The mayor and the Teamsters and the Carriage Horse trade have a deal. It is a bittersweet thing. There are things to celebrate, some things to mourn. I suppose that is the nature of real life.

It is a good deal in some ways, a bad and sad one in others.

As of June, 2016, the carriage horses will be restricted to giving rides in Central Park only. The number of licensed horses would be reduced to 95 from somewhere between 180 and 220. The deal will essentially put the carriage trade at the permanent mercy of the city government, their new landlord, while permitting it to survive and also be promoted.

By October of 2018, the horses will be relocated to Central Park, the stables will be closed or sold. The carriage horses will no longer be permitted to work in city traffic, or live and walk among city residents. They will no longer be an organic part of the city, as they have been for hundreds of years.

No one in the city will again hear the evocative clip-clop of their hooves outside of the beautiful park.

The ugly and disruptive pedicabs that have plagued and competed with the horses will be restricted to Central Park above 86th street. No horse medallion owner will lose their medallions. The city’s taxpayers will pay for the horses new home in the park.

I was very happy to learn that the cruel and demoralizing harassment of the carriage drivers will end, no protests are allowed in the park. Although the city media has ignored the issue, the long campaign against the carriage horses has become a civil and human rights issue, filled with harassment and confrontation. It has caused great fear and suffering. The people in the carriage trade deserve to work in peace.

No vendors will be permitted near the hack stands.

With permits, the horses can still do street work. NYClass  (they love animals, they hate people) may now choose to use some of its millions to save animals who are in real trouble and are actually being abused.  The group  which conceived the bumbling and disastrous campaign against the horses, and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the mayor’s campaign, is  reported to be furious.

Curiously, the deal prohibits any carriage from working more than one shift a day, as if wood and metal can be abused. The surviving horses will be working a lot harder.

You can read more about the deal here.

It is  very important in my mind to recognize that the New York Carriage Horse controversy has awakened and educated animal lovers all over the country about the real needs and lives and circumstances of horses and other domesticated animals. The idea that work for all animals is abuse has been almost completely discredited, and the horses have also helped many others to see that one the real dangers facing animals is the movement to remove them from our everyday lives rather than to seek ways to keep them with us.

The horses have triggered a new social awakening about animals and our need to understand them in a new and more humane and mystical way. That began to happen there.

Because New York City is such a big stage, the carriage horse controversy has re-shaped and re-defined our understanding of what the abuse of animals really is, and who has the right to speak for them and their rights.  If these 100 or so discarded horses are sent to slaughter, as equine experts believe is likely, their killers will not be animal abusers driving carriages, they will have been killed by the very people who claim to speak for them and protect them.

There is no right for animals I know of greater than the right to survive in our world.

In this new deal, a number of drivers, full and part-time, and some stable hands and groomers will lose their jobs. Horses will lose their good and regulated lives.

A number of horses will return to the much harder work of farming, spend idle and invisible lives on rescue farms and preserves, or, according to the NY State Veterinary Medical Society, be euthanized.

The carriage horses will essentially be seen and known only by tourists, they will have little or nothing to do with the city’s residents, a sad and short-sighted reality. I think of this new idea of them as their becoming living Carousel Horses, something pretty to look and leave.

Some elements within the carriage trade are equally upset and concerned about the future, they have formed a protest page on Facebook.

The carriage trade is a tribal universe, with diverse and independent elements, almost all of them resistant to change and with conflicting ideas about how to proceed in the face of so obsessed and disconnected a mayor. Some of the drivers feel betrayed by the deal, others are relieved by it. The mayor, stung by the backlash against his unpopular crusade against the horses, and eager to move on to other issues – he seeks to be America’s progressive icon – is said to be very eager to see the City Council pass his proposal.

There is much about the deal that remain unclear, and animal rights activists are outraged and bitterly opposed to it. Their goal is and has always been the removal of the horses from New York and from any kind of work with humans. The animal rights movement is a liberation movement, not a rescue movement. They seek to free animals from people, even loving and conscientious people,  as they tried to do here.

Although the carriage trade has retained Norman Siegel, one of the country’s most prominent civil rights lawyers, the deal, if it is upheld, means the carriage trade will not ultimately challenge their persecution or the government overreach as the civil rights issue it really is and has been. That is unfortunate. This is still a story of  political arrogance and the corruption of money in the political and regulatory process. It seems unlikely those issues will ever be confronted now.

The mayor ought not to get away with it.

The elephant in the room was always real estate, not animal rights. In New York City, everything small and individual and traditional thing is being swept away in a tsunami of greed and power and real estate development.

The mayor, who campaigned against real estate developers, seems to have slipped into their pockets. There are tens of thousands of homeless people living on the streets of New York in record-breaking numbers, many can no longer afford the rents in the city. Billion-dollar condo developments will soon replace the West Side stables that have housed horses for generations.

The animal rights movement has some serious re-evaluating to do, although they are the least likely people to do it. In the rational real world, heads would be rolling all over the streets for this catastrophe of a campaign.  Their pursuit of  the horses was a disastrous failure from the first, they misjudged almost everything about politics of the city, the nature of  horses and the city’s historic and intense relationship with them. They demonstrated the most profound ignorance about the real lives and needs of animals. They lied and distorted reality repeatedly.

But there is a hard truth confronting the negotiators and lawyers and advocates for the horses:  sooner or later, real estate developers would have gotten the stables, and the industry would have perished, along with so many others. An enlightened mayor could have found a way to save the carriage trade if he were so inclined, but not this mayor. He promised to obliterate the day from “day one,” he said it was his foremost priority as the new mayor.

The choice seemed to be to find a way to survive, or sit back and watch the industry die.

At first, the mayor and the people seeking to ban the horses claimed they were abused, that argument collapsed in a stream of reports and evaluations from vets, trainers, behaviorists and animal lovers testifying to the animal’s health and good care. The argument then shifted to the idea that it was not safe for the horses to be on the city’s congested streets. Although there is little or no evidence to support that claim, it was a more effective argument, one pressured City Council members – in the city, the council is historically weak – could grasp.

The mayor has said the horses are not safe in the city streets, but that is a false claim. In 30 years and millions of rides, three horses have died in motor vehicle collisions, there is no form of public transportation anywhere in the city or anywhere else that comes close to a safety record like that.

This was always an invented controversy, it was never based on reality.

The carriage trade is now assured of surviving in New York City and in Central Park. The horses will stay in the city, where they belong. But only in a fractional and Disneyfied way, no longer a part of the city’s fabric, as they always have been.

The deal came with a high price.

The carriage trade will no longer be an independent industry representing an idiosyncratic and  distinctive way of life, the horses will only exist within the narrow tourist universe, the trade will always be at the mercy of the city, its new landlord,  and it’s politicians.

Ultimately, and once more, we have chosen trucks, cars, money and development over animals, who are disappearing from our world, I’m not sure who is killing more of them, developers who destroy their habitats or people who claim they speak for the rights of animals, but seem to have only one idea – take them away from people.

The deal is a stunning defeat for the animal rights movement in New York City and elsewhere. They have spent millions of dollars and much energy and very expensive lobbying – often irresponsibly and dishonestly – to ban the carriage horses, only to have their major ally, the mayor, agree to and sponsor a deal that will not only ensure that the horses remain forever in the city, but require the city government to promote them and renovate their new homes.

We need a better understanding of animals than this. The horses have spoken to us, gotten our attention.

Many people in New York City and elsewhere know a lot more about the issues the horses represent than they knew before, that is a good thing, and a good model for the future.  We cannot save animals by keeping them on hidden preserves and sending them to slaughter. We have to be able to see them and know them.

The more people know, the better decisions they make about the future of animals, and no matter what happens to the horses, we need to remember that more than 62 per cent of the people in one of the world’s most progressive and sophisticated cities stood with them to the end. Too bad they are so much more perceptive than their mayor