Today is publication day for my new book “Talking To Animals: How We Can Understand Them And They Can Understand Us.’  You can order the book through my local bookstore and (get a neat tote-bag for free) and I will sign and personalize it, or you can buy it on Amazon or anywhere book are sold. If you wish to talk to nice humans on the phone, you can call 518 677 2515.

I was thinking about the anatomy of this book, and I realize it was born in the drama of the New York Carriage Horses, which the mayor of New York and various animal rights groups in the city have spent years and millions of dollars trying unsuccessfully to ban or shut down.

I am told that I played a small but useful part in the victory of the horses over the hateful and profoundly dishonest campaign against them, an assault that continues to this day. And as a former journalist and investigative reporter, I realized something else, this attack on the carriage horses was my first close-up exposure to what we now like to call Fake News.

I worked for the Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, and CBS News,  but none of this prepared me for what I found when I went to New York to visit a carriage horses stable three years ago to take a first hand look at the horses, who, it was claimed, were being savagely abused.

It was alleged that they were eating rotten, feces-infected food, living in stalls too small to lie down in, that they were overworked, in suffocatingly hot and freezing cold weather. They were sick and dying from breathing city fumes, driven and cared for by drunks and thugs. They were lonely and yearned for the wild.

They were a danger to New Yorkers.

The horse were unstable, uncontrollable.

Horses do not belong in cities, it was said, they died young and their wounds were not treated for injuries or illness.  Animal rights leaders said the big carriage horses were better off dead than pulling carriages in Central Park.

As a lifelong member of several animal rights organizations and a supporter of the rights of animals, I was fully expecting to be outraged. I had read nothing but these horror stories about the horses.

I was prepared to find animals that were abused, and it is easy enough to spot them if you know what to look for.

I was, in fact, shocked, but not in the way I expected. I found myself mired in a sea of lies, distortions, the rankest kind of elitism, harassment and even slander.

I did not realize that the carriage horse controversy was prescient, a harbinger of the politics that were to come, where facts and truth no longer mattered and the most inaccurate and dishonest statements would be endlessly repeated, and even accepted as truth.

I spent three years investigating the claims about the horses, and I found that barely a single one was true, provable, or even plausible. I talked to more than 200 people in my inquiry into the horse controversy. I spoke with equine vets, behaviorists, trainers, police officers, breeders, stable hands, riders.

I found out that vets visited the horses every week, they had the best and most expensive health care.

I talked with the animal rights demonstrators who try to spook the horses, attack the children who want to ride in the carriages, spit on the drivers, call them foul and profane names.

You may recognize some of the very familiar symptoms of Fake News.

They said it was cruel and abusive to use animals to entertain tourists and children and lovers in the park.

Science is not recognized, experts are not consulted. Ideology triumphs over reason, every time. The dogma is that the horses are abused, that they should not ever be made to work,  that veterinarians, police investigators, horse trainers and experienced behaviorists do not matter. That ideology trumps reason every time.

I found that there are  no facts, and no truth in this kind of modern social confrontation. Lies are acceptable,  even expected, the more often repeated the better. Eventually, someone will believe them.

I found that far from being a danger,  no human being had been killed by a carriage horse in the 150 years of the trade.

No horse had ever been found to have done or taken ill from breathing the air in New York City, the same air that children and residents breath every day.

And no reporter had ever visited a New York Carriage Horse stable to find out for him or her self what was happening. When Liam Neeson showed up in the stables to defend the drives, more than 200 reporters appeared to take a look at him.

I found that the draft horses ate the cleanest and freshest feed and hay, that they had ample room to lie down and turn around, that they had never lived in the wild and could not survive there, and that work for them was healthy and necessary, not cruel and abusive. There were no feces in their feed.

I found that the animal rights organizations and spokespeople involved in the campaign against the horses lied brazenly, and  a gullible and lazy media simply took the lies as one side of a controversial story, and repeated these lies over and over again.

I found that the mayor, who has never mentioned the carriage horses, owned a dog or cat, or ridden a horse in his life, decided the carriage trade was immoral and needed to be banned only after the leader of the main organization pursuing the carriage trade ban donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his mayoral campaign.

I found the animals rights groups seeking money to ban the horses routinely posted photos online of dead and “abused” horses that were not from the city, had never pulled carriages in New York. Most were horses who simply died or been involved in accidents.

I found that of more than three million carriage rides, only six horses had ever been involved in traffic collisions or accidents, three of them fatally. (Thousands of New Yorkers are killed in auto and pedestrian accidents in the city every year.)

I found that despite the claims by the animal rights pursuing the ban that the big horses did not belong in the city, Central Park was actually built for the horses, and was the safest and most comfortable place for them to be and work.

Researching this story was a trip through Wonderland, a maze of lies and partial truths and distortions. The animal rights groups did something that is now standard fare in national politics: they demonized and de-humanized the drivers so that they could appear to be less than human, and thus demonized and banned. And sought to take their animals away.

They called them brutes and drunks and greedy abusers, who care for nothing but money.  They harassed them repeatedly, calling them murderers and abusers in front of their customers, often in front of their children. Many drivers sold their medallions and left the work they loved.

The caricature present of the drivers was so extreme and offensive, it would have provoked outraged had it been directed at any other ethic, social or demographic group.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the animal rights groups and the mayor said that if the carriage trade was banned, a home was waiting for every one of the hoses in various animal preserves that had been contacted and had agreed to take them (It costs about $60,000 a year to feed and care for a working horse, including hay, medical care and feed) for life. This was an outrageous lie. No preserve had ever promised to take a single draft horse anywhere.

If banned, the horses would have been sold at auction or sent to slaughter.

Nor could I find a single case where the primary organization seeking to ban the horses – NYClass – had ever rescued a single animal in the New York City area. They did manage to fund raise every day by presenting themselves as  savior of animals.

This story brought me close to horses, and transformed me. I had come nose to nose with Fake News and was astonished by it.

So I decided to write a book about the need for a new and wiser understanding of animals. In the book, I recount the stories of the animals who most affected me in my life, and who taught me the most about communicating with animals and understanding them, because understanding them is an urgent need for animal lovers.

The animal rights groups in the city seemed to know nothing about horses. They did not understand anything about them.

They did not know that working horses need to work. That they have never lived in the wild, and even if they did, there is no wild left for them to go to. They did not know the worst thing for them is to be idle. It is not humane, it is the very definition of abuse.

They did not bother to see the love and care the horses are given every day. Nor would they read any of the dozens of studies and reports by equine veterinarians and their organizations, all unanimously finding that the horses were healthy and well cared for.

So that is the genesis of “Talking to Animals.” The lesson for me was that the carriage horses did not need to be sent away, they are the luckiest horses in the world, understanding them means knowing what they really need. That means communicating with them  and other animals in a wiser and more mystical way.

Come along for the ride. You can order my book here.