Let’s talk about the horses, because it is the right thing and no one seems to be speaking for them.
In two days, the New York City Council will vote on a proposal that would in effect, cannibalize the carriage trade, destroy more than 800 carriage trade and pedicab jobs, and give at least 100 carriage horses the right to be traumatized, dislocated, languish or die.
We see again in this conflict how the animal rights movement has lost its vision and is fighting for animals to die, not live. We also see how dangerous it is for animals when political leaders and passionate but ill-informed animal lovers presume to decide their fate and future.
Our connection to long-domesticated animals like the carriage horses is a dialogue that must never be interrupted, it is not mercy for them to be left on a farm for the rest of their lives with nothing to do, and no one to love. Or go to slaughter. The have done us much good and still do us much good, we are morally obliged to return the favor.
There are some things that everyone who knows horses, lives with them or works with them knows.
Working horses need work, they need food and shelter, they need activity, structure, the attention of people. In that sense, they are just like working dogs. What border collies need, working horses need. If you want to know what a horse needs, think in many ways what your dog needs. They are not far apart. Love and care is how we speak to them, how they speak to us.
More than anything, as much as food, working and domesticated animals need consistent work to do and people to attach to. Animals do not make moral judgements about people, they do not care if we are nice or conservative or liberal or carriage drivers or animal rights activists.
They want – need – focused activity, they love tradition and routine, they wish to be touched and paid attention to, and they wish to trust their sustenance, food, water and shelter.
They do not care if they are out in nature, or in a clean stable. They do not make housing or career choices. The big working horses have never lived in the wild, they would perish there. They are bred to use their big muscles to move and work.
It is traumatic for horses, as it is for dogs, to be separated from the human beings who feed them, care for them, groom them, and from their familiar surroundings and routines. It is not humane to traumatize any domesticated animal in that way and for no reason – not a dog, not a horse, not an elephant.
Here’s the simple truth.
This week, the mayor of New York is asking his rubber-stamp City Council to pass legislation that put more than 100 horses in peril quite soon. At last week’s city council hearings, no one asked the mayor’s staff or the animal rights spokespeople where the carriage horses will go once they are sent away from their safe and secure stables and work in New York. No journalist in the city has raised the question or written about it that I can see or find.
Every politician in the city talks about the rights of animals, but no one seems to understand what that really means.
Any reporter – or for that matter, anyone reading this story – can do what I did, get on the phone and call a half-dozen horse rescue farms and hear the wrenching and piteous stories of horses in America today. The farms are overcrowded, often in disrepair, overwhelmed and underfunded. Each one tells the same story, they work to save abused and starving and hideously mistreated animals, not the healthy and well-cared for carriage horses of New York.
None of them have any money.
In New York City, people who kick a dog are now required to register for life on a public website so they can be publicly shamed and barred from owning animals for years, if not forever. City council members who vote to send scores of horses to their death for no reason will get a 30 per cent pay raise.
The horses cry out for us to see that we need a new movement to support animals, we need a wiser understanding of animals than this. We need to speak for the true rights of these horses and other animals being “saved” at the cost of their lives and welfare.
An ethical mayor or city council or animal rights activist might want to talk to famed biologist Jared Diamond, whose wrote in his seminal work, Guns, Germs and Steel, considered a classic, that horses are the “perfect” domesticable animals for life in urban areas. They have orderly and dominant hierarchies, a tolerance for other species, genetic malleability, and strong herding instincts.
This means they are stable, resilient, trainable, sociable, gentle and obedient.
It also means that they are predictable. It does not mean that they will never fall, get sick, be frightened or die. They are not statues, they are living things, just like us, only a lot calmer and stronger. They were made for New York, they have lived there comfortably and safely for hundreds of years, most of that time in a city that was far dirtier, more dangerous, crowded and chaotic than it is now.
I don’t know if the mayor is dishonest or not, but he has no idea what he is talking about when he makes and tries to explain his irrational decisions about the horses.
Repeatedly, he and the animal rights groups seeking to ban them have said every horse will be taken to a horse rescue farm and fed and cared for as long as they live. Over the past several years of intense debate, not a single one of these groups have named a single rescue facility or farm or explained who will pay for the care of huge horses that eat four bales of hay for 10-20 years.
A horse rescue farm in California estimated last year that it would cost $24 million to feed and care for all of the carriage horses for the rest of their lives.
Last year, more than 160,000 American horses were sent to slaughter. Because animal rights lobbyists pressured Congress to close or restrict slaughterhouses in America, the horses are now taken in often hot and crowded trailers to Canada or Mexico, where nails are drilled through their heads. This is, by all accounts, a terrifying experience for animals, especially prey animals like horses.
This is the likely fate of many, if not all, of the carriage horses who would be displaced. They can die in the name of giving them better lives by people too righteous or lazy to bother to know the facts or the truth.
Almost all of these horses are rescue animals in the first place, bought from mostly Amish farmers or from auction houses where they were headed for slaughter. No one who knows and loves horses believes returning these horses to their former lives will improve their existence in any way, make them easier, healthier, more humane or safer.
The carriage horse controversy is headed to court, where it belongs, even as opposition mounts to the mayor’s bill.
There is a staggering amount of dissembling and misinformation about the horses in New York City.
One of the most outrageous falsehoods is the claim by the mayor and animal rights activists that every horse will have a safe and stable rescue farm to go to.
This is simply not true, and anyone who votes for the mayor’s legislation ought to at least take responsibility for the fact that they are giving many of the horses the right and a pathway to die, even though they are healthy and well cared for.
In May of 2014, Dr. Christopher Brockett and Dr. Ann Dwyer of the New York State Veterinary Society Inc. wrote a letter to Mayor deBlasio warning him of the fate of the horses if their work in New York was eliminated and they were taken away.
“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,” said the letter.” Although rescue groups and individuals struggle to do what they can to save these animals and find them an appropriate home,” said the letter, “euthanasia is too often their fate.”
Much of the public debate over the horse-drawn carriages fails to take into account what is likely to happen to the carriage horses if their jobs are taken away from them, added Drs. Brockett and Dwyer. “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.”
That assumption also masks an equally troubling assumption, which is that moving to a rescue farm would be good for the horses in the first place.
Famed horse trainer Buck Brannaman, the inspiration for the movie The Horse Whisperer, has said repeatedly that the horses in New York are leading good and healthy lives, the horses that suffer are those left with nothing to do on rescue preserves and farms but eat, drop manure, and deteriorate.
Those horses, he said, are the ones to pity. The carriage horses are the lucky ones.
The NYState Veterinary Society was supported in its position by the two most prestigious equine veterinary associations in the country, the American Veterinary Medical Society and the American Association of Equine Practitioners. Also by the New York State Horse Council. All of these organizations pleaded with the mayor to leave the carriage horses where they are, and recognize that they are in a healthier and safer place than almost all of the horses in the world.
None of these groups or their respected veterinarians and behaviorists have been contacted by the mayor, his office, or anyone in the New York City Council. They have not been asked to testify, to come and talk, or to submit the exhaustive studies they undertook to evaluate the carriage horses, their health and their care.
It is difficult for me to imagine an organization that claims to be in support of animal rights not knowing these findings, or showing any interest in studying or discussing them. Animal rights ought to be about helping animals live, not die. Horses need to stay with people who care for them, not be separated from them.
Friday, the city council will vote on the mayor’s proposal to move the carriage trade to Central Park, where a new building will be constructed for the carriages and a stable renovated for the horses.
There is enormous opposition to the idea that a private and profitable industry ought to be moved into a public park at taxpayer expense. There is opposition to the brutal elimination of hundreds of pedicab jobs. There is tremendous opposition to the bill by the members of the carriage trade.
Long before any stable could possibly be built for the carriage trade, the hours, number of horses and territory of the carriages would be severely curtailed or restricted.
Ian McKeever, a carriage driver and owner in New York, told the New York Times yesterday that the timeline prepared by the city would severely threaten the carriage industry over the next two years. “We’re all against this bill,” he said of the drivers. “This is a ban bill wrapped up in clothing because we will not be able to survive until the stables are opened.”
If McKeever is correct, and I know him to be an honest and sincere person, then all 220 of the carriage horses will be in peril, along with the people who have lived and worked with them and cared for them for years.
I see no way in which this path benefits or saves or improves the life and safety of one single horse, which is the stated purpose of the legislation and the long and bitter drive to push the horses out of the city. I believe that the case for the horses and their people needs to go to court, anything short of that is just death by a thousand cuts.
Amid all of the political intrigue and maneuvering, the fate of the horses sometimes seem lost. These horses have triggered a new social awakening, they are changing the narrative in the long and sad story of animals in our world.
They have sparked an awareness by animal lovers everywhere that we need a better understanding of animals than this, we need a movement that will speak for the real needs and rights of animals, it is wrong to exploit them so we can feel better about ourselves.
We cannot simply remove one animal after another from our every day lives, and then from the world, and pat ourselves on the back for being noble and righteous. Our fate is their fate, we are their partners in the world, not their mothers or fathers or siblings or enemies.
I believe in the Native-American vision of people and horses. We are not different things, but one thing. As they have worked so long and hard for us, we must learn from them and struggle to speak for them.