The photo above shows the rich pasture the Miller family rent to give their horses fresh grass to graze on when they are not working. It says a great deal about how they treat their horses.

Ever since I began writing about the Amish, a curious thing has happened; three or four times a week, I get a link or an e-mail telling me about an Amish family accused of running a puppy mill or an Amish family believed to be abusing or overworking their horses.

Some stories say the Amish work their horses to death or kill them when they tie or fail to trim their hooves or feed them properly. Anytime an Amish horse is spotted with ribs, someone sends me a photo of it and s suggests the horse is being starved so the Amish can make more money. At first, animal rights activists sent me stories like this to write about the Amish and describe them as being cruel to animals.

Then, they were written to persuade me not to trust the Miller’s and accept that they treat their animals well.

I do not doubt that some Amish families have operated puppy mills, or that some Amish horses have been overworked, or that some Amish horses have been killed when they can’t work hard any longer. Another meme is that the Amish starve, beat their dogs, and have puppy mills in their back yards.

This is familiar to me. Memes are deadly and move rapidly. It is almost impossible to answer them once they get rolling.

Years ago, when I was writing for Wired Magazine, I began studying memetics, or what we call memes. A meme is a virally transmitted idea or image, often sharing commentary about cultural symbols, or social beliefs. Memetics studies how a concept is transmitted virally through the digital network, the Web, and the Internet, or more recently, on what we call social media.

Corporations love memetics, they help spread new products, sales, and public awareness.

Memes are valuable. If we choose the right one, the idea can go viral, and people can make a lot of money or get a lot of votes or followers. I love the study of memes and have been watching them sail out in the world for years. An advanced meme is that the Amish abuse their horses and their dogs.

For some years now, the animal rights movement has used images and stories about animal abuse to raise money and awareness.  The New York Carriages have suffered from the use of memes to attack them for years. These memes failed to drive the horses out of the city, but they have raised millions of dollars for the animal rights movement.

I’ve had the opportunity to check these stories.

Some of them are true; many – most –  are not. Almost invariably, these accusations offer nothing in the way of specific details. Even fewer result in police or judicial action, even though animal abuse is illegal in every state in America and thousands of people are prosecuted under these laws every year. In more than a century, one carriage horse driver was convicted of abusing carriage horses by working one longer than was permitted.

(I’ve visited the carriage horses a dozen times, they were clean and the horses had plenty of room.)

If you read the animal rights websites, it would be simple to believe every carriage horse was starved, beaten, fed rotten grain, or abandoned to freezing or brutally hot weather. Buyer beware.

Very few national reports of animal abuse are Amish. While these accusations are frequent, I rarely have, if ever, gotten links or allegations that mention non-Amish people who commit the vast majority of abusive acts against animals.

I know many of my neighbors in this town who mistrust or neglect their horses or dogs; I know of no Amish resident here who has.

These messages puzzled me, as I live just a few yards down the road from the Millers, my relatively new Amish neighbors. From the first, and before getting these messages, I made it a point to watch how they treated their animals. I saw them with their dogs, their dogs Tina, their eleven horses, and two goats.

When I get these messages about the “abusive” Amish (almost every day someone posted such a message on my Facebook Page), I ask why my neighbors have been targeted in this cruel and dishonest way since there is no evidence of them mistreating any of their animals.

Most of the time, the people run away when challenged. The few people who do reply talk about seeing puppy mills in Ohio or Pennsylvania (no details), but no one here has seen any mistreatment of the animals on the Miller Farm; I’m there almost every day.

Tina, their Heeler/Collie mix, lost part of a leg in a saw. Moise Miller treated her wound, nursed her back to health, feeds her regularly. She is happy, healthy and much loved.  She has a shiny coat and sleeps inside every night. She watches and guards the small children in the family conscientiously and faithfully. I admit to loving that dog.

The Amish do not see their dogs as pets or furbabies; they see them as having work, like everyone in the family.

They are not hugged, fussed over, or called baby names. They are in good health and are well cared for by the family. The millers have never run a puppy mill or done any dog breeding, nor do they plan to. I do not understand why people keep trying to post messages on Facebook suggesting that since some Amish families have mistreated their animals, all of them must.

They are fortunate the Amish are forbidden to sue anyone.

That is just a familiar form of bigotry, and I delight in running those people off of my page. I ask the messengers if they have any specific information about the Millers being abusive. I tell them if they care about animals; then they are morally obliged to contact the police, not me or my blog readers. Animal abuse is illegal in my state and my county, and my town.

No one has ever offered a shred of evidence to support those vague accusations, and when challenged, the messengers turn cowardly and flee. Some Amish people may or may not have run puppy mills, but that does not mean the Millers have, or that they are animal abusers. I must have written that on my social media platforms a couple of hundred times, and I’ll challenge this kind of mob thinking for as long as it lasts.

Memes are easy to lunch, but once they catch, very hard to stop or reverse.

Today I was visiting the Miller Farm, and I looked up at the rich grass and growth on the side of the hill across from the farm. Moise went to the owner of that land – it’s right across the road – and offered monthly cash payments so that the horses could graze for hours every day on fresh grass and growth.

Their horses are healthy with tails and heads up. I’ve seen Amish farriers come to trim the horse’s hooves, and they seem careful and thorough and humane. Their trims are professional and thorough.

The Amish work their horses hard, and I imagine they either slaughter them or sell them when they get too to work. So does every other farmer with horses on a working farm. No real farmer can afford to feed horses that can’t work. That is not abuse; that is real life and the fantasy of rich city people who know nothing about how animals live on a farm..

The horses work hard, but not as hard as the Amish themselves.

Horses are life and death tools of survival for them, and there is a lot of work for them to do. Moise has eleven horses and two giant draft horses; he distributes the job, and horses get to graze during the day and are sheltered with hay and grain in a barn every night and during bad weather. From what I see around here, they are the luckiest horses, not the abused horses.

Memes can spread rapidly and be both cruel and lethal.

Slanderous or libelous memes ought to be illegal and one day will be.

An example of a corrosive meme and how it is spread is the one Donald Trump started: that the 2020 election was rigged.

It was the perfect meme for a divided country. Trump used social media platforms to spread the meme and keep it going. He repeated the lie and the meme countless times, and has happened with pointed emotional memes, they take on a life of their own. This is disgusting for most of us, devastating to a national political figure with a large following. Memes are the demagogue’s best friend.

Even though there is still no evidence to suggested any fraud was perpetrated, more than half of the members of the Republican Party believe it, and so millions of Americans. This meme is damaging the country’s faith in democracy, even though faith int the system was what kept our country together all these years.

The idea of all Amish being animal abusers because some might be is a similar kind of meme. Some of the most powerful ones are just lies, but the digital highway is too fast for the existing system to catch up with. Even Facebook seems to have no way to control it’s own site, which has run away from them.

This photo says a lot. These are the luckiest horses on the earth. Most horses never get to see life outside of their fences and yards.