As a rule, chickens will stay in their roosts unless they see the bare ground when they look out down. Yesterday, our Imperious Hens decided they wouldn’t come out. They saw some snow and ice when they looked out and decided to stay in.

This troubles Maria, who believes – like my mother and grandmother of a generation ago – that it living things that stay inside when the sun comes out. She said she wasn’t sure they knew it was safe to come out.

She felt the same about our cats when they retreated into our basement to stay warm.

So she decided to reach in and grab each hen and put them outside as the temperatures warmed and the sun peeked through the clouds.

Why did you do that? I asked.

“Shouldn’t the chickens make up their minds about whether to come out of the roost?”

We had one of our very rare and gentle disagreements about chickens’ rights. Maria said it was the right choice, it was warming up outside, and the hens didn’t need to be clucking inside all day.

Then she backed down a bit and said it was probably true – they were grown-up hens and could make up their minds.

This led to much discussion and triggered some thinking on my part about the fundamental rights of animals.

Maria said she agreed with me, but a few hours later, she reported how happy she was to see the hens out in the pasture, pecking around and finding worms.

But the chicken fight was small potatoes.

Animals in our world are in real trouble and need all the rights they can get.

Maria has a bit of the 50’s mom in her, this ingrained belief that it was unhealthy and poor parenting to let a kid sit inside all day if they chose to read or play with a friend. I had many fights with my mother, Aunt Fanny, and grandmother about this.

The minute the sun rose, I was ordered to go out and play even though I had no one to play with and knew no games to play. It made them feel good but did nothing for me.

Instead of lounging around inside with a book or puzzle, I just ended up lounging outside with nothing to do.

I threatened to start a chicken rights movement to demand they make their own choices about coming in and out of the roost. We laughed about it all day.

This was a fun argument, not resolvable, and not necessary. But I often think about what the rights of animals are and should be.

Sadly, there is no rational animal rights movement in America as I see it.

The national movement that calls itself an animal rights organization exists primarily to drive domesticated animals out of our lives and off to their earth and demonize people who live and work with them.

They believe no animals – elephants, ponies, draft and carriage horses, working dogs – should be owned by people or asked to work with or for them. Their primary focus now is targeting people who live with animals and harassing or persecuting them.

It was heartbreaking to hear the stories of the elephant trainers who had lived with this gentle and domesticated creature all their lives and were shattered when they were harassed out of the circuses.

I saw how many animals  – horses and elephants – loved their humans and how many were loved.

Very few of those elephants are alive today.

The animal rights movement doesn’t worry much about them or the ponies they have sent to slaughter because they insist it is cruel for children to ride on them in their small corrals.

There is no other work for most of the ponies who delighted children. Most of them are dead, also.

The movement has become a giant wedge between people and animals – making it almost impossible for poor or elderly or disabled people, or people who work hard and don’t have expensive sensing to save millions of dogs from lives trapped in crates or lives ended by shelters and rescue groups that can’t find homes for them.

In 2022, the issue facing animals is not whether carriage horses should pull carriages (we wouldn’t have a country without them) but whether animals like horses can survive at all. This issue isn’t as good for fund-raising, so you don’t hear much about it from the so-called guardians of animal rights.

In New York City, the animal rights movement has mainly become a scam, teasing money out of good-hearted animal lovers who buy their often false propaganda and tolerate their almost total ignorance of animals and how they live.

Any work with humans is cruel; the only choice is to be sent away, dumped in crowded pastures, and die.

Instead of fighting ways for working animals like horses and elephants to work and live among people, they have driven countless domesticated animals away, either to die or poorly funded and crowded “reserves” or die for lack of work and the cost of feeding them.

People think they are donating money to save animals when increasingly, they are donating money to kill them and remove them from the earth.

The animal rights movement doesn’t blink at the giant animals, chicken, pig, and cow farms where animals are confined to cruelly small quarters never permitted to step outside in the fresh air.

This is great for fast food burger makers but a holocaust for the animals. More chickens and pigs, and cows are tortured every hour in America than all of the carriage horses in New York City for the last century.

Animal rights groups in New York City have spent millions trying to kill off the content and well-treated and monitored carriage horses; they genuinely don’t know that working horses love to work and need to work.

The carriage horses are the lucky horses.

So what are the rights of animals?

Animals need to have work that keeps them among people.

This is what keeps them alive. Thanks to the animal rights movement, the only domesticated animals our children and grandchildren will ever see live only on YouTube.

Animals need the right to remain on our earth; anything else is a distraction. The actual abuse of animals in our time comes from greedy humans and insatiable corporations who are taking their habitats and food sources away.

Animals are not children and fur babies and should not be treated as such.

Let dogs be dogs, donkeys are donkeys, and chickens are chickens. Our interactions with them should be respectful and dignified; we ought to do nothing artificial to change their natures beyond what is necessary for their safety and health.

It is comforting to have the animals we love around us, but their primary purpose is not to tend to our emotional needs and neuroses.

And yes, chickens should be allowed to stay in the roost if that is their instinct and choice; they do not need to adhere to the arbitrary dictums of human beings reflecting what they were taught. We all do it, including me.

Animals have the right to be taught how to live safely with humans, so we can find ways to work together to keep them with us and know our children. It is tragic to send powerful workhorses to so-called preserves whose only purpose is to eat, shit, and die.

Animals have a right to life; without us, they have very few prospects for survival. Their habits are being destroyed by climate change, human greed, poaching, and corporate indifference to anything but money and more money.

Animals are more important than other motels or Amazon workplaces.

We need an animal rights movement that will help us to see animals in a new and different way, not just as victims but as partners. We must find ways to improve their working lives, not make them illegal.

We need to get creative about keeping them in our cities and suburbs so children and adults can get to know them rather than listen to the often ignorant and cruel policies of their “protectors.” The carriage horses live happily and safely in the midst of America’s most densely populated communities.

If the animal rights movement had a clue or were less greedy and corrupt, they would offer these stables as role models for other cities, not a scourge to be shut down. This would save the lives of countless horses and teach the rest of us what animals are like.

Instead of running off the big horses to their death, perhaps the obliteration of species after species might be a better use of the millions of dollars they raise daily.

Animal abuse is a severe and urgent problem when considering the treatment of animals by humans, but it isn’t abuse hat is killing off more and more animals in our world. It is us, all of us, our needs, and our greed.

The World Wildlife Federation estimates that half of all living non-human species have been destroyed in the past 20 years alone, while the number of hungry humans is already nearly unsustainable.

We need a radically different kind of movement when it comes to the rights of animals.

Our emotionalizing of pets like cats and dogs destroy their very nature and blunts their survival skills. How many of our pet dogs could survive in the wild if there is one?

Chasing the carriage horses out of New York or the elephants out of Ringling Bros. will do nothing to help animals survive. Our dogs have figured all of this out. They will be fine.

We need the other animals in this world for all kinds of reasons, personal and our health and sense. I can’t wait to donate money to a movement like that.

As to our hens, they decided to jump out of their roosts this morning and are happily marching around the farm.