Just a few short months ago, the mayor of New York City told reporters – more than once – that he agreed with the animal rights groups seeking to ban the carriage horses. It was inhumane, he said, for horses to pull carriages.
About that time, a carriage driver approached the mayor at a public function with his eight-year-old son in tow. Since the mayor refuses to meet with the carriage drivers, the driver said, he came with his son in the hopes he could speak to him.
Why, Mr. Mayor, he asked, are you so determined to ban the horses and destroy the carriage trade? Because said the mayor, as he turned away and in front of the driver’s son, “your work is immoral.”
This year, the mayor is pressuring the New York City Council to move the carriage trade and 95 of its horses to Central Park, where they might conduct their inhumane and immoral work for all time in a stables renovated by the city. He refuses to explain how he got from there to here.
The mayor’s proposal, agreed to in principle by the Teamsters Union, which represents the carriage drivers, is controversial and confusing and uncertain.
It may be the best hope of survival for the horses in New York, it might just be an indirect way of destroying the carriage trade in small cuts. The mayor now wants to be the horses new landlord.
There is a lot of hand-wring about the Teamsters agreement. But the Teamsters are doing what Teamsters do: protecting jobs and wages. If not for Liam Neeson and the Teamsters, there would be no carriage trade today. Their job is not to protect the future of animals in our world. No one seems to be doing that.
There is some fierce opposition developing to the agreement, the New York Daily News has been leading the outcry, check out today’s editorial.There were more protests today. Very few people on the carriage trade side appear to trust the mayor to fulfill any of his pledges.
I’ll leave the politics to the politicians.
For years now, New York has wrestled with the question of the horses.
But there has never been any serious discussion on the bigger issue that hovers over the unnecessary controversy: what is the future of animals in our world, and can the horses continue to thrive in urban environments, as they have for thousands of years?
The media sees this in the narrowest of ways, as a political argument between the unions and the mayor and a never-ending struggle between the carriage trade and the animal rights movement. To them, it is just another kind of football game, winners and losers, one side versus the other.
But New York, our biggest stage, is important. People everywhere are waiting to see if New York will give up on its horses and the people who live and work with them.
The animal rights people have failed animals and people miserably in this long argument. They cannot see beyond the transparently false issue of cruelty and abuse that has marked this conflict. The carriage trade, a collection of tribal and quarreling factions, is fighting for their way of life and their work and sustenance. A lot of families are on the line, and a lot of horses.
Instead of fighting for the survival of the horses, the mayor and the animal rights activists in New York insist on throwing people out of work, sending many horses to their deaths, and removing the rest from the sight and lives of almost all of the city’s more than eight million residents.
This past year, I have come to see that there is no animal rights movement, we have all been lulled and distracted by all the noise and thunder.
The horses stand for nature. They are nature’s living and lonely symbol and testimony in our greedy and distracted lives, in a city choking on its own greed, density, and indifference to the environment.
In accepting this agreement, all parties are tacitly conceding that domesticated animals do not belong in the streets or neighborhoods of the densely-populated city, that it is unsafe and dangerous for them to be there. In the years that I have been following this story, I have not seen one single piece in all of the voluminous media coverage of the controversy (what he says, what she says) exploring that question, which is, after all, at the heart of.
Beyond raging battles over the horses treatment – we see this now as the chimera that it is – there has been little or no focus on where the horses belong. If you care about horses, you perhaps know that is the very best and safest outcome for them.
And I would argue, for us.
There are many good reasons to keep the big horses in the city, from environmental concerns about motor vehicles to practical concerns about traffic and pollution and the movement of goods and people. Horses could reduce the murderous accident and injury rates inflicted by motor vehicles, and greatly affect our own emotional well being, peace of mind and stress.
Anyone who has been near a carriage stand in Central Park and watched the faces of the people and children walking past knows of the power of horses to lift our spirits and pull the love from he deepest parts of us. Is that dangerous?
It is a beautiful thing to see big horse clip-clopping through the streets. It is not a beautiful thing to see another car rush past or another giant condo rising in the sky.
If the raging horse controversy in New York were about the number of cars and real estate development projects – just substitute the words – it might make some sense. It makes no sense now.
Until the animal rights movement seized control of the debate nearly a generation ago with its notions of liberating animals from cruel people (there are no good people in the stories and liturgy of the animal rights movement), humans had constructed their understanding of horses over millennia.
And it was a far wiser and more knowing understanding of animals than exists now. We used to live among horses. Most animals are strangers to us now. We know them from afar, and we exploit and emotionalize them accordingly, mostly to make us feel better and superior.
Almost every day, the animal rights outrage and genocide machine feeds the hungry media another accusation of abuse and animal cruelty that is usually either unprovable, ridiculous or just plain false. Almost none of these charges have been proven to be true, but they recur, again and again, distracting us from the things we ought to be talking about, including the very real abuse of animals that occurs every day.
If a fraction of these endless accusations made against the carriage trade over the years were true, there wouldn’t be a work horse left alive or standing in the city.
In his landmark work, Guns, Germs And Steel, the famed biologist Jared Diamond’s found that horses were the perfect domesticable animals for cities with their dominant hierarchies, gentle natures, tolerance for other species, genetic malleability and strong herding instincts. Humans could never have lived in in the giant, wealth-generating communities that spread over the earth in the nineteenth century without working horses.
Horses, write Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr in The Horses In The City, have also benefited from this human built ecology. The urban horse, always working hard, is undoubtedly better fed, better housed, given better medical care, and better protected from cruelty, abuse and overwork than horses on farms or in the wild.
Horses have always thrived in urban environments, their populations booming, their life spans growing. The carriage horses – big draft horses – have never lived in the wild and could not survive there. For that matter, there is no longer any wild for them to go to.
The relationship between people and horses has, for thousands of years, been symbiotic – horses could not have survived as a species without human intervention, and dense human populations have always relied on horses and lived safely and worked well with them. The idea that horses cannot live safely in crowded cities is a new idea, it came not from reality but from the liberation theology of the animal rights movement, which was spawned by academic theorists in the 1970’s.
We need a wiser and more rational understanding of animals than this, if we are to keep any of them in our lives and our world.
This people-horse relationship, dating back to thousands of years. is about to be shattered in New York City by the mayor and the animal-dumb supporters in the animal rights movement. A sacred contract and glorious history is being discarded. They are saying that horses can no longer live among people, but only in the new ghettos of the animal world, rescue farms and preserves, where they can never again work with people or know them, they will lose the very source of their endurance and survival.
I have ridden in many horse carriages as they go to and from Central Park to their stables. The horses are calm, responsive, under control. Fire engines rush past with blaring sirens, they pass trucks and construction sites, there have been a handful of incidents in millions of trips. Sometimes, they slow things down a bit, many people smile and wave to them. Is this really dangerous?
The new understanding of horses says its okay for them to live in stables in a park, or in stables on a rescue farm, or even go to slaughter, but not to be in stables in city neighborhoods where they can continue to do many kinds of work, from hauling to therapy with children.
And where they can also represent nature and Mother Earth, both of which have largely vanished under the condo and development onslaught in New York. In Baltimore, horses pull fruit carts through the city’s poorest neighborhoods, bring fresh fruit to people with no markets nearby. The horses are known and loved, they bring much light and love, and are not considered overworked, mistreated or abused. They live and work among people who see and know them.
They horses keep us from living in the grim and joyless world of the new idea of animal rights, if they go, they will take the mystery and magic with them.
Horses work in crowded cities all over the world, often in conditions far less humane than in New York.
Isn’t it elitist to confine the horses to one park and the time of tourists? Why shouldn’t everyone in New York get to see them and enjoy them and know them? Instead of trying to ban them, the mayor could as easily have proposed traffic-free horse lanes, new turnout grazing for them in the city’s parks, and deals with developers to build new and safe stables in different boroughs.
It is far from clear that the city will be better off with no horses on the streets, or left among the people. The mayor claims that cars are safer, but huge increases in traffic volume, mileage and speed have increased pollution and human mortality dramatically, while horse accidents are rare, almost unheard of.
In the 157 years of operation by the carriage trade, no human being in New York has been killed by a carriage horse. Could there be a better safety record than that?
Hundreds of adults and children are killed and maimed in motor vehicle accidents every year in the city.
Yet the city’s notoriously raucous media has never challenged the argument that they are dangerous, a view now widely accepted in the city and never discussed.
To some people in the modern world, equine waste may seen disgusting, even unhealthy. But animal waste is recycled back into the earth and is biodegradable. Modern air pollution has no such mitigation and is believed to be destroying the planet. No such accusations have been leveled at horses.
The mayor, who claims to be a progressive leader in the nation, has actually endorsed the idea of replacing the carriage horses with giant and ugly and expensive tourist cars, inspired by Disney’s Main Street buses.
Our conversation about the New York horses seems obsessively focused on politics and controversy.
But it is really about loss. If the horses disappear from city streets, something important will be lost, and for no rational reason. We will once again break faith with the natural world, and cut ourselves and our children off from it.
The joy of my life is living with the animals on my farm, the dogs, barn cats, chickens, donkeys and sheep. And one horse.
The daily, constant presence of living, breathing, defecating, loving and yes, sometimes dying animals is a constant reminder of nature, of the powerful relationship human beings have always had with animals like horses. And of our obligation to help make the world healthy again, even in cities, even in completely manufactured environments.
Out of sight, we will forget them, and our own history and Mother Earth along with them.
The saddest thing about the New York Carriage controversy right now isn’t what everyone is saying about the horses. It’s about what they are not saying and don’t seem to want to know.