I’ve finished my next book, Talking To Animals, it will be published by Simon and Schuster next Spring. I am excited about the book, it chronicles my very personal and spiritual search for a new and better understanding of animals than seems current or available to us now.
The book was initially inspired by the naturalist Henry Beston’s beautiful book on his year on Cape Cod nearly a century ago, it was called The Outermost House: A Year Of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod. Beston was not, I think, an especially gifted writer but he wrote one passage about animals that has reverberated down through time and is even more relevant today than it was then.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
My book focuses on my own experiences talking to animals and listening to them – Elvis, Winston, Orson, Rose, Julius and Stanley, Homer, Lucky (my very first dog), Izzy, Lenore, Red and Fate, Simon and Lulu and Fanny, goats and hens, sheep and barn cats. In a sense Bedlam Farm is a laboratory for communicating with animals.
Beston’s challenge has not been met. We used to see animals as beasts of burden, on the earth only to work with us. In our society, we have veered far from that idea, mostly, we see animals as piteous and dependent creatures in need of rescue (there is only one way to get a dog).
Carriage horses are not our partners but victims, they exist to be rescued from people and separated from society. Elephants are no longer domesticated animals who uplift and entertain people, especially children, they are all abused and exploited, they exist to be saved from us by any means at all costs, even if it means sending them to death and extinction.
Ponies can no longer be permitted to interact with children, expose them to animals, give them their first ride on a horse’s back, they are only objects of cruelty and abuse, they must be sent off to a mythical wild and vanish from sight. Most children growing up today will never see a carriage horse, an elephant or a pony, not once in their whole lives. And this, we are told, is all in the name of preserving the rights of animals.
My book is not about animal rights or carriage horses, although I devote two chapters to the horses and their impact on me.
The carriage horse story brought me into my community, the community of animal lovers and people who work with animals, the community of people who wish to keep animals in our world, treat them humanely, insist that they remain a part of our everyday lives and not be banished to private preserves and slaughterhouses, where we shall never see or know them again.
The people who know it is not cruel for working animals to work, it is not exploitation for animals to life the spirits of people, animals can help us save Mother Earth, cars and trucks cannot.
In New York, there is no end to the cars and condos and giant apartment towers of the wealthy, but the country’s biggest and richest and most powerful city cannot find a way to keep 200 rescued draft horses in safe and clean and well-maintained homes.
The carriage horse controversy made it clear to me that we do need a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. The horses were a powerful reminder of the awful consequences that can occur to animals when well-meaning people make decisions for them without understanding them or listening to them or knowing them. No one who loves a horse believes it is cruel for working horses to work, especially in the cities where they have lived for thousands of years among people.
The people who know how to listen to animals and understand them – the behaviorists, biologists, trainers, animal lovers – all see the horses clear and hear them telling us in all of the way that animals talk – body language, eyes, tails, coats, behaviors – that they are content and comfortable and safe and well cared for.
The animal rights people, many well-meaning, have too often become blinded by anger and self-righteousness, they only see and hear one another, they have forgotten how to talk to animals, if they ever knew. Henry Beston would, I believe, be horrified at their systematic removal of animals from the lives of everyday people, of their narrow view of animals as helpless children all in need of urgent rescue.
Because no one left in the animal rights movement knows how to talk to animals or listen to them, they almost sent all of the horses out into peril, and would do it again in a minute given the chance. Lots of elephants will die in the coming years because no one bothered to worry about where they will go once their are removed from the circuses. The horses have narrowly been spared that fate, at least so far.
So my book is a very personal story, and a very spiritual one, it is also an answer to Henry Beston’s please for a new way to understand animals and think of them. They are not our piteous wards, they are our partners in the splendor and travail of the earth.
As we suffer, they suffer, as we thrive, they thrive, they are caught with us in the net of life of time. The carriage drivers know this, and the people who truly love the horses know it, and the Native-Americans who lived so closely with the horses for so long know. But many Americans, long ripped away from the natural world and the lives of animals, have forgotten it.
I am grateful to the horses for what they have taught me, for their impact on my writing and my book.
The challenge for every animal lover in our earth is not in saving animals from people, but in re-connecting animals with people. The are not our children, they are our fellow prisoners in life.