I spent most of my life as a city boy; I never lived anywhere else until I was almost 60. Before that, I lived in Atlantic City,  Providence, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Jersey, and New York City. I love cities as I love the country.

I live on both boundaries and mainly through the death of our animals, I’ve got a deep look at how differently Americans feel about the end of animals.

I’ve seen many of my animals die in cities, and now, many die in the country.

It’s very different and tells us about the divisions tearing the country apart. One side thinks the other is evil and elitist, and the other thinks the other side is dumb and bigoted. It’s the perfect formula for a cultural wildfire, and it shows up every time we need to figure out how to say goodbye to the animals we love.

Ghoulish politicians like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis tapped into this resentment and turned it into a movement.

The differences are striking and broad.

Although animals like horses and elephants helped build cities worldwide, the movement that pretends to be about animal rights has driven them out of communities and away from people, mainly leaving them to die on those “preserves,” where they drift pointlessly through life, eating hay and dropping manure.

The lucky ones get euthanized.

Most of them die quickly without human contact or meaningful work. City people, cut off from their history, often think that is merciful.

Most animals who die in the country are not pets; they are livestock and a farmer’s livelihood. The difference between survival and ruin for a farmer can be how an animal dies. Very few take their cows, farm dogs, or horses to a veterinary clinic to pass on a stranger’s floor with IV tubes sticking out.

Large animal vets are for helping cows give birth. Small animal vets get the dogs and cats.

Animals, like people, live very different lives when they live and die in cities rather than the country.

People in the city have no or little room to bury their dead dogs and cats.

Animal lovers in urban areas seem to believe their pets should be kept alive at any cost for as long as possible. The rural people I know, including me, see it differently. When animals are sick and dying and can’t lie an everyday life, they are put to death. Mercy isn’t only about prolonging a life.

The farmers, believing it is much kinder to their animals, will often take a dog out behind the barn and shoot it if it is near the end or has harmed a child or passerby. City people are horrified at the idea of shooting a dog.

City people can hardly believe we are letting Minnie die a natural death. Country people can’t imagine letting a vet come out for the death of a barn cat. These are generalizations, but I’ve been experiencing this year for nearly two decades, and it tells me a lot about what happens when people stop speaking to one another and only talk to or through machines.

What is offensive to many rural people, including me, is prolonging the suffering of an animal because we don’t want to lose them. I live between these two cultures, and seeing the differences is fascinating and disturbing. We are strangers to one another. The love of animals should unite us, but it seems to be just another argument with no possible resolution.

Every time one of our farm animals or dogs died, the widening schism in how rural and urban people differ about the sickness and death of their animals reveals itself.

Too often, the messages on both sides are arrogant and offensive.

A blog reader posted a piece on Facebook praising our decision to let Minnie die a natural death.

She was immediately assaulted: “Because you said some dumb shit in Support of dumb fuck neglecting their animal who is slowly dying,” wrote one man.” Still, because they think it’s more beautiful for an animal to have “natural” death they aren’t having her put to sleep, which is a fucking giant crock of shit, so yeah I’m a fucking laughing at you you’re an idiot.”

I’ve learned over time that the best response to trolling like this is no response. Trolls are inverse vampires; they need exposure and response to feed off of. Ignored, they go away, looking for more prey. Argument is their diesel fuel.

 

 

(We check on Minnie every morning and offer her some food and water. This morning, she came out of her cat  house, where she slept at night, to see Maria.)

I get messages like this every time an animal on the farm days; I’ve gotten them for years.

They have helped me to understand why so many rural people – primarily people who can’t afford to spend $300 to have a vet come over to the house and kill their border collie when they can do it in a second for the cost of a bullet and be more humane and merciful.

I’ve also learned to tell where a person lives by how they respond to sick and dying animal care. Urban people no longer know much about animals; they rarely or never see them besides the pets they love. Increasingly, they equate dogs and cats to children.

Rural people live near nature, and farm people know that if you call a vet every time an animal is gravely ill or dies, you won’t be a farmer long.

We have lost touch with each other, the urban and the rural, tearing our country in half.

We no longer see the world in the same way. That is a severe problem, especially concerning government and politics. Generally, cities and suburbs are more prosperous than rural and agricultural areas.

Billionaires don’t live around here—Harvard and Yale graduates to cities where the pay is much more generous.

Millennials don’t generally dream of living in the country.

Wealth dramatically affects how we see animals and their health and deaths —only the wealthy worry about special diets for their horses or rush quickly to veterinarians where there is a problem.

Farmers can’t afford special diets or the animals that need them.

The death of animals has shown me why so many people around me see urban and suburban people as arrogant elitists who don’t know that it isn’t cruel for a carriage horse to pull a carriage in a city park. In return, city people often see rural people as brutal and ignorant racists and bigots.

“I just can’t believe those people up in New York,” said one neighbor, “they believe it’s cruel for a working horse to work.”  from either side
Just yesterday, a woman berated me for defending my Amish neighbors from the idea that all Amish people abuse their horses.

“I bet they work their horses almost every day,” wrote one.

Having lived in both places, I can understand both sides; although I steer away from extremists, they have no credibility with me.

I see this schism everywhere.

People don’t seem to know that working horses, like working dogs, die and get sick much less frequently than horses with no work to do other than stand still and age in so-called refugees if they get that far. Horses without work don’t live long in America.

Because I have written in defense of the New York Carriage Horses and their right to stay among people in cities and have work that keeps them healthy and alive, people who see themselves as animal rights advocates message me every time a horse gets sick and dies – which is an infrequent occurrence in New York since five different government agencies police and monitor the horses and their care.

This argument always amazes me.

If you live here,  you can easily find horse cruelty, from beatings to neglect, overwork, and food deprivation. The biggest problem is when people can’t afford to feed them. They don’t get special diets; they get no diets.

But if they aren’t carriage horses in New York, “animal rights” people don’t seem to notice them, as that would mean seeing them and knowing something about them. Cities like New York are ripe for fundraising.

Even healthy horses die all the time, as do healthy humans. We don’t live forever, and neither do they. The death of a carriage horse triggers a tsunami of hate, hysteria, and overreaction.

Do we think that carriage horses will never die? Or that horses living on so-called preserves will live forever?

Dogs and cats hold unique places in the lives of people and animal lovers. Any vet will tell you that the worst thing they ever see are people who prolong the lives of sick and dying pets because they can’t bear to lose them. This animal cruelty means not letting a feral barn cat die the way she wants.

I hope to have that freedom; I wish it for my loved ones.

But so far, society won’t permit us to decide how and when we might die, as it wants to deny women the right to determine how and when to have children. Sometimes I think the people who speak the loudest about patriotism have no idea what freedom means or how it might apply to the death of animals.

I’ve never had a message from a person who lives in rural America criticizing me for ending the life of a dying animal by letting nature take its course in many cases. I get that criticism from city people all the time. I think that’s because urban-raised people like me have lost touch with nature and the lives of animals.

Because life in our cities has become ever more stressful – crime, congestion, noise, the insane costs of living – dogs and cats have come to mean something new and different – family members, fur babies, surrogate children, “comfort animals.” Vets are where city people go when their animals face death.

And as much as I love vets and respect them, I also know they make a lot of money by orchestrating elaborate death rituals for people who no longer see their pets as animals.

If you Google it, you’ll see scores of special veterinary services for euthanizing, burying, or ritualizing pet death.

The average price of these services ranged from $300 to $500, much more if you want photos, statues, headstones, or albums. Then the cost can go to $1000 or more. Special food diets for horses can go much higher than that. The money fees are staggering to me.

I know no one in my town or village with $500 to spend on tombstones for their dog. I got a Stone Mason to carve Orson’s name in a rock for 15 dollars. My neighbors thought I had lost my mind.

Rocky, a blind and impaired and very old poney we inherited on the farm some years ago, was suffering attacks from the other farm animals – animals in the real world drive sick and wounded animals away as they attract predators – soon after we moved to the farm.

Simon, our much-loved Rescue donkey, kept attacking Rocky, who was helpless and facing another winter. He was bruised, terrified, and confused. He was suffering.

Our vet said the merciful thing to do was to put him down.

You might have thought I had just joined the Hitler Youth the rage and condemnation came in an outpour and came still.

“Why didn’t you just build a pasture and let him live Rocky alone?” wrote one outraged woman. I had to smile. No farmer or country person would suggest building a pasture to protect one aging and blind animal from the others. They know what making a fence costs and bringing water to a field means.

I learned to eliminate messages like that by offering to build a new encampment for Rocky if the complainant wished to pay for it. I never heard from them again.

I remember my border collie Orson, the dog who brought me to the first Bedlam Farm, bit three people in one afternoon, including a child in his neck; I will never forget the sight of blood coming off that poor child’s neck and swore it would never happen again.

I took Orson to the vet and had him euthanized immediately. I knew I could never claim it could never happen again. Nor could I confine a sheep-tracking fence in a small enclosure for the rest of his life.

I had spent thousands of dollars taking him to veterinary specialists, psychologists, trainers, holistic practitioners, and vets who practiced Chinese medicine. I won’t do that again, either.

And yes, I greatly resented the rich and urban animal “lovers” who thought me a heartless murderer.

Once again, people who thought he should have stayed alive assaulted me for months, even years. “Why didn’t you build him a fence and just keep him in it” several people suggested as if that was a human way for a border collie to live.

When our donkey Simon suffered a stroke, a vet came to euthanize him and spare him pain. He was terrified animal rights people would see Simon lying down and call the police and accuse us of animal cruelty. He said it happens all the time.

He insisted we drag his body down the hill and out of the sight of the road.

I lived in cities for most of my life and understand the schism. I could not imagine burying our Golden Retriever, Emma’s first dog, in the backyard when he died. For one thing, it was too small; for another, it was illegal; we might have gotten ourselves arrested in our New Jersey suburb. We did what everybody did. We took him to the vet to be put down. Even then, it costs $200, extra for the ashes to be returned.

I often choose to end my dog’s life in that way.

I can’t bear to see my dogs suffer significant pain or disorientation on incontinence. And I don’t want them to eliminate all over our house; it is upsetting for us and them.

Sheep and barn cats are another matter; although I usually shoot a sheep struggling and dying, I’ve learned how to do it quickly and without pain. Vets can terrify sheep when they euthanize them; we don’t like seeing them end their lives that way.

Minnie, our barn cat, is different.

Barn cats are not domestic pets; they are feral and half-wild creatures who hang around barns and kill rats and mice. They die like most wild animals; they separate themselves from people and animals and go off into the woods or under purchase to die alone and privately.

The idea of rushing them to a vet to be killed on a strange floor by strange people is abhorrent to me and cruel, not to mention the $200 to $300 bill, which city people are happy to pay.

The strangeness of this division hit me a few months ago when I stopped by a neighbor’s farm fence to feed his horse a carrot. I thought it was a sweet, kind thing to do. The e-mails started coming immediately. “Don’t ever stop and give a horse an apple if you don’t know his eating history,” said the first message, followed by many like it.

The horse lived in a huge fenced pasture with all kinds of apple and pear trees right in it. I then noticed that everyone yelling at me had to be wealthy. They discussed the dangers of giving horses anything not part of their special diets.

If you live in the country outside of Saratoga Springs, you are unlikely to see or know any horse on a special diet. Farm and country people are not rich; they rarely keep horses on special diets. It’s way too expensive for any farmer.

I was soon flooded by messages from farmers and country people thanking me for taking the time to give a horse an apple.

Rural people were skeptical that people might object to bringing an apple to a horse. His farmer owner was astonished. “What are those people drinking up there,” he asked. I asked him what he meant by “up there.” His response was quick: “City people.’

The divisions were clear to me.

If you ask me what one of the biggest problems causing the most trouble in America was, I might say the problem is that there are too many rich people in the cities and too many poor people in the country. That often explains the choices people make.