“Deborah: It saddens me to see the condition of this horse’s hooves.”

How sad indeed, Deborah; it makes me happy to see them. Are we looking at the same thing? I see a working horse that needs some trimming.

It does not make me sad.

Debra, you have the right to think whatever you wish,  my wish for you is that you rethink the way you think of animals and work. We need a new way to think of these beautiful animals if we are to keep them alive and among us.

The Amish and the carriage drivers have found the way if we only open ourselves to it. Yes, some will mistreat their animals. They are human, just like the rest of us.

I believe that most don’t mistreat their animals.

The true abuse comes from the people who claim to speak for these animals but have no plans other than to take them away from us, and forever.

I get a message like this every time I post a photo of an Amish horse (as happened when I took a photo of a New York Carriage horse.)

The horses almost always make me happy; I love images of horses, especially in 2021 in my town.  I love strong horses that work hard and love to be among people.

Everyone is a doctor or vet or authority on something—free speech on steroids.

Sometimes I think of social media as a giant toilet bowl, where people project their neuroses.

I know this horse well. I see him often. He is a lucky horse and a healthy horse, and a much-loved horse. Yes, his hooves are not as smoothly trimmed as my donkeys are, or as they should be.

But he never limps or constantly lifts his feet or trots at anything but a brisk and confident pace, tail and ears up, coat shining in the light. An iconic image, a beautiful image, it makes lots of people happy.

I love photographing this horse precisely because he is so content, and active, and hard working. He is the very definition of fit and strong, which is the very opposite of sad.

The Amish stay is clear of human doctors and veterinary doctors and farriers unless things get urgent and serious.

The unfortunate thing is that most Americans have lost contact with horses, who were our dogs and tractors once. As my e-mail reminds me daily, they know nothing about them.

It’s really not hard to know if a horse is healthy and well cared for. I’ve done it a hundred times, thanks to the good vets who had worked with me and the carriage drivers in New York, who let me into their lives and stables when the animal rights crusaders were after their jobs and their hides.

While writing about the New York Carriage horses, I got a  good look at the damage well-meaning people can do to the lives of domesticated animals.

While they need our support the most to stay relevant and alive, the security and well being of these iconic horses is being undermined by the  people who presume to speak for them. These horses are doing what they were bred to do and what they have done for thousands of years: do people’s hard work.

I have strong feelings about these horses, and the things we owe the animals who helped build our civilization. Every horse with a job to and humans to feel and shelter him or her is a small miracle.

The moral question of our times as it relates to animals is not, “why am I sad?,” but “what can we do to keep them among us and on this earth?”

To me, that is the defining moral issue for those who claim to love animals. They are disappearing for ever at a staggering rate.

Every horse taken away people and exiled to a life of invisibility and irrelevance is a crime to me, abuse pre-ordained. This is precisely what the so-called animal rights activits have done to ponies and elephants.

When was the last time  you or your children saw one?

Without the carriage drivers and the Amish, there wouldn’t be any of these magnificent creatures living among us. They are their last stand.

In the twisted logic of modern America, their work is now considered abuse, the humans who work so hard to live with them smeared again and again as abusers when they are not.

In this world, all work is exploitation; no human can be trusted, all large domesticated animals – elephants, ponies, horses – must be ripped from their lives and condemned to one of those mystical and mostly non-existent “preserves.”

There, they can be forgotten and join their awful march to oblivion. There, they can drop manure for the rest of their lives, grow dumb and fat, or be killed because they are too expensive to maintain.

I asked our farrier what he thought of how the Amish treat their horses, and he says they work them hard, do not abuse them, and are sometimes sloppy hoof trimmers.

Horses had first domesticated on the plains of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago. People there rode them and drank their milk.

A decade ago, the animal rights movement’s Ivy League directors, city-born to a one,  decided it was inhuman for horses to work.

That’s when my sad, often outraged e-mails began. That’s when the AR movement launched a campaign to send hundreds of carriage horses to slaughter and make sure no child sees one again except on YouTube.

They have been horrifyingly successful at persuading people it is abuse to put working animals to work.  Carriage horses have disappeared from towns and cities all over America.

In fact, PETA thinks it abusive for people to own animals at all.

Work gives working horses a chance to live productively among humans. The absence of work is a death sentence, something people like Debra don’t seem to want to know or care about while they obsess on shadowy photos of hooves online.

For two years, I traveled to the New York Carriage Horse stables and wrote about the campaign to save them; I met a dozen equine vets there over that time who came to inspect the horses.

Every single vet found the horses were clean, healthy, safe, and well cared for. Every single one stated publicly and told me and anyone who bothered to ask that the animal rights people were way off base.

Not a single one of them found a single horse that was malnourished or mistreated. Every weekend, so-called activists gather in Central Park to call the drivers and riders murderers.

Buck Brannamn, the inspiration for the “Horse Whisperer” movie by Robert Redford,  wrote that the carriage and draft horses in New York and elsewhere are the luckiest horses in the world.

They get to work and are valuable to their humans, who care for them well for their sake and the animals.

That online campaign against the Amish is eerily similar to the one against the carriage horses – constant and most unproven allegations of abuse and brutality against a faith centered around the worship of God and all of his creations.

I don’t know where love and self-interest cross with the Amish, and I don’t care.

If they stopped feeding those horses well and ignoring their well-being, their work and farms and life would shut down in a minute. Healthy horses are central to their survival as a community.

We might think of celebrating them for keeping these horses among us rather than stalking and harassing them,  taking away their work and people, and leaving them to rot in some pasture with nothing to do.

Most end up getting sent to Mexico and Canada to have bolts fired into their foreheads to kill them for meat. The people who fought to remove them from our lives and their work don’t mention that on their websites.

It’s almost a ritual now.

Whenever I put up a photo of a horse, Amish or otherwise, I almost immediately receive a mournful, angry, even tragic note like Deborah’s.

Never mind, she has never met the horse or talked to its humans.

No knowledgeable horse person or vet would look at that photo on a computer online from hundreds or thousands of miles away and diagnose the horse unless the image showed severe personal injury or signs of starvation.

This horse meets just about every standard of contentment and health that I know about.

But you need not take my word for it.

______

Here are the ways equine veterinarians, handlers, trainers, whisperers, and horse writers and owners suggest we look for signs of a healthy horse:

l.Look in their eyes. Healthy horses are bright and alert, interested in other horses and their surroundings. Doctors do the same thing with people; they look for the spark in their eye, a sign of health.

2. Are they eating? Is the No.1 sign of an infectious disease like influenza or West Nile in a horse’s loss of appetite or refusal to eat?

If they eat heartily and regularly, they are healthy.

3. A horse’s eyes and nose should be clear, fully open, and clean. Nostrils should be clean and free of mucus. However, it is normal for a horse to have a trickle of clear liquid in the nostrils.

4. Horses constantly vary in weight. Their weight goes up when they aren’t running or working and down in the summer months when they are working hard.

Generally, one should be able to feel the ribs but not see them too clearly.  The vets all say some weight loss and rib protrusions are inevitable in warm weather if the animals are running or working. Most of the farm animals I see here in the country show some ribs in the summer.

It depends on the animal; it is not, by itself, a symptom of abuse or starvation.

Farmers report that people driving by their farms call the police when they see a horse lying down. These are among the people who know nothing about horses but presume to know what’s best for them.

It is perfectly natural for a horse to lie down and take a nap.

The Amish depend on their animals to work hard. If they weren’t fed, sheltered, and given fresh water, they would be useless.

5. Manure and urine: A healthy horse will pass manure eight to 12 times a day, depending on exercise and weather.

6. Posture, Legs, and feet. A horse should stand squarely with its weight evenly distributed over all four feet. Slightly raising and taking the weight off a hind leg is normal, but not for a foreleg. The horse’s legs should be free of bumps, swelling, cuts, or hair loss. There should be no heat in the horse’s feet.

I should say that the horse in this photograph meets  every single criteria that define a healthy horse.  He will be trimmed soon.

My only complaint would be that the trimming of their hooves could be a shaper.

But no horse I’ve seen has appeared uncomfortable or in pain.

Other ways:

Horses should take an interest in their surroundings. Their owners should pay daily attention to them.

The owner needs to know what is normal for the horse, not for some stranger hiding behind a computer hundreds of miles away.

Vets recommend feeling a horse’s legs before and after working him to feel any lumps or bumps or areas of unexpected heat. No knowledgeable horse trainer, vet or handler, would diagnose a horse’s life from a single photo posted online.

The Amish horses living around me graze for hours every day on the grass in wide and green pastures.

The Amish who ride them give them human kinds of names and are proud of them. They boast about their horses all the time and ask for prints of the photos I show them.

I saw the horse in the accompanying photo above yesterday.

His eyes were clear, he was alert and curious, his tail was up, so were his ears. His coat was shiny. He was eating normally, cocking a rear leg, which means “calm” for a horse, and was neither breathing heavily nor panting.

I think the professional farriers do a better job of trimming hooves neatly and smoothly. The Amish like to do the trimming themselves; I’ve not seen any horse struggle walking on grass or asphalt.

I refuse to sit in judgtement of them.

The horses are strong; they walk bristly and stay calm, even in the presence of roaring, growling truck engines.

They are truly great horses, doing herculean work alongside their masters. To me, it’s a beautiful story, and I am sorry to see it despoiled by people who need to find something meaningful to do with their lives.

Like keeping the horses with us. Maybe send me a message supporting the bloody but unbowed campaign to keep these horses alive and among us.

The way we are going is that my granddaughter will only see  workinbg horse on Facebook. That makes me sad.