Since the New York Carriage Controversy is supposed to be about the horses, their rights, their safety and their welfare, it seems essential, as the mayor tries once more to drive the horses out of New York City, to consider as thoughtfully as possible what will become of them if more than 150 horses are taken from their work and shelter in the city, as has been proposed.
And to also consider who will be held accountable if and when some of them die, as seems almost certain.
The mayor is seeking to cannibalize the carriage trade in the next few weeks in exchange for vague and somewhat fantasized promises to build a stable for 77 horses in Central Park sometime in the future. Officials close to the park and city planning say such a stable is unlikely ever to be built in Central Park, at least not for many years and much legal conflict and many millions of dollars.
I want to focus on the horses. Their safety and welfare, lost in the fog of New York money and politics, are supposed to be the point of all this.
On May 12, 2014, the New York State Veterinary Medical Society, Inc. (NYSVMS) wrote a letter to Mayor deBlasio.
“Many residents of New York City are unaware that New York State faces a major problem with unwanted, and even abandoned, horses, whose owners, for a multitude of reasons, are unable or unwilling to provide further care for them. Although rescue groups and individuals struggle to do what they can to save these animals and find them an appropriate home, euthanasia is all too often their fate.”
The debate in New York City over the horse-drawn carriages fails to take into account, says the letter, “what is likely to happen to the City’s current carriage horses if their jobs are taken away from them. The naive assumption that somewhere there is a pasture to which they can retire, masks the reality that sooner, rather than later, many of them will be put down.”
The NYSVMS warning was ignored by the mayor, he never acknowledged the letter or responded to it. Nor did he acknowledge or respond to more than a dozen similar warnings and concerns from just about every one of the most prestigious equine medical associations in the country, includling the American Veterinary Medical Association, and the American Association of Equine Practitioners.
At least a dozen private equine veterinary practitioners from around the country came to New York and also found the carriage horses to be healthy and content.
These groups and doctors all came to New York and studied the carriage horses, along with the NYSVMS, which found after an exhaustive study that “opponents of horse-drawn carriages are also misinformed about conditions in the carriage industry, frequently claiming that the horses are forced to live and work under inhumane conditions.” All three major veterinary organizations found that the horses, “many of which are rescue animals themselves, live and work under the careful scrutiny of the veterinary profession, which follows stringent standards designed to ensure the animal’s welfare is of paramount importance.”
The mayor has refused to meet with or speak to a single one of these internationally reknowned experts, veterinarians, behaviorists or biologists. He has never asked a single one what they found, saw, or concluded. He says it doesn’t matter.
This is an extraordinary position for a politician who aspires to lead the progressive political movement in America.
And one thing should be clear by now. The animal rights movement is not an animal rescue movement, it is an animal liberation movement. It’s oft-stated goal is to remove animals from the ownership and control of people.
Many leaders in this movement have said they believe animals are better off dead than living in bondage to people, forced to do their work. Steven Nislick, the founder of NYClass, the group spearheading the assault on the carriage trade has been quoted as saying that as well.
The movement that says it speaks for the rights of animals does not. The carriage horses are in peril.
In the irrational world of New York animal politics, and animal rights politics in particular, science doesn’t matter.
Neither does the plea of famed horse trainer Buck Brannaman, the inspiration for The Horse Whisperer book and film. The carriage horses, he wrote, are the lucky ones, they have light work to do and people to pay attention to them. The ones to worry, he cautions, about are the ones languishing on preserves and farms. They have nothing to do but eat and drop manure. That is not, he says, a healthy life for any horse, let alone a working horse. For them, he says, it is a slow death.
Or the conclusion of famed biologist Jared Diamond, who says the big horses are the best suited animals on earth to live in urban areas.
The mayor is not interested in Brannaman, or Diamond, or in reason, knowledge, or people who have spent their lives treating or living with horses, or the real needs of animals. He has never owned a dog or a cat. His major supporters include real estate developers who will inevitably buy the properties on which all three city stables sit.
Mayor deBlasio, along with the animal rights activists seeking to ban the horses, has rejected any kind of equine or animal expertise and refused to meet with the carriage horse owners or drivers. He will not visit the stables, not even after the actor Liam Neeson, a long-time lover of horses, humiliated him by urging him to “man up” and see the horses for himself.
There are a number of murky but very serious issues relating to the future of the carriage horses, if they are taken from their work and stables. The bill the mayor is introducing into the City Council dictates what the horse owners can do and can’t do with their private property. This is a nearly unprecedented expansion of government authority over personal property, especially by a municipal government in a democratic country.
The bill says that “A licensed horse shall not be sold or disposed of except in a humane manner, which, for the purposes of this subchapter, shall mean a licensed horse may not be sold or otherwise transferred to an individual or organization for purposes of slaughter, resale for slaughter, or holding or transport for slaughter.”
For one thing, carriage horse owners suddenly thrown out of work – more than half would lose their jobs under the new bill of the mayor’s – may need to sell their horses in order to raise money and live, the city has no plans to reimburse them or offer them any kind of buyout. You can’t sell your horse to a rescue farm.
For another, it seems their business what they do with their horses. They bought them, trained them, lived and work for them. Should the mayor and City Council really be deciding what people can do with the animals they own? Since the animal rights movement across the country is arguing, along with the mayor, that work for horses is tantamount to torture and abuse, they are essentially limiting the owners to selling their horses to rescue farms and preserves.
The horse rescue community is in awful difficulty since the recession.
More than 160,000 horses were sent to slaughter last year – 10,000 more than when the NYSVMS wrote their letter to the mayor in 2014. Rescue farms are overcrowded, underfunded, and it is beyond naivety to believe there will be room for 150 1,800 lb draft horses who eat four huge bales of hay a day. It is dishonest to insist there are safe places for all of these horses to go for the rest of their lives.
I called a large and well-known rescue farm in Minnesota yesterday and talked to the owner, who asked not to be identified for obvious reasons (the animal rights movement does not promote civil dialogue).
“I’d like to see the horses leave all cities,” she said, “but I have to be honest with you, I’d rather see the horses alive and well and cared for in New York than dead or hanging around all day on rescue farms with a lot of sick old horses. Working horses need to work, and I don’t have the money to feed big and healthy and active horses. Those aren’t the ones we rescue, they are fine. If 150 horses are sent out of the city like that, most of them will be dead within a couple of years. Nobody has that kind of money. We rescue the ones who are sick, starving, neglected almost to death, we need to save every penny for them.”
The mayor is blindly and obsessively plunging ahead with his plan to decimate the carriage trade and remove the horses from the city, as he has promised to do. As he travels the country in pursuit of his burgeoning national political ambitions, he may well find the ghosts of these beautiful and iconic animals waiting for him.
In the next weeks, the mayor is hoping to ram through the council his bill destroying the carriage trade while dangling his Trojan Horse – the promise of a stable in Central Park somehow at some time. He can’t kill them outright, but he can try to bully them into committing suicide.
It is time, I believe, to ask him and the members of the City Council who will be held accountable for the deaths of these horses if and when they occur, as they inevitably will if they are sent away, according to every equine authority there is. I hope the lawyers of the carriage trade will emerge from their silence and speak up clearly for these animals, while there is time.
The horse world all across the country is up in arms over this issue, I have been giving interviews all morning. They and animal lovers everywhere will be taking note of every healthy and happy and loved carriage horse who is sent off to their death by an arrogant and willfully ignorant mayor and any other New York City politician who joins with him in this very unholy crusade.
This, clearly, is not about the rights of animals but the greed and ambition and arrogance of human beings.
A member of the City Council – he was from Queens – e-mailed me last night after reading the piece I wrote about the new legislation. He was seeking information about the future of the horses. His constituents, he said, were asking him about it.
He said he was thinking ahead, and he said he did not want to find himself explaining why he voted to kill one carriage horse after another for no reason anyone can justify or explain, and after the mayor and the leaders of the animal rights movement had promised that every one of the horses would be safe and cared for all of their lives.
Amen, brother, I answered. You are wise. The horse and animal people and the spirits of the horses will not forget.