In the 70’s and 80’s, rural communities across the country enacted what are called “Right to Farm Life” laws, designed to protect farmers and agriculture from development and new residents who object to farm life – the sounds, smells, accidents and other inevitable characteristics of farming.

Lawmakers realized that while everyone wanted lots of good on supermarket shelves, no one any longer knew much about what it takes to get it there. This idea echoes through the fate and future of animals as well. These laws protect farmers from legal action, nuisance suits and from the growing numbers of people who know nothing about animals or farming.

This week, those laws seem relevant.

Animals are very much on the minds of animal lovers from the sad but understandable killing of Harambie, the Cincinnati zoo gorilla to the equally troubling case of Craig Mosher, a Vermont bull owner facing 15 years in jail because his pet bull Red got through a fence and was struck by a car whose driver was killed in what most people would have in the past called an accident.

The Rutland, Vt. prosecutor is calling it a crime.

Harambie’s death has sparked widespread calls for zoos to be closed and for animals like Harambie to be moved to private preserves and sanctuaries. California writer Janet Hamilton wrote an especially thoughtful piece yesterday about the need to think more carefully before removing animals like Harambe to places where few people would ever get to see them again.

Many Asian elephants could have been saved if this same thoughtfulness had been applied to banning them from circuses. The idea that animals like Harambe should join the growing list of animals being taken away and hidden from human beings is more frightening news for animals, a death knell for many.

The story involving Harambe and Craig Mosher were very different, but had one thing in common – they once again reveal the belief that animals other than dogs and cats – even domesticated animals –  must be protected from human beings and moved away from them. This is the central argument in the bitter controversy over the New York Carriage horses, the belief that the animals suffer from living in urban and suburban areas and ought to be retired to preserves and sanctuaries and rescue farms.

Or to “nature,” where so many of them die from the elements, from disease and starvation, poachers and predators.

The circuses, one of the great hopes for elephant survival in the developed world, are now gone as a safe home for them.  It is heart-breaking to read the messages from so many of the trainers who loved them and worry endlessly about them now.

This is the fate chosen for ponies in farmers markets and elephants in circuses – to be saved by being slaughtered or made irrelevant to human life or even extinct. Elephants from Asia have worked and lived and entertained people for many thousands of years, it is only in our new world, where few people no longer see or know anything about animals, that this has come to be seen as a crime. Not only with most of these elephants be sent to their death, but very few children in our future world will ever see one or the remarkable connections they often have with people.

That is a kind of abuse all its own.

The people advocating that these animals are being abused and mistreated in the care of people have not given much thought to where they will go once they are driven out of their current homes and workplaces. If the carriage horses had been banned from New York, most would have gone to slaughter, as will be the fate of so many elephants and ponies without work or places to live. As Harambe’s death has demonstrated, we seem as a culture to have only one knee-jerk solution to animal accidents and tragedies: remove them, get them away from people, hide them in “preserves” where they will have nothing to do and never been seen again.

It seems to me that the most fundamental animal right is the right to survive, and be known by humans.That is the key to survival for them in our world.

Very few behaviorists, biologists or trainers would agree that a confined life on a sanctuary – they are far from most people, and visiting fees are often extremely high, as Hamilton pointed out – is a good life for any animal, deprived of work, human contact.

As is the case with carriage horses, elephants in circuses and ponies in farmer’s markets, these are the only opportunities most Americans ever have to see an animal that isn’t a pet, and when animals vanish from human consciousness, history shows us that they do not long remain on the earth. More than half of the animals species in the world have vanished since 1970, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

And the big idea we seem to have about animals is not  how to keep them with us, but to send even more away.

The controversies over animals raise significant questions about the rights of animal lovers as well. Should dog and horse and bull owners be jailed if their animals escape from the house or break through a fence opened up by a falling tree or a lightning strike or a door left open?

Should people who work with animals – carriage horse drivers, researchers, pony ride operators, movie producers – be subject to intimidation and harassment and legal jeopardy if they treat their animals well, and care for them and their health? Do we have the right to own and work with animals?

Should private citizens and individuals have the right to arbitrarily define and redefine the meaning of animal abuse, beyond any legal proceeding, court or law, or scientific and behavioral evidence?

Should animals be afforded the right to survive and live among people, even if it means giving them priority over wanton development, automobiles, condominiums, human greed, and persistent efforts to remove them from human beings?

Should farmers and private citizens be subject to police raids and searches and animal seizures because informers driving by – often with not understanding of animals or farming – see a cow with snow on her back or a horse napping in a pasture? Should authorities and rescue groups have the right to seize, and sometimes euthanize animals that are privately owned without any kind of hearing or due process?

Should rescue groups and so-called animal rights organizations be given the right to seize animals and charge substantial amounts of money for their boarding and care, even if their owners are found innocent of any wrongdoing?

Should poor or old or hard-working animal lovers be denied the right to adopt any dog or cat because they don’t have tall fences, because they work hard, because they are elderly, because they don’t have enormous resources for expensive veterinary bills?

I’m thinking about a Right To Animal Life law similar to the laws farmers lobbied for that protect them from new neighbors calling the police when they spread manure, or trying to put them in jail when a cow walks through a broken fence.

• The right of animals to remain among people in suburban and urban areas, rather than to live only in isolation and out of the consciousness of human beings. How can we possibly save the animals of the world if we can never see them and get to know them?
• The right animal lovers to privacy and freedom  except for clear and legally defined and provable evidence of abuse, that is grievous injury or death or neglect.
• The right of people to work with animals as long as the animals are treated well as defined by qualified experts – veterinarians, behaviorists, trainers and animal lovers.
• We need laws that make it illegal to criminalize accidents and acts of God and nature involving animals. This would affect pets as well as farm animals. A dog is much more likely to run out of a house or under a fence and get hit by a car than a bull. If Craig Mosher goes to jail, you might also.
• We need laws that protect people willing to live with animals and care for them, not persecute them.
• We need laws that protect the right of animal lovers to preserve their way of life. Carriage horse drivers, elephant trainers, pony ride operators, zoo keepers and trainers are often people who have chosen working with animals as a way of life. Like farmers, many come from families that have been doing this work for centuries. It ought to be unlawful for politicians or private organizations to  deny them the freedom to maintain their way of life, absent overwhelming and convincing evidence – buttressed by qualified experts – that shows they have mistreated them the animals they live with. (It is by now apparent that while some Asian elephants in circuses were mistreated, many (most, it seems) were not.  A lot of elephants will pay with their lives for this mob hysteria.
• Laws are needed to advance and protect right of cities and suburban communities and residents to keep animals.  Human beings have the right to live among animals, not just see them in private preserves. As the Harambe tragedy demonstrates, there is epidemic ignorance about the true nature of animals from people who call themselves animal lovers. Many people do not know that a 400-lb gorilla could easily grievously harm or kill a small child without even meaning to. Many people can no longer accept the idea that animals will suffer accidents and tragedies just as people will, or that if animals are to survive, they cannot be kept in absolutely secure bubbles. Animals escape from private preserves as well as homes and zoos, it happens all the time. Thousands of children are injured or killed in accidents every year, no one is suggesting they all be removed to private preserves where only the rich and mobile can ever see them.

It is by now clear that the idea of returning animals to nature and the “wild,” advanced by many animal lovers and animal rights organizations, is no longer a viable or sustainable goal.

There is no wild any longer. A central idea of animal rights – that animals should not be owned by people or ever be used to uplift or entertain them – no longer makes sense. We urgently need to find ways to keep animals with us, in our sight and consciousness,  not send more of them off to disappear or remote or financially struggling preserves.

There, they will be soon forgotten and will inevitably join that list of lost species.

Climate change and development have damaged or eliminated countless animal habitats. The only way in which remaining species – elephants, gorillas, ponies, work horses – can remain in our world or be known to us and by us, is for us to work to keep them among us and give them what they need rather than send them away.

The mayor of New York City and his supporters in the animal rights world spent millions of dollars arguing that the horses must be banned because they are endangered by New York City traffic. But neither the mayor nor a one of these groups would spend a dollar creating a horse traffic lane for a dozen blocks that would have made their transit to and from their stables safe.

Banning animals has become the default position of people who see them only as piteous, dependent and abused. It is an outdated idea and it is often thoughtless and misguided. That is too narrow a view of animals for me. Perhaps it is time to really protect the animals of the earth and giving them and the people who are willing to live with them and love them and work with them real and meaningful rights.

In this hysterical and ignorant climate, it is becoming more difficult all the time to own animals and live with them. Too risky, too expensive, too fraught with danger. Now, the fear of going to jail for something no animal lover can ever fully control.

Animals and people deserve the right to stay together, to work out their differences, to survive in a dangerous world,  and know one another, as they have for thousands of years.