Several years ago, a retired carriage horse driver and passionate defender of the carriage trade named Eva Hughes met me at the Clinton Park Stables in New York City.
We spoke briefly, and have not met since, but I well remember what she told me: the carriage horse controversy was triggering a new social awakening, a turning point in the way we view animals and the people who love them, live with them and work with them.
And a new idea of what the rights of animals really are.
Eva was prescient. The social awakening is occurring, and it is changing the dynamic between animal rights activists and the growing number of their victims. They are coming together to form a new community of animal lovers, and it is both uplifting and positive.
The sad (for animals and people) but increasingly disturbing excesses of the animal rights movement have created a new and diverse kind of community: a growing national network of linked people who have been victimized by animal rights organizations and are forming their own powerful community.
They are rushing to support and defend one another in the face of confounding, often anti-democratic and Orwellian attacks that reveal an animal advocacy movement that is increasingly into a rogue, hated and feared militia.
Yesterday I wrote about an assault on the Benner Family Farm in East Setauket Long Island. It shocked me and many others.
A visitor to the farm met one of the Benner cows, a two-year-old beef cow named Minnie, and she learned that Minnie would be slaughtered to help feed the Benner family.
She demanded that the cow be turned over to her so that she could send her to a rescue farm, and when the Benners refused, she contacted various animal rights organizations who have unleashed a furious assault on the farm – death threats, threatening phone calls, hateful e-mails, physical demonstrations and protests, Facebook pages and online petitions. The groups are insisting that the cow the Benners have raised for food be kept alive for the rest of its life.
The farm, a popular, humane, environmentally conscious, much-loved destination in urbanized Long Island finds itself under an awful siege for raising their own food in their own way. The family has not been accused of cruelty or abuse or broken any laws of regulations. The woman who instigated the attack on the Benner Farm told reporters Bob Benner should go buy organic beef for his family from the very trendy Whole Foods chain, and keep Minnie alive.
But something new and different is happening.
The Benners are not alone. Offers of help, money, support and encouragement are pouring into the farm by the thousands. Their own local community is standing behind them, and Bob Benner is standing in his truth. He is demanding the right to live by his own values and feed his family in whatever way he deems best. He is also fighting for the idea that all animals are not pets, and ought not be viewed in that way. Unlike his persecutors, he has lived with farm animals all of his life and understands them.
Today, the farm’s Facebook Page had 5,000 likes and countless wonderful reviews. He has collected 10,000 signatures on a change.org petition launched on his behalf. You can sign the petition here.
The new community is rushing to defend him.
This kind of incident may seem shocking to many, but it is becoming all too familiar to people who love and work with animals. Social media have permitted like-minded people who know and understand animals to talk to one another and use new technologies like social media to help each other when this new and awful kind of mob descends on them. And the Benner incident was no isolated one, this is happening all over the country, to farmers, dog and cat lovers, people with horses, pony ride operators.
The New York carriage trade made history this year by soundly beating back two separate attempts by the mayor of the city and his supporters in the animal rights movement to ban the carriage horses from the city.
People all over the country used Facebook and Twitter to spread the truth about the horses. There was enormous data to show that the horses were not being mistreated.
People in this new community used the Internet to send contributions, to organize rides in New York and visits to the stables, to send letters to New York officials, to support the carriage drivers and the stable owners, to spread the word that the horses were safe and content and well cared for. The carriage trade itself turned to social media and the Internet to post daily photos and stories, and to counter the often wild and demonstrably false accusations being made against them by so-called animal rights activists.
When the farmer Joshua Rockwood was falsely accused of animal cruelty during the awful winter cold of 2014, crowd sourcing efforts and farmers and supporters from all over the country quickly raised more than $70,000 in legal fees and other support for him. They well know it could have been any one of them. They helped Joshua to beat back all of the spurious charges against him, reclaim the three horses improperly impounded, and helped him to equip his farm for the next winter.
He has said this new community saved his farm and his work.
I saw this with the carriage horses, with Joshua, with the Benners. The community has no name, no leaders, no official organization, it is a community linked by logs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and e-mail. And by a love of animals. When something happens like the attack on the Benner Farm (my own post about it on this blog had more than 3,000 shares in just a few hours), they organize quickly and come running.
The animal rights movement has unaccountably alienated many people who actually know animals and live with them. Animals like Minnie are not pets, they have worked and lived with and served people for thousands of years. The new movement understands that we need to keep them in our world, not drive them off to hidden preserves and the private lands of the wealthy.
These controversies are erupting all over the country, and they demonstrate that the animal rights movement is one that claims to love animals but promotes the persecution and hatred of people.
The victims of the animal rights movement, in many ways closer to a series of hate groups than a social welfare movement for animals, are piling up: the man in New York who lived in a van and whose dog was taken from him and euthanized without his knowledge because a so-called animal rights activist thought the dog wasn’t getting enough medical care; Tawni Angel, who gave pony rides to children for years, and whose business was shut down by the Santa Monica City Council because three animal rights demonstrators claimed falsely that they had dirty water and no room to turn; a Delaware housewife whose dog was taken from her porch and killed because a secret informer called the police and claimed it was abused. There was no hearing of any kind.
And there is the very poignant story of Blue Star Equiculture, a horse rescue and organic farm center in Palmer, Mass. where rescued and retired work horses are cared for to the end of their days in the cleanest and most loving of circumstances. Because they support work for working horses, (the animal rights movement believes work, by definition, is abuse) the farm has been the subject of relentless attacks and hateful messages and harassment, including one effort to break open the farms fences and release the horses onto a busy road.
No animal and few people could live a better life on the earth than these horses – I have been there many times – yet the staff and directors are subject to the cruelest kinds of insult and attack and hate messages. If this is the vision of the animal rights movement, it is surely doomed and has no moral authority to speak for the rights of animals.
Scores, if not hundreds or thousands of farmers have suffered Mr. Benner’s experience. Secret informers call the police, and quite often farm animals are seized because cows are out in the snow, horses are lying down to take a nap, their herding dogs are running or sleeping outdoors, pigs look cold. Farmers are being charged for having unheated barns, or chickens who run in the road, or barn cats running loose near barns.
The most striking thing to me about the New York carriage horse controversy was how little the animal rights groups knew about horses.
They claimed the horses were depressed because they stood with their heads down or legs hocked. They claimed there was rodent feces in the grain bins. They put up photos of dead horses killed in accidents in the Southwest and claimed they were abused carriage horses who died on the streets of New York City.
They used the pictures to raise enormous amounts of money online. They claimed it was cruel and abusive for 2,000 pound draft horses to pull light carriages on asphalt in Central Park. They claimed the horses were dangerous to the people of New York, even though no human being has been killed by a carriage horse in 155 years of operation.
And the woman who brought all this misery on the Benner Farm did not know cows are eaten for food, and are not poodles sleeping in beds. She had no idea that the food in grocery stores comes from slaughtered animals just like Minnie. She had no idea that this is how farmers survive and feed their families. Or that farmers can’t afford to shop at pricey stores like Whole Foods.
The new community is on the case, the Benners will have what they need. They are no longer alone. Facebook was ablaze with support yesterday and today.
This new community is remarkably diverse, it transcends the left and the right, it has people of all genders, faiths, points of view. It has animal lovers, pet owners, farmers, vets, farriers, shearers, dog-walkers, behaviorists, trainers, liberals and conservatives. They are disparate, but they are united in their conviction that the freedom and property of people who love animals and work with them should not be arbitrarily invaded and disrupted by an outdated movement whose only principle seems to be to attack and destroy, with or without cause, and to remove animals from people.
Animals unite people, not divide them. The country may be polarized on many issues, but on on the national love for animals.
The new community is loosely but clearly linked by new technology, primarily social media, and is ready to donate money, moral support, political and legal expertise when necessary. At Joshua Rockwood’s first court hearing, more than 300 outraged farmers and neighbors showed up. A Glenville town council member told me the leaders of the town were stunned, it was one of the largest turnouts in the history of the town.
This is something new and important. The animal rights movement was born out of good intentions, and has done considerable good, but it has become a source of conflict, abuse of people, persecution and irrationality. Animals and the people who love them deserve better.
Eva Hughes was correct in her vision of a new social awakening. We are not comfortable re-defining the nature and meaning of abuse arbitrarily and outside of the law and without discussion or reason. We believe in science, not emotion – we respect behaviorists, biologists, trainers, veterinarians and animal lovers when it comes to deciding the future and well-being of animals. We believe animals have their own need for rights and protections, not the rights of humans.
I am happy to be a part of this movement.
We believe it is moral to love animals and people, and treat them both with dignity and respect. We believe in the right to privacy and to choose our own way of life. We believe working animals want and need to work.
We believe it is not the business of government or private citizens to threaten the freedom and property of people who have done no wrong. We believe that absent clear and convincing evidence of cruelty or neglect, the privacy and values of animal owners ought to be respected, not wantonly invaded by secret informers, bought-off politicians and politicized animal rights workers.
We believe the primary goal of any animal advocacy movement ought to be the retention of animals in our world and our everyday lives, not their removal from work, human populations and human contact.
We believe the fate and future of animals ought to be decided by people who know them and understand their needs, not by people who emotionalize them for their own purposes and who use them as vehicles for hating and harming human beings.
Bob Brenner has done no wrong, he has almost heroically kept his small farm running for years, humanely and efficiently. His animals are treated lovingly and well, it is wrong to subject him and his family to threat and disruption and terror because of one human being who knows nothing about animals, farming, or where food actually comes from.
Victims of injustice are among the most motivated of people. They are eager to do good. The victims of the animal rights movement seem ready to help others. They are re-shaping our understanding of animals in our world. And much more to come.
Out of darkness, light, out of rage, hope. These social crimes are, in fact, sparking a new social awakening and a new community is rising up to protect the true rights of animals and also of the people who love them and live with them. Many people have had to suffer for that, but hopefully, this suffering is not in vain.
(If you wish to sign the change.org petition in support of the Benner Farm, you can do so here.) They already have 9,000 signatures, the campaign to force them to give up Minnie has 2,000.)