The carriage horse supporters in New York City are understandably gloating over the humiliation of the humiliation of their mayor, the evil conjurer who is already promising to come back to try and destroy them again. The mayor has embraced his new role as the Snidely Whiplash of the animal world. It is clear to the rest of the world that this is the wrong side to be on, but not yet clear to him. Perhaps next time.
On the blogs and websites of the carriage people, it’s like Dorothy and her pals celebrating the demise of the Great Wizard. Except the Great Wizard is still behind his curtain – “no one gets to see the wizard” – pulling his levers, and he offers no joy for animals or the people who love and work with them.
In the background, the horses whisper to us humans: do better than this.
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For me, victory is a long ways off, and it is, I think, a much bigger thing now than the mayor or the carriage trade, or even than New York City itself, one of the great stages of the world.
For me, victory would be a world in which government, citizens, animal lovers and advocates embrace the need to think very differently about animals, or we will continue to drive them from our world. It is too late for so many species, it is not too late for the horses.
The most painful thing about the New York Carriage Horse controversy is that it should never have happened, and it ought never to happen again, even as the mayor gets ready to do just that. We are far from victory, passionate but unknowing animal rights activists all over America – Chicago, Philadelphia, Charlotte – are working to make the same dreadful mistake the mayor was prevented from making at the very last minute.
The truth has trickled out beyond the arguments, blogs, political maneuvering and labor politics.Truth is like that, if you believe in it, it will always triumph over hatred and ignorance. It just may take a while. The trick is to not become what you hate.
The horses belong in New York, they are safe and healthy and much loved. The biologist Jared Diamond was correct, the big horses were bred to be in cities, they belong there, they are better suited than any other domesticated animal to live and work with us, and be our partners in the joys and travails of the world again.
The great irony is that the people in the carriage trade have figured out how to do it, they have made it work. They are smart and tough. And unlike their tormentors, they changed when they needed to change.
Many drivers and carriage owners will concede privately that back in the 1980’s, some of the horses were not treated as well as horses are today. Some were not treated well at all. Facing an animal rights movement that was beginning to target them, they chose to reform. They proposed new regulations and procedures far more stringent than anyone was even demanding.
They began to change their story, their experiment has great import and meaning for animals, if we can just see it.
They cut back on the working hours of the horses, agreed to temperature restrictions far more severe than horses anywhere – especially in the wild – live under. They cleaned up the stables, offered five weeks of vacation, hired more stable help, opened themselves up to regular inspections, accepted scores of new regulations. They became what veterinarians everywhere described as a model for how domesticated animals can be treated and kept in cities safely, humanely and productively.
The people in the carriage trade had better motivation that anyone – certainly than the mayor or the animal rights groups – their very livelihood and future depended on treating the horses well. And they worked hard to do it. There are very few animals in the world treated as well as animals that earn money for the people who own them.
The plight of animals in the world challenges us to think differently about it today. When the animal rights movement was spawned amid the liberation movements of the 1970’s, it was responding in part to the rise of factory farming, which so many people believe is cruel to vast numbers of animals in a new and horrifying way. Peter Singer, whose book Animal Liberation, helped launch the movement, focused on the growth of the giant animal factory farms that sprung up to make hamburgers and chickens for the fast food industry.
And he advanced and supported the idea that most animals do not belong in the care and ownership of most people.
At the time, there was no wide understanding of climate change, little realization that the natural habitats and environments of almost all of the domesticated animals in the world were disappearing. The animal rights movement preached the very new idea that work for humans was abuse for animals, and the use of them in any way to entertain humans was exploitive and demeaning. As a liberation movement, the big idea was to liberate animals from people. That they increasingly had nowhere to go and nothing else to do did not seem to matter, as the Asian elephants are now learning.
There was a vast and willing audience for this message. Disconnected Americans have left their farms behind, most have pets, not animals, and know little or nothing of the real lives of real animals any longer. The animal rights message seemed like a good one, it was, in so many was, the perfect cause. Who, after all, is for the abuse of animals?
No one could begin to count how many animals – horses, ponies, elephants, movie animals – have paid with their lives for this new idea of animal welfare. For animals, the road to hell is definitely paved with the best of intentions.
Development and global warming have eliminated half of the animal species, according to the World Wildlife Fund. At the moment, the carriage trade is almost alone in keeping the big draft horses alive and productive in urban environments. Ringling Bros. has the only sustainable herd of Asian elephants in the Western Hemisphere, and the animal rights movement has succeeded in harassing them into abandoning all work with the elephants.
Ringling Brothers is not a charity or an animal museum, it is a profit-making business, a corporation, and it doesn’t take a psychic to figure out their stockholders will soon tire of keeping giant and unprofitable animals around for years. If this new idea of animal abuse continues to dominate the world of animal policy and politics, we can be sure our children will never see or know these wonderful animals or understand one thing about them. They will live only on YouTube, a remote curiosity, a break between texts and video games.
The Asian elephants, unlike their African counterparts, and like the carriage horses, are domesticated animals with a long history – thousands of years – of working well and easily with humans. There is no longer any kind of sustainable work for them to do in our world that is acceptable to the people who say they support the rights of animals. The same is true of the big horses: they can work very hard on Amish farms, go to slaughter, or pull goods and carriages for people and tourists. This is easy and good work, truly, for horses. It enables them to survive and be well cared for.
We should celebrate it in every possible way if we really love animals.
As a culture, we need to support this work, expand it, and support the few people and industries willing to do it. Horses can do a lot more than pull carriages in Central Park, and they can do it cheaply, safely without damage to the environment or the air we breathe.
Horse lovers, trainers and behaviorists know this, but this will require a fundamental change in attitude among political leaders, lawmakers and even many animal lovers. The problem with passionate ideologues is that they cannot change, learn, adapt, or grow. That is why they almost always fail in the end, they do not have the Darwinian survival and adaptive skills of dogs and cats, who have uniquely managed to manipulate human beings into loving them and caring for them.
We love to think dogs love us unconditionally, but the truth is that are just genetically a lot smarter than we are. Unlike raccoons, they have adopted to humans, the most murderous and dangerous of all species, they have tricked us into loving them and giving them human names and bringing them into bed. No raccoon can claim that.
In New York City, hundreds of children will require facial reconstructive surgery as the result of thousands of awful dog bites. No carriage horse in New York has ever killed a human being or caused so many destructive injuries to the most vulnerable of citizens. The mayor wouldn’t think of banning dogs, the animal rights movement ducks like a herd of ostriches when the issue of dog bites comes up. Fund-raising is the step child of modern advocacy.
Yet the dogs can teach us a lot about how to keep animals in our world. Yes, there are risks and problems and accidents in having dogs, that will always be true. But as a culture, we have come to see that the benefits of keeping dogs among us great enough to outweigh the risks, even if we put up with waste, bites, abuse and sacrifice the faces of many of our children to our own needs.
A generation ago, very few people in New York City had dogs or were permitted to keep them. Many parks and apartment houses and hotels banned them.
That is no longer true. New Yorkers have figured out how to live with dogs in New York, keep them healthy, use them to ease the stress and loneliness and disconnection that sometimes comes with urban life. Dog lovers in New York go to extraordinary lengths to exercise their dogs, socialize them, take them to special parks and runs, groom them and love them. They have beaten back countless political and social efforts to restrict dogs, or even prohibit them.
Diamond, perhaps the most famed biologist in the world, says that the big horses are better equipped for urban life than any other domesticated animal, including dogs. Horses are gentle, trainable, adaptable, herd animals, they love to work with people. Dogs are actually much more difficult to train and unpredictable. And they hurt many more people.
Humans could not have built or lived in the giant, wealth-generating metropolises that emerged in the nineteenth century without horses, write historians Clay McShane and Joel A, Tarr, in their important book, The Horse In The City.
The relationship was symbiotic and beneficial to humans and horses – horses could not have survived as a species without human intervention, and dense and complex human populations relied on horses for garbage removal, commerce, transport, food and construction.
Cars and trucks replaced horses, and sent most of them away from the cities.
But the pendulum is turning again, carbon monoxide from motor vehicles is choking the earth, fossil fuels are limited and stocks are being depleted, cities are too crowded and polluted to sustain so many engine-driven vehicles. The hip and truly progressive cities are bringing the horses back. Their time is coming.
Short-sighted leaders and activists are surprised by change, they have only one vision, to see the horses as fragile and outdated and send them away. It is time for some new ones.
There is a new awakening, a new vision. The horses have started it.
Instead of sending the horses away, find more varied work for the to do. Keep them with us. They have proven that they can transport large numbers of people safety, transport goods, helped build and repair buildings. They can reduce traffic congestion and pollutants. They do important and widely-recognized therapy work. They connect us to nature. They keep some magic and romance in our distracted lives. They can help repair the earth, and bring joy and meaning to people, just as dogs and cats have, and as they did for thousands of years.
Horses have always been important to people, and held great meaning for them. We need a new and wiser understanding of animals. For me, the big problem with the mayor of New York City isn’t that he is in bed with real estate developers, I don’t really know about that, the problem is that he is void of any real understanding of animals and can’t see their great benefit to us. If he wins his inglorious campaign, we will all lose, and it will be a mistake that can never be undone.
This is a symbiotic relationship that has served people and animals so well for so long. It ought to continue.
That is a truly inspiring idea for any political leader, the mayor would be loved and applauded for it. But this mayor seems blinded by arrogance and righteousness, condemned to mumbling platitudes and lame and unknowing clichés, trapped in the grip of old and irrelevant dogma.
Victory would mean the horses surviving this way of thinking long enough for the rest of us to learn to think differently about animals, and the ways in which we can help them – and us – survive the great and challenging changes in the world.