who are political about animals but seem to know little or nothing about them. In the 1940’s, 90 per cent of Americans lived on farms or in rural areas and understood that cows and horses can do some time without water and usually do in their natural environments. Today, 90 per cent of Americans live in congested areas along both coasts. It seems the farther they get from the real lives of real animals, the more certain they become about how they should live.

No animal in the wild has heated water available to them 24 hours a day.

The Glenville police and the politicized small animal vet who accompanied them did not seem to know this, nor did they know that almost no farm has a heated barn for animals like cows or sheep or pigs. Any large animal vet will tell you (or would have told them) that pigs and sheep and work horses don’t like to be confined and heated confinement in closed spaces, they can be dangerous to their respiratory systems.

No farmer can guarantee their animals the perfect, life-protected environment that the animal rights theologians believe should be guaranteed by law to every animal who lives with people. Nature and the weather and animal biology intervenes – as it did to Joshua Rockwood, an unusually conscientious and ethical farmer. There is no outdoor heating system for water that cannot freeze in sub-zero temperatures.

The job of the farmer or animal lover isn’t to guarantee a perfect, accident free life, but to pay attention and respond when trouble occurs. Joshua made certain his animals had fresh and potable water, that’s why two vets certified that they were healthy and hydrated days before their arrest. The police didn’t care. That isn’t a question of justice but competence and laziness.

As a former police reporter, I have the greatest respect for the police and the difficult work they do. But the bloated-coffers of the increasingly extremist animal rights movement have led to the passage of countless laws designed to redefine what it means to be cruel to an animal or to neglect them. The police have once again been drawn into a conflict they are not prepared to cope with, and shouldn’t be asked to. There is real crime in Schenectady County, lots of unsolved murders and robberies.

In most states, the standard for abuse is, or was, simple: willful and sustained neglect to the point of grievous injury or death to an animal. Joshua Rockwood’s arrest meet neither of these criterion. His animals were fine, none died during that awful winter and none were injured. Nothing else is really the business of the police or the secret informers of the animal rights movement, now a plague on our very ideas of fairness and  civil liberties.

Joshua Rockwood should get a medal from the Chamber of Commerce for raising healthy food so carefully and in such environmentally sensitive ways. He is the future, not a criminal.

For centuries, there has been a sanctity about or relationship with our animals, some of us do better than others, but if we do not hurt them – grievously and seriously – then it is no one’s business how we live them and what decisions we make about them. That long-standing ethic kept the police and government out of this kind of trouble, and would be a good model for them to return to.

Joshua not only had to endure the nightmare of arrest and prosecution and near financial ruin, he was compelled to give thousands of dollars to the horse rescue farm that helped impound his horses for no reason anyone can yet explain. That does not seem just to me, either. Justice will be served when the police and the district attorney apologize to Rockwood and explain what steps they are taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Do not hold your breath.

This is  now an intense, sometimes bitter political issue. When the police raided Joshua’s farm on the basis of untrained and unqualified secret informers, they are taking sides in a volatile disagreement. At stake is whether or not working animals can remain in our everyday lives, and whether any sane and honest person dares to live with them.

The animal rights movement is a liberation movement, not a rescue or welfare movement for animals. In every single case they are a part of  – the raid on Joshua’s farm, the move to ban the carriage horses, the seizures of pets like dogs and cats, their long and often dishonest campaign against the circus elephants, their campaign to bar ponies from being ridden by children, their opposition to any kind of work or entertainment animals might do for people – their goal is exactly the same: remove and liberate animals from people, who they do not like or trust, and send them to rescue farms and preserves or put them down.

In almost every case, these animals will never be seen again by most human beings, or go to extinction and slaughter, the more likely outcome.

This is the movement that the police in Glenville, N.Y. and the Schenectady County District Attorney have entwined themselves with  and embraced. They have not explained why.

Chris Churchill was honest and correct in his column about the Rockwood case, but I would add one thing to it: the stench of this case will not go away until there is an open and honest discussion about disturbing and irrational notions of abuse,  and about the future of animals in our world.

Joshua Rockwood’s sweeping victory gives reason to hope.