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For me, two moments stood out quite powerfully during the long and sometimes racuous hearings in the New York City Council Friday on the mayor’s latest proposal to gut the New York Carriage Trade. This round features a bill that would move the horse trade into Central Park somewhere, someplace, some time in the future, at taxpayer expense, and despite overwhelming opposition, all to be decided later.

I should make it clear that no one close to city government or the history of parks and projects believe a stable will ever be built or renovated in time to save the carriage trade, if ever.

Late in the morning Friday, a City Council member asked the team of mayoral aides assembled at a long table what the purpose of moving the horses into the park was, and a deputy mayor responded quickly that the legislation was only about the health and safety of the horses. It was so they could escape the dangerous streets of New York.

If that were so, asked the councilman, how many horses had been killed in those streets since the mayor’s office was keeping track?

I could see this was a set-up, the councilman looked like a fox zeroing in on a chicken. Readers of my blog, you know the answer to this, but the jammed hearing room in New York was on the edge of their seats.

“None,” said the mayoral aide.

Not one horse in at least the past decade.

And the councilman asked again, just to be sure, and perhaps for affect. He was savoring the moment.

And the answer was the same: Not one.

And you could hear the gasps in the room, and the jaws of the council members drop. And the animal rights people, hooting and hollering all morning, were quiet.

None? (Actually, three horses have been killed in the past 30 years in traffic accidents in New York City out of roughly three million rides, but the mayor’s office didn’t seem to know that.)

And so, asked the councilman, how many horses have been injured in recent memory?

Four horses in modern history have been in traffic accidents, the mayor’s aide mumbled – the room was very quiet –  and more council members shook their heads.  And the horse people beamed. The audience gasped again and murmured.  “Well,” said a council member, “that’s too many, but really, not many, given the number of rides.”

And this, several  council members asked, is why the horses must be moved out of their stables and to the park at a taxpayer cost of 25 million dollars, while 55,000 New Yorkers remain homeless?

Because no horses were killed and a tiny fraction injured in one of the busiest and most crowded cities in the world? I wish people had a safety record like that, said one councilwoman.

It was a Perry Mason moment, the only truly unforgettable moment of the day, the one that defined this controversy that isn’t.

It tells you about all you need to know about the carriage horse drama, except this:

How many drivers, asked a council man have been arrested for abusing a horse?

Much whispering and conferring at the mayor’s table, then the answer. One, and the case is pending.

“One?” asked the councilman, hardly believing his ears. “In 150 years?” The mayor’s aide cleared his throat, and you could barely hear his response. “Yes, one, and the case is pending.”

The scene was surreal, the air seem to go right out of the balloon, the mayor’s gnomes sagged in their seats. Some of the council members even left the room, went to lunch, headed for the bathroom. I used to live and work in New York as a journalist, and I can tell you these people deal all the time with some of the toughest, most insoluble and controversial urban issues on the earth – real problems. They all seemed to be wondering, almost out loud, why they were dealing with this? Why were they wasting so much time on the crisis that isn’t?

They were trapped. The mayor had a big debt to pay, and he was twisting their arms to pay it. Once city council member talks to me fairly regularly. “They did an awful job of presenting it,” he said, “but don’t be fooled into thinking that matters. This was a show for the cameras.”

No matter how the hearings looked, or what the council members think,  the mayor says he will pursue his proposal to cannibalize and diminish the carriage trade and reduce it to a narrow tourist concession in the middle of the park, preserved but forever cut off from the life and soul of the city and its people. The carriage trade will be dependent on the largesse of the city government  and this mayor for it’s very existence and the maintenance of a new and radically less glamorous home.

The mayor is a powerful force in New York government, the city council is weak and dependent on the mayor for power.

If he really wants the bill to pass, it will pass, no matter how foolish or arrogant he looks or how illegitimate it seems. He has made it clear – some of the negotiators believe that he is not sane – that he will pursue the carriage trade by any means at all costs.  He might delay his bill, or change it a bit, or even negotiate some things if he has to, but the odds are he will get it through.  He is banking on the fact that if the horses are allowed to remain the park, most of the city will forget how and why they got there.  And not really care. A good bet, I think, given the history of animal survival in America.

Americans are so disconnected from the natural and animal worlds they no longer even remember when we lived so closely with them and so easily.

And then there is the Teamsters Union, which represents the drivers, wants this to happen. Their position is simple: a stable in the park is better than no stable at all, some jobs saved are better than no jobs saved. The horses are not really their problem.

The second moment that struck me was the testimony of the young and eager yuppies of NYClass, (we love animals and hate people) the animal rights group that has pursued the horse ban for so long and at such a great cost. Seeing them on TV, they did look so righteous you wanted to smack them a bit, they forgot to not look smug. Mostly, they were ignored. They looked a little twerpy.

One of the members of the animal rights panel breathlessly recounted NYClass and PETA’s much-publicized and horrific story from last summer in which a bus is said to have grazed a horse, terrified him and caused his carriage to flip over, after which callous carriage drivers laughed and joked about their money,  forced him to lie on the ground for a long period and suffer so they could preserve the harness and make him get back to work.

Another insisted the horses were kept in stables which are filthy, and  where they can neither lie down or turn around. This is not true, according to my own eyes and to busloads of veterinarians and trainers, but no matter.

This is all by now a well-worm chapter from the spectacularly successful NYClass media playbook, in which the carriage drivers become the new Jews of Hitler’s Europe, greedy, soulless, unscrupulous, conniving, capable of any deprivation, less than human. None of them – not one – are good and worthy people, none of them actually loves a horse or cares for it well.  There is no reason to even speak to them, they are not members of the moral community.

I spent a good day tracking down this story (carriage horses, raining on the just and the unjust)  after the mayor cited it as a reason to ban the horses from city streets. PETA claimed a lawyer from Oklahoma witnessed the incident and saw the bus and saw the laughing, jeering drivers force the suffering horse – his name was Spartacus – get up and go to work as soon as they got him on his feet.

I called the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the NYPD and both agencies told me there was no bus anywhere near the carriage horses at that time, no incident was reported to them, and they emphatically said there was no incident involving any bus and a horse. They would have known.

I witnessed a number of videos taken by tourists at the scene – some were readers of my blog – and they said they saw no bus. One horse pulled out of the line, its wheels got tangled with the wheels of the carriage behind it, and Spartacus was pulled down to the ground.

The drivers reacted calmly and professionally and untangled the harness from the horse so he wouldn’t struggle or panic and get hurt, as is common practice with fallen horses who are in harness. Then he got to  his feet – the incident lasted about two minutes from beginning to end. Spartacus was taken back to the stables, examined by a police vet, declared healthy and able to return to work, he was given a week on a New Jersey farm to get over it all.

Spartacus, whose owner is known to love his horses almost to the extreme, was never returned to work right after the incident. This “witness” was never identified, no reporter ever spoke to her, there is no evidence she ever existed as described, she has never spoken out in public about what she said she saw, only privately to PETA whose history of telling lies is as rich as its bank account.

None of the hundreds of witnesses corroborated her story in any way.

The “witness” didn’t seem to know in the PETA account that the driver spoke little English, and couldn’t have said the brutish things attributed to him, or that one of the other drivers helping out was a woman with long hair, not one of three men. No reporter, then or now, questioned her story or the NYClass account of the incident, it would take any reporter about three minutes to see through it.

No person or animal was hurt, there was no bus, the horse was not forced back to work. I asked the MTA and the NYPD if anyone but me had called to ask about the bus and both said no, no one else had called. The story was repeated and talked about for weeks, in the newspapers, on blogs, on TV. That is the story of the carriage horse controversy in New York, a fanatic social group with dubious ethics feeding misinformation to a hungry media eager to use it. It is all about the safety of the horses, but the horses are safe.

The issue has nothing to do with politics or money, but it is all about politics and money. It is not about truth or facts.

So this is where we are with the carriage horses, this surreal charade of a democratic process, this theater of pretense,  a frenzy of closed-door wheeling and dealing, everybody pretending to be conscientious and diligent and open while being both incompetent and derelict and secret. Or maybe just savvy and self-serving. The fix is in, I can smell it all the way to my farm.  No one in New York is too surprised. I guess the truth does want to be free, and it did emerge in some ways.

When the animal rights people were spouting this transparently false stuff, even they didn’t seem to believe what they were saying. They were just like the family of tourists from Idaho who get to wave outside of the Today show window in Rockefeller Center. All but two of the city council members had gone to lunch by the time the NYClass people talked about how much they suffered when the saw the horses trotting by. No one was left to listen.

What is victory now for the carriage horses? Impossible to say.

The carriage trade seems to want to survive, they are exhausted and divided, they can’t or won’t really offer a new and clear vision for staying independent and beating back this overreach of government authority. The see the mayor’s creepy offering as their only hope.

In my mind, absent egregious abuse or safety concerns, this is simply none of the mayor’s business, no matter how much money the animal rights people gave him to do their dirty work.

In unity, there is strength. In division, weakness.

I was struck by several things.

– The mayor has won.

One way or the other, whether the stables are built or not, the carriage trade has been de-legitimized as an independent and iconic industry, a part of New York City and it’s day-to-day life, as they have been for so many years. The utterly false idea that the horses do not belong out in the city, in the streets, among the people, in their own stables, has been accepted now by everyone – the carriage trade, the Teamsters, the mayor, the animal rights organizations, the City Council, and then, inevitably, the people.  It is about to become the law.

The domesticated animals in our world have lost big, communities everywhere will decide that horses in their towns and cities don’t belong on the streets either, they will begin to vanish from our world, as have the ponies and the elephants and so many other species. In this case, as in so many others, no one has even really looked at any alternative for the carriage trade other than moving into Central Park, or for finding a way to save all of the horses who will soon need saving.

– The horses lost. They will not all be banned, but they have lost the struggle to remain in our everyday world, that idea simply took more vision than  the leaders and animal lovers of New York City possess. The city is in the throes of a real estate surge that has made it virtually impossible for the carriage horses to stay in their stables. It seems to be Central Park or perish. That is a tough negotiation to have to have.

Is it better to save 90 than lose them all? Sure.

The surviving horses will have to work twice as hard and much more frequently so that they can have better and easier lives, another goal of the mayor’s new legislation. They will surely need to be replaced or retired much more frequently than the horses working now.

-I believe the carriage trade lost as well as the horses, at least to this point. They will survive, and some of them may even make some money when the blood-letting and maneuvering is over, but they will exist only as marginalized wards of the state, under the thumb of people who care nothing about them and have made it clear they would love for them to be gone for good.

They will exist in New York in the same way hot dog vendors exist in the park, or the lovely carousel can be heard in the Spring and the Summer. But they will no longer be a proud and self-sufficient tradition in the city that spawned their industry. Most children in New York will never see them again, they will be a quaint tourist attraction in the park, if they get that far.

As every horse lover in America understood from the beginning, most of these horses will be either worse off or dead in short order. There is nothing worse for a working horse than to stand around with nothing to do all day but eat and drop manure, the other alternative for needy horses in America right now is a long trailer ride to Mexico or Canada, where nails will be drilled through their heads.

This is the good life the animal rights groups in New York have promised the horses in their long and bitter campaign to free them from bondage and return them to nature.

We humans have done it again. When it comes to the animals who have always been closest to us, we are very good at removing them from the world, dreadful at making the changes and sacrifices necessary to keeping them safe and among us.

In the raucous tribal world of the carriage trade, it seems the Teamsters are the only ones with a plan, and it is coming to fruition. The carriage trade has not yet been able to unite and focus on a single vision for their future. So they may well have to accept someone else’s.

– The horses lose again, as they have so many times in America.

Another set of animals sold out and abandoned by the people who claim to love them and speak for them.

The Teamsters are nothing if not practical, they are tough, you-gotta-break-an-egg-to-make-an-omelette people. They have saved jobs, but they are not going much farther for a tiny industry struggling to survive when they have so many big contracts to negotiate. It doesn’t appear the carriage trade even wants them to. I wish writers were in the Teamsters Union, many of them might still be working. and writing books in New York.

There are about 220 horses now, about 90 will make it to the new stables, if there ever are new stables. Most of the horses will pay with their lives, we all know this to be true, this is the cost many animals pay when well-meaning but thoughtless people decide to save them.

The Teamsters looked slick and smooth, as they are and do. Their savvy leader,  Demos Demopoulus of Teamsters Local 553 purred like a kitten at the hearings and said he really couldn’t discuss any of the details of the secret talks without compromising the negotiations that didn’t really occur, or the deal that was never made,  because no deal was reached, just an “agreement in principle.”

Much to be done, he purred,  sadly and mysteriously.

He looked to me like the Cheshire Cat, all smiles, you can’t even see the teeth but you know they are there. Demopoulus, who represents the drivers in the negotiations, looked rueful but hopeful, as if this were all a secret club, and he and the members were the only ones who knew the code.  He shook his head wisely and often,  revealed absolutely nothing, and regretfully, and the council members practically crawled across the floor to warm his feet and leave him alone.

The public is not involved or permitted in this part of the process. Negotiation, like democracy and making sausage, isn’t pretty.

It was interesting, the mayor’s people stumbled and bumbled through their presentation, they looked woefully unprepared and confused. The Teamsters told the council members even less, they looked like a million bucks. That is how the pros do it.

The Teamsters won. They seem to tower over everybody else.

The council members played along, everybody knew what was happening. Nobody wanted to ruffle those feathers, not the mayor’s, not the Teamsters, that is the raw definition of power. Evert other councilman and woman talked about how much they respect the mayor, every reporter and politician in the room knows they all think he’s a wingnut.

On their blogs and Facebook pages, the carriage trade was jubilant all weekend, it was true that they did make the animal right people look more like the Three Stooges than animal saviors, they were congratulating one another all weekend. They have done a wondrous job of fighting back against the longest odds.

But I can’t say I really understand what the victory is here, let alone whether it looms, and I no longer know what it will mean for the horses and the trade. I don’t know why I should feel too triumphant about it.

Maybe this will reveal itself in the foggy thicket of New York back-room dealing, but it seems clear that the stables are unlikely to be built at all, let alone in the near future, surely not in time to save the carriage trade. If the mayor gets his bill passed, and the Teamsters can’t bully it down, the carriage trade will soon begin bleeding.  It seems clear that at least one, maybe more of the three remaining West Side stables will be sold soon if the “agreement’ does not pass, or even if it does.

The city would not even look for a way to alter that reality. We will not know if the horses could have been kept in the city.

The mayor says he will move aggressively forward with his proposal to move the carriage trade out of the city and into the park, and with it, a number of noxious and remaining limitations, changes,  restrictions that will cripple the trade and cannibalize it. Death by a thousand cuts, the drivers say.

I am not in New York, but I have been raising my voice whenever possible, I will keep it up, I am told it matters.

The Teamsters winked and smiled and hinted there was more negotiating to come, maybe their “agreement in principle” would get sweeter. The insiders say the trade needs the deal to get into the park in order to escape being picked to death by the mayor and gobbled up by the real estate industry.

I don’t see a victory here, but one of the people close to the negotiations assured me it could have been much worse. I thought of that line in one of Jeanne DePrau’s novels: “Why, if it’s going to be all right, does it seem to be getting worse every day?”

Not too long ago, most Americans lived and worked with animals and understood them. The people who made decisions about them knew what they were really like and really needed. Abuse was a concern, but it was not the prism through which we understood animals, it was just one element.

That is no longer true, and the animal world, once a place of partnership, connection, love, work and sustenance has changed. It is filled with conflict, anger, corrupted  by money, politics and dominated by people who do not live with animals, do not seem to love them, and more and more, seem to know nothing about them.

Abuse is now the primary determinant of how animals shall live, or even if they shall live at all. Even though little known about how much abuse actually occurs, and how it should be defined, it is almost all we think of when it comes to animals. There are few laws or regulations to make animals safer and remain in our lives, almost none to protect their dwindling world.

There are countless laws to prevent their abuse and target their abusers.

The national hysteria over abuse now dominates our national and local policy about animals. It distorts their lives. It threatens the very existence of the carriage horses, the elephants, the ponies, the sled dogs and working animals.

There is an elderly women who lives in my county, she is eccentric – or perhaps quite sane – she cannot say no to feral cats. About a dozen lived in and around the small split-level house – some would not come inside –  that she now lives in alone. Her husband died a decade ago. The cats are her life, her reason for being.

Two months ago, informers contacted an animal rescue group who appeared with the police and an animal control van. The old woman was cited for cruelty and neglect – she did not have enough fresh water or feed or the money for vaccines – and the cats were seized. All but two were euthanized. She faces an appearance in court and fines and legal fees, and is devastated by the loss of her cats.

Her neighbors have supported her with money and a retired lawyer is handling her case for free. They say she is a sweet and loving person, they do not understand why she could not have been helped to keep her cats in the proper way, rather than be traumatized and arrested and see her cats killed. I do not know her and have not met her, I believe that her story – like Joshua Rockwood’s story in Glenville, N.Y.  – speaks to us about what has gone wrong in our understanding of animals in our lives.

And about how the good guys in the animal world are now the bad guys, this world has been turned upside down.

There is an old and mentally ill man living in a garbage dump near Vermont, his emaciated horses  – he loves them but could not care for them – were seized, and the horse rescue group that impounded them is seeking to seize his Social Security and retirement funds  – tens of thousands of dollars – in payment for boarding them. The horses needed to be taken away, but the old man needed to be cared for as well. No one is rushing to re-home him or feed and care for him. I am hoping to meet him soon and learn more about his story.

What happened to the good guys of the animal world? Most of us grew up in a world where organizations like the U.S. Humane Society and the A.S.P.C.A. were the trusted spokespeople for the welfare of animals, they were known for advocating humane treatment of animals and for helping people who sought to live with animals and keep them.

I think of the special fountain the A.S.P.C.A. built in Central Park for the carriage horses, such a warm and useful gesture that helps the horses every day. This would be unheard of today, the A.S.P.C.A is helping to put the horses at great risk and to put the hundreds of people whose livelihood they are out of work.

The modern A.S.P.C.A., along with the H.S.U.S. has lost it’s own purpose and identity, it has become a lobbying arm of P.E.T.A., the strident and wealthy national animal rights group. It is campaigning to ban the carriage horses from New York.

The H.S.U.S. and A.S.P.C.A. and their associates in the animal rights movement are not protecting the rights of animals, they are driving them away from people and purpose and killing off many more animals than all of the animal abusers combined. They are a far greater danger to domesticated animals than old men and women in trailers and dumps.

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So how are we tell the good guys from the bad guys if we love animals and wish them to remain in our world? Some tips on what to look for when you are seeking to find a good guy in the animal world:

1. The good guys are always – always – seeking to keep animals in our world, not to remove them to farms or slaughterhouses where they will never again work with people or be seen by them.

2. The good guys love to be around animals. To touch them, talk to them, learn about them, give them snacks and treats, take photos of them, ask questions about them, smile around them, see and touch them. If you are near New York City, go to Central Park and watch the drivers and the streams of people touch the horses, pat their noses and shoulders, give them carrots and bits of apple, ask their names and speak to them. They are animal lovers. Across the street, you may see people carrying signs demanding that the horses be banned from the city. You will never see one touch a horse, offer a carrot or an apple, talk to them or smile at the sight of them.

3. The good guys love people. It is not possible to hate people and love animals. Domesticated animals have always loved people and worked with them, and there have always been people in the world – carriage horse drivers, pony ride operators, farmers, elephant handlers and trainers – who choose to live and work with animals. A life with animals is a special and cherished way of life. The bad guys use animals to intimidate and frighten people, to harass them and inform on them. The good guys always use animals to connect themselves and others to people.

4. The good guys seek meaningful work for animals in our world. If one looks at the history of domesticated animals in our country, the story is really quite clear. Animals who work with people people survive among us, they are, in general, considered valuable and important. They are better cared for than any animal in the wild, who faces a horrific list of dangers and threats, from climate change to poachers to development and disease.

Animals who do not have work with people – the wild ponies of the plains, the elephants in Asia and Africa, the ponies who give rides to children, the big draft horses who pull carriages – perish, they become extinct. Work is not abuse for working animals, it is their connection to humanity, and their literal survival in a world that has displaced and forgotten them.

5. The good guys know that the best way to save animals and keep them from neglect is to educate and help the people who own them. I know a farmer whose barn collapsed in a snowstorm and his cows had poor shelter. An animal rescue group came to his farm with 15 volunteers and fixed his roof so he could keep his animals and they would be protected. He was terrified to call them, he was sure he would be arrested, but a friend intervened and convinced him they were the good guys.

This group works to reach out to farmers and people with animals so that they can help people keep animals in their lives and care for them well. The good guys know that so much of what we call neglect and abuse is really poverty, inexperience or unavoidable circumstance. Good guys prefer to help people and animals, rather than jail and prosecute them, even kill their animals.

6. The good guys seek to connect people in need of animals with animals in need of them, not to throw up insurmountable obstacles to adoption and companionship. There are many elderly people living in loneliness and anxiety who would love to have one of the 12 million dogs vegetating and languishing in no-kill animal shelters. They too often can no longer qualify to adopt an animal: they are not able to walk them for miles, cannot afford tall fences, cannot engage in aggressive training. There are hard-working people who are denied dogs because they have full-time jobs, or live in apartments. Poor people are often denied dogs because they may not be able to afford vet bills. Farmers are afraid to leave their cows out to forage in the snow for fear someone will call the police. Good guys do not create obstacles for adoption of homeless or otherwise needy dogs, they remove them.

7. The good guys do not employ secret informers to spy on animal lovers and farmers and anonymously report them. I have a good friend of mine who is an animal control officer, and she does not invade or pry into anyone’s live unless there is a good reason to do so. “If they don’t have a license,” she says, “I don’t seize the dog, I give them three weeks to get a license and ask if they can afford it. If not, I ask someone in town to help them out, someone always does. Dogs can be very happy in the homes of poor people and farmers and the elderly, they are a lot better than in crates in a pound or a shelter.”

This animal control officer does not criminalize or demonize farmers or the real lives of human beings. She seeks a balance, caring for animals, caring for the people who live with them.

8. Good guys work to understand farmers and the natural world. They know it is not cruel for example, for working horses to work; they know it is cruel when they don’t. They know cows can eat snow or stomp through frozen ice if they are thirsty and have to wait a few hours for water in the winter. They know farm animals are hardy, and do not need heated barns or shelters. They know the animals living with people are the lucky ones.

9. Good guys understand the real lives of animals. They know the carriage horses have no place to go if they are banned from their work, and they know there is no more unhealthy or meaningless life for a work horse than to spend the rest of their lives with nothing to do, no humans to connect with, nothing to look at, for the rest of their lives. They know there is no place for the Asian elephants being abandoned by the circuses to go once they lose their work, they know they are being condemned to die by the people who think they are saving them.

10. The good guys are not elitist. They love “stupid” animal tricks because they result from the most intimate connections and relationships with human beings, and because they have delighted, entertained and inspired human beings for many thousands of years. They know it is not cruel for animals to entertain people, it is one of their most sacred and cherished functions, from the elephants in the circuses to therapy dogs in children’s hospitals. Is it really true that the only place for the domesticated animals of the world to be are impoverished and understaffed rescue farms where they will never again be seen?

The people who claim to speak for the rights of animals are creating a joyless world where it was once loving, a barren existence where it was once full and meaningful, and angry and loveless world which was once joyous and full of meaning. The good guys still hear the magic.

If it is cruel to separate elephant mothers from their children, then keep them together. If it is, in fact, cruel to use bullhooks, then ban them. If people have abused elephants, then punish them, as the laws in every state provide for. There is no reason to condemn the elephants or the horses or the ponies away from people,  to exile or death, to send them out of the world.

11. The good guys understand what abuse really is. That it is not an opinion on Facebook but a crime, it happens every day. It is evident in some of the giant industrial factory farms where millions of animals live lives of sunless confinement in confined spaces where they can barely turn around. The New York Carriage Horses are not abused, many horses are starved and neglected. The good guys would like to help them, rather to spend millions of dollars on political and lobbying campaigns.

12. And finally, this. The good guys are nice, they are fun to be around. If you pay attention, you will see that people who love animals are most generally loving people. They smile, socialize, have fun, believe in magic and mystery.  I have never seen a contented animal with a hateful person, I do not believe it is possible. If you want to learn more about the good guys, check out Blue Star Equiculture, the draft horse sanctuary and organic farming center in Palmer, Mass.

They practice the Third Way, the new way to fight for the rights and welfare of animals, to cherish animals and people and help them remain together. They are the good guys,  you can see what they look like, what they believe in, what they do. They rescue animals and care for them they do not ever harm people.

The Native-Americans speak for the horses, and they warn us that the message of the horses is clear, they are making their last stand to tell us that we are at a crossroads, we will either learn to live in harmony or the world as we know it will end.

 

There are five people who are driving forces behind the move to ban the New York Carriage Horses. One is the mayor of New York City, Bill deBlasio. He has never owned an animal –  a horse, a dog or a cat.  He has never visited a carriage horse stable and refuses to meet with the carriage drivers or owners. He says he is a proud supporter of animal rights. Another is the City Council President, Melissa Mark-Viverito, she has never owned or ridden a horse, she says, but she has two rescue cats and says she supports animal rights and believes it is cruel for working animals to work. Another is Steven Nislick, a real-estate developer and animal activist and strong supporter of the mayor, he is the very wealthy founder of NYClass, the group spearheading the carriage horse ban. He was the leading financial contributor to Mayor deBlasio’s election campaign, and is widely credited with the mayor’s victory.  He has said the carriage horses would be better off dead than pulling carriages in Central Park. Nislick bought some horses in the 1980’s and has occasionally taken part in “eventing,” an equine sport Time Magazine has described as the most dangerous (for animals and people) sport in the Summer Olympics. Another wealthy supporter of the ban is the chief financial officer of the Hugo Neu Corporation, a recycling and industrial real estate company that supports NYClass. Wendy Kelman Neu, who helps run the company, has never ridden or owned a horse, she says, nor has she ever visited a horse stable in New York. She is, she says, currently caring for 48 feral cats and loves all animals. She hopes to alleviate the suffering of animals, and she believes it is abuse for draft horses to pull carriages. Another is Allie Feldman, the executive director of NYClass and a frequent spokesperson for the movement to end the carriage trade. She has told reporters she has never ridden a horse or owned one, but she has a friend who has.

Buck Brannaman, the most respected horse trainer in America, the inspiration for Robert Redford’s movie “The Horse Whisperer,” he has been riding and training horses since he was three. He says the New York Carriages are healthy and content and fortunate. Pulling carriages in Central Park is light work for them, he says, they are busy and need daily exercise. They are not the horses to feel sorry for; the ones in need of rescue, he says, are the ones with nothing to do but stand around all day and drop manure. This is the very fate the mayor and NYClass intend for the horses, they say they belong back in “the wild” or on rescue farms, where they will be prevented from ever working again. That, say the animal rights groups, is a condition of their going anywhere.

The American Association Of Equine Practitioners and North American Veterinary Association, two of the most prestigious and respected animal veterinary organizations in the world, have both stated that the horses are healthy, well-cared for and content. Draft horses were bred to work, and have worked for many hundreds of years. Without work, say behaviorists and veterinarians (and anyone who has ever owned a work horse), their muscles atrophy, they are prone to lung disorders, they become sluggish, unhealthy and disoriented.

Both veterinary groups have stated that draft horses need work in order to be healthy and sound. No reporter in New York City has ever contacted Brannaman, the NAVM or the AAEP and quoted him or asked him or them to share their views or research about the carriage horses.

Jared Diamond, one of the world’s leading biologists, has written that draft horses are the most “domesticable” of all animals, are better suited for life in urban environments than dogs, calm, trainable, tolerant of other species, herd animals. No draft horse in New York has ever harmed a child, not one in more than 150 years of work.

The people above – who demand the horses be banned – are quoted constantly and without challenge. This may help some to understand the particular dynamics of the New York Carriage Horse controversy, a tragically unnecessary and misguided conflict.

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So we are getting down to it.  The mayor has introduced legislation into the City Council to ban the carriage trade as of 2016. The City Council – it’s members under intense lobbying and political pressure from the mayor – has several months to decide the fate of the horses. There are enormous consequences in this controversy, they go far beyond the carriage trade and the horses themselves, the future of the carriage horses will affect the future of animals in our world, their very existence in urban areas,  everyone who owns, works or lives with an animal. It will shape our understanding of cruelty and abuse, the fate of working animals everywhere and the underlying rationale behind the ban – that it is cruel and abusive for working animals to work.

The controversy pits ideologues who seem to have little connection with animals, and who emotionalize them as helpless human children,  against animal lovers and owners, the people who know, live and work with animals. The animal rights movement, consciously or not, is driving many animals away from people, making it more difficult to own, live and work with them. Animals are vanishing at a staggering and unprecedented rate, if the carriage horses leave New York, domesticated animals that are not pets will be largely unknown there.

It also, and not incidentally,  threatens the freedom and way of life of people who have broken no laws, committed no crimes, violated none of the hundreds of regulations that govern the carriage trade, one of the most intensely regulated businesses in the history of New York City or the country.

I have devoted most of the past year to researching and writing the story of the New York Carriage Horse controversy. I am an author who has written a dozen books about animals – dogs, donkeys, sheep, cows, goats, chickens, horses – and a former journalist. I believe that facts and truth matter, I was an investigative reporter and a reporter and editor at The Atlantic City Press, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, the Baltimore News-American, the Dallas Times-Herald, and was executive producer of the CBS Morning News. I am also a long-time supporter of the rights of animals.

None of the many pieces I have written this year has been refuted or challenged, I have corrected a  number of factual errors – about a dozen –  but all of the pieces have stood up without contradiction. I agree with the idea – it came from former New York Senator Daniel Moynihan – that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Sometimes, conscience calls upon us to do right and seek out truth. This is one of those times.

I began writing about the carriage horses in January of 2014, and am at it still.  The horses started talking to me last year, they wake me up many mornings, including this one. I am here to tell you from my heart that this effort to ban the horses and take away the sustenance, property, freedom and way of life from hundreds of law-abiding and hard-working people is unjust, and is based on a profoundly distorted view of the true nature of animals in the real world – an extreme and disturbing view of animals based on misconceptions, ignorance and falsehoods.

Here are five truths I have learned in my writing about the horses. I hope they may be helpful to you and others seeking, as I did, to understand this painful issue in good faith.

1. The carriage horses are not abused, a score of independent groups and associations and veterinarians, along with inspectors from the five different city agencies that oversee the carriage trade, have all, unanimously and without dissent, found that the horses are well-cared for, healthy, content and safe, that the stables have heat and air-conditioning, fresh hay and and cleaned regularly. The carriage horses live longer than rescue horses, horses on farms, horses in the so-called “wild,” if there even is such a thing any longer. They have found the pulling of light carriages in Central Park to be well within the range of draft horses, and they have all found no evidence of respiratory disease from breathing New York’s air, the same air it’s children and residents breath.

Unlike most horses, they have access to food, medical care and shelter, every day of the year. They are not permitted to work in extreme cold or heat, they get five weeks of vacation a year, time off they perhaps do not even need.

Abuse is a crime, not an argument on social media. It is about the willful neglect of domesticated animals to the point of grievous injury or death. No carriage driver has ever been accused of real abuse.

2. The Mayor refuses to meet with the carriage trade, it’s owners or representatives, even though he meets regularly with representatives of the animal rights organizations seeking to ban the horses and has taken enormous amounts of money from them.

NYClass, which contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the 2010 mayor campaign and had an enormous impact on the outcome, refuses to provide the name or identity of a single horse or other animal the group has rescued or saved, they have funneled vast amounts of money – mostly donated by people who believe the horses were mistreated – into political campaigns and causes, especially the effort to ban the carriage trade. A carriage driver approached the mayor at a public event with his young son, and he asked the mayor why he pursuing the ban on the carriage trade. “Because your work is immoral,” the mayor said, before turning away.

3. The accusations against the carriage trade are, almost without exception,  not true.

In incident after incident, the stories relayed by spokespeople for PETA and NYClass and other groups to the media – horses starved, forced to work while ill, doused with freezing water, beaten and overworked, confined in spaces too small to lie down in, fed bad food and given polluted water, injured in collisions with buses – are simply not true, there is absolutely no evidence to support them. In one intensely publicized case, a veterinarian working for NYClass admitted she lied when she said a carriage horse was knowingly worked while ill.

In another, a “tourist”  allegedly witnessed a horse whose carriage tipped over being spooked by a bus, forced to lie down on the ground by a cruel driver seeking to protect his carriage, and then made to work while injured. It seems there was no tourist, no bus, no cruel driver, and the horse was not forced to work but returned to the stables. The media widely reported the allegations, but never mentioned the truth. A true leader would not associate himself with cruelty and lies, there is nothing idealistic about that.

In my research, I found more than a score of “incidents” that were either unchallenged, demonstrably false, or distorted and exaggerated beyond recognition. The mayor and various animal rights spokespeople claim the horses do not belong in New York City, that they are dangerous. In 150 years, no person has ever been killed by a carriage horse – hundreds of New Yorkers die every year in motor vehicle accidents. Three horses have been killed in accidents in the past 30 years out of more than three million rides. Horses are the safest means of transportation in New York City – by far.

4. The mayor and the animal rights groups lobbying for the ban claim that every single one of the nearly 300 carriage horses will go to a safe home on one of many rescue farms that have agreed to take them if the ban goes into affect.

Almost no one in the equine industry, rescue or otherwise, believes this is true. The mayor and the animal rights organizations will not release the names of any of the rescue facilities that will supposedly take in these large draft  horses. Equine associations estimate it will cost $24 million to feed this many large horses for the rest of their lives, this at a time when equine rescue facilities are overwhelmed and seriously underfunded. More than 150,000 horses are sent to brutal slaughter in Mexico and Canada every year, forced onto trailers for long rides and then killed with nails drilled into their head.

Does it really make sense to send these horses out into the diaspora when they are needed, loved, well-cared for and much beloved by the many people who ride them every day? Can we really justify the killing of these animals in the name of saving them?

5. The animal rights campaign against the horses has been marked by cruelty and hatred, not by dialogue, negotiation or research.

The drivers and their families have been targeted, picketed and harassed. Their confidential data has been hacked and put online, they have been ridiculed for their teeth and dress, their customers, including children, have been harassed and intimidated. At demonstrations, the horses are regularly prodded with placards and provoked in the hopes that someone will get injured. For years, they have lived in fear and faced uncertainty for their own work and for their families, who depend on them.

John Locke wrote that the function of government in a free society is to protect freedom and property. In New York City, the government seeks to deprive the people of the carriage trade of both. Jefferson said that freedom is fragile, it can disappear in a moment, or die a death of a thousand cuts. The people in the carriage trade have suffered these cuts for years, there is nothing progressive about such ignorance or brutality.

I live a life with animals, I have dogs, donkeys, sheep and chickens, soon to get a  horse. I cherish my life with a working dog, a border collie named Red, and working donkeys, who guard my sheep from predators. Like the people in the carriage trade, I treat them humanely and well, they are my life and my livelihood, why would I not? If New York City decides that it is abuse for working animals to work, and if ideologues inside and outside of government decide can decide without cause to seize my animals and take my way of life from me, then freedom has not died from a thousand cuts, but some brutal and thoughtless ones.

I write this as the City Council decision draws near in the hopes that fair and open-minded people will reach their own conclusions. The mayor says he will pay no mind to the 62 per cent of New Yorkers who oppose the ban on the carriage trade, their opinions, he says, simply do not matter to him. They should matter, and so should facts and truth. These stand squarely behind the New York Carriage trade, and the horses, who have a glorious, even sacred history of working with human beings to build our world. I write this in the hope that horses and other animals will remain in our city, and not be confined to ghettos without purpose or human connection.

If the horses are banned from New York, a terrible injustice will be done to animals that can never be undone, the horses will vanish from our consciousness, the people and children of New York will never see them again. They will disappear like so many other animals have before them, doomed by unthinking and ungrateful human beings. And for no just reason. Working horses have lived among people in cities for thousands of years, it is what they are bred to do.

People who decide the fate of animals ought, at the very least, be required to know something about them. Now, it is clear, people who love them will have to fight for the right to keep them among us.

So another jarring twist in the Wonderland controversy that surrounds the carriage horses in New York.

If the mayor gets his way, carriage horses will soon be illegal in New York City, ferrets (cousins of weasels, technically) will soon be legal again.
Ferret enthusiasts, emboldened by Mayor deBlasio’s determined efforts to ban the New York Carriage Horses, are pressing New York City Health officials to rescind the ban on ferrets in New York. The deBlasio administration, which seeks to be seen as “animal friendly,” has quickly and enthusiastically agreed.  The city says it will recommend that the ban, imposed in 1999 following concerns about rabies and weasel and ferret bites on children, be rescinded. It is likely to happen at the end of the month.

Ferrets, say city officials, are no more dangerous than many other pets kept in New York City and are banned in very few places. If you are shaking your head in bewilderment, as I was, at the reasoning behind legalizing weasels but banning horses, it is time to take a deep breath and reason on. All you can do is take a deep breath and think. Reasoning and facts are the only way get through this maze. I’ve said before that the White Rabbit is in charge of animal rights in New York, and he is busy these days.

Ferrets are mammals, they vary in length from 7 to about 9 inches in length. They are carnivores, they feed on small animals, and have often been considered vermin. Some ferrets have fed on poultry from farms or rabbits from farms and commercial warrens. They often appear cute and furry, and are generally affectionate. People love to cuddle with them, they are, in many ways, the stuffed teddy bears of the animal world.

Ferrets and weasels have been domesticated as pets for centuries. Like dogs and most carnivores, they sometimes bite their owners and children, they sometimes – rarely – carry rabies and other diseases. In many ways, weasels are safer than dogs in urban environments since they are rarely let outside to make contact with diseased animals. And they do less harm to children than dogs when they do bite.

The ban against the ferrets (along with rhinoceroses, bats and poisonous centipedes) was ludicrous in many ways, but the mayor and his aides do not seem to grasp the irony that ending a ban on ferrets makes the ban on the carriage horses appear even more thoughtless and foolish. There is simply no sane rationale, consistency, or logic applied to questions relating to the future of animals in our world, especially in cities like New York. Animal rights has come to convey anything determined groups of human beings decide it is, at any given moment, what they want, depending to their needs and impulses.

Ferret rights activists have campaigned for years for their legalization, but true defenders of animal rights have joined naturalists in arguing that apartments and condominiums are not a natural or proper environment for carnivorous mammals. Ferrets – unlike the carriage horses, who have always been stabled in barns and city stables – belong in nature, not caged indoors for their entire lives.

Cuddling with people have never been the sole rationale for the existence of animals, not in a political environment that says work for animals is abusive and they should not exist solely for the entertainment of people. Still, barring extreme health and safety issues, it is not the place of the mayor of New York to ban them. Still, the weasels are helping us to see the extraordinary hypocrisy in the campaign against the horses.

The comfort of humans and their entertainment are the sole purposes of  ferrets in the city, and the sole argument for their legalization.They do no other work, have no other function. Where, I wonder, are the animal rights groups who are pursuing the carriage horse ban so vigorously, claiming it is abuse for animals to entertainment people? If the horses belong only on rescue farm, where, I wonder, do they think weasels belong?

I am  not into banning weasels or ferrets, many ferrets have not been in the wild for many years, but It seems that morality in the animal rights world, much like the mayor’s office, is fluid and selective. It’s expensive, too, it costs a lot of money to get a mayor in New York to be animal friendly.

One of the first thing one learns in exploring the carriage horse controversy is this reality about animals:

To the mayor and his supporters in the movement that claims to speak for the rights of animals, all animals are rescue cats – piteous and dependent beings to either be caged and crated and cuddled and leashed and sheltered for life, or removed from dangerous and exploitive contact with people and sent to private rescue preserves to stand around and rot.

Ferrets do not work with humans, like dogs and cats, their function is to be pets. Ferrets love to be cuddled, they often issue sounds interpreted as happiness and bursts and squeaks of joy called “dooking.”

Carriage horses do not like to be cuddled, they do not engage in dooking. A happy horse lowers his head, cocks a rear leg, and snorts. The horses have worked in New York City for 300 years – a lot longer than ferrets have been pets in the city. They have provided sustenance and employed to many thousands of New Yorkers, pathways for generations of hard-working immigrants,  given rides and entertainment and pleasure to many millions, contributed tens of millions of dollars in taxes to the city government, and heightened the history and romance of one of New York’s great treasures, Central Park.

It is sad that the people righting for the rights of weasels believe see the efforts to ban the horses as something that is friendly to animals. It is just another form of the new abuse.

No carriage horse has ever bitten a child, or transmitted rabies to a human being in the city.

If is, of course, very fashionable in politics and culture these days to be “animal friendly.” And after all, who isn’t? It sometimes seems that every dog in America was abused by one person or another, and there are many people who believe it is unconscionable to get a dog from anyplace but an animal shelter (where, I wonder, do they think those snappy border collies come from on TV?).

But what does it mean to be “animal friendly?” If the carriage horses ought to be banned because it is immoral for them to haul light carriages in New York City, why is it “animal friendly” for ferrets to be locked up in apartment prisons for years so that people can cuddle with them at night when they get home from work? Why it is “animal friendly” to take large horses bred to work and be with people – farm more trainable and temperamentally and genetically suited to life in cities than ferrets – and leave them to wither and deteriorate with nothing to do and no exercise on rescue farms, or more likely, end up in brutal slaughterhouses?

To be animal friendly to me means understanding and respecting the true nature of animals and acting in their best interests, not just in ours. There is no good reason I know of to ban ferrets from cities, even though I would not be comfortable owning one. There is even less reason to ban the carriage horses, they are healthy, safe and content in their work and in their good care. They are far better regulated and supervised than any weasel will be in New York.

It is cheap and easy for politicians to score points by claiming to be “animal-friendly” while almost continuously demonstrating their arrogance and ignorance about animals and by embracing policies that harm many. If they city will listen to the pleas of well-intentioned ferret owners and meet with them regularly, and jump through hoops for them to get their ferrets back to demonstrate how virtuous they are, how can they justify their refusal to even meet with the people in the carriage trade, or even consider ways to make the horses lives better and safer?

The carriage trade people tell me the reason is that that millionaire real estate developers gave the mayor a lot of money to ban the carriage  horses and leave their stables open to development. I am reluctant to believe it.  I’ve written a hundred times that I have seen no concrete evidence of this but every day that this unnecessary and unjust controversy continues, it seems that it is the only theory that makes sense.

The carriage horses and the people who live and work with them are as important as ferrets or weasels and the people who love them, they deserve the same consideration and support. I am glad the ferret lovers are getting their weasels back, freedom is not only for people who do what I do or like what I like. Safety aside, it is not for the city government of New York to tell us what animals to live with or which law-abiding citizens can have their work and property taken from them. Perhaps one day the ferret people will see that the people in the carriage trade are their brothers and sisters, they are on the same side, the same thinking that banned their pets wants to ban the carriage horses. What is just and humane for one is just and humane for the other.

Horses have contributed more to New York City than all of the other animals there combined. Working animals have written the most glorious chapters in the history of animals and people. How sad to think the only animals that can be legal in New York are those confined to crates in apartments and whose whole reason for existence is the emotional gratification of urban people, cut off from the natural world and the true nature of animals.

 

 

It’s sad but not really unexpected news:  New York Mayor Bill deBlasio plans to ask the City Council to ban the Central Park Carriage Horses as early as December 8, three weeks before Christmas, according to various media reports this morning. According to several City Council members, he plans to offer the displaced carriage drivers free “green” taxi medallions – worth about $6,000 and good only for giving rides in the outer boroughs – on condition that they purchase handicapped accessible cabs.

The carriage drivers have made it clear that they do not equate working with  horse-drawn carriages in Central Park to driving cabs in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. They have said they will never accept an arrangement like that.

According to the Capital news wire, the legislation also stipulates that the stable owners cannot sell or give the horses – their private property – away to a slaughterhouse and would require documentation to ensure that does not happen.

Since more than 150,000 horses are sent to slaughter in America each year, that means the horses would have to go to private farms or to one of the many overwhelmed and struggling rescue farms in the country. The legislation will not be voted on for six months. I am no lawyer, but it is difficult for me to believe any court would support such a stipulation.

Christina Hansen, a spokeswoman for the carriage industry,  texted me this morning:. She said they knew something was coming, but were not sure what form it would take:  “We’re going to fight like Hell,” she said.

She means it, too. The carriage trade has been fighting like Hell for several years, and successfully. This has taken a brutal toll, but they are tough, battle-scarred, they know how to fight. I am sorry the mayor chose to ruin their holiday season and add to the struggle and anxiety that has marked their lives, especially since he took office in January and said banning the carriage trade was his first and most urgent priority. Could it have waited until after Christmas, I wonder? But then, the carriage trade people have been so dehumanized, there probably seems no reason to worry about their feelings or families.

In any case, the struggle is on. It is important, it will pit many animal lovers against unknowing politicians and the wealthy and increasingly strident individuals and organizations who claim to speak for the rights of animals. There is a great schism in America between urban and suburban people whose only experience of animals is having cats and dogs, and mostly rural people who live with animals and work with them. This deepening conflict has come to a head in New York City.

The mayor’s planned ban is contemptuous of democracy and the democratic process. Opposition to the ban has been overwhelming in New York, in a year he and his supporters in the animal rights movement do not appear to have convinced a single New Yorker that the horses are being mistreated, or that they are in need of rescue (which so many horses really are.) More than 66 per cent of New Yorkers told a recent poll that they oppose the ban.

There was not a single demographic – race, age, gender, borough, income – that supported banning the carriage horses. All three  city newspapers have opposed the ban, so have the Chamber of Commerce and the Teamsters Union, the Central Park Conservancy, the Working Families Party and just about every child and tourist in the world. In a sane world, that ought to be enough. But it doesn’t seem to be.

The abusive and often dishonest claims and tactics of the animal rights movement in New York in their ugly campaign against the carriage trade has awakened and aroused many horse and other animal lovers around the country, who have been flooding the mayor’s office and City Council mailboxes with petitions and pleas to leave the horses alone. This is becoming a new social movement, one that seeks to treat animals and the people who love them rationally and with dignity. Outside of the animal rights movement, it is well known that work is not abuse for working horses or other working animals, including police horses, bomb-sniffing dogs at Amtrak, border collies and search-and-rescue dogs. The mayor of New York has never owned a dog or a cat or other animal, the City Council President – she supports the ban – says she is qualified to judge the horses because she has a rescue cat.

Beyond the overwhelming public opposition to the ban, platoons of veterinarians, journalists, Native-American leaders,  behaviorists, trainers and equine rescue and advocacy groups have inspected the horses in their stables and at work and have stated they are healthy, well-cared for and safe. These horses, they remind us, are the lucky ones, they are not in need of rescue. But experts have no place in the bubble that is the animal rights movement in New York, the White Rabbit presides, the only people admitted seem to be those that know nothing about animals, and are proud of it.

The mayor’s campaign is elitist. Mayor deBlasio, who claims to be a national leader in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, refuses to visit the horse stables, meet with the owners or drivers, or negotiate the welfare or future of the horses. He describes himself as a proud member of the animal rights movement.  He seems to assume that driving a green cab (not to be confused with the yellow ones) in the outer boroughs is the same thing for the drivers as riding their horse carriages in Central Park.  When a carriage driver attended a public event with his young son and asked the mayor why he was determined to ban the horses, the mayor turned to him and said “because your work is immoral” and walked away.

Steven Nislick, the millionaire head of NY Class, the group spearheading the ban, has referred to the horse and drivers in New York as “random people,” and he was recorded telling one audience in Florida that he thought the horses would be  better off euthanized than pulling horse carriages in New York.

(Buck Brannaman, the inspiration for Robert Redford’s “The Horse Whisperer,” and the most respected horse trainer in America,  has said the horses in the most urgent need of rescue are not the carriage horses – he said their work was light and easy – but those left on farms and stables with nothing to but stand around and drop manure. Those, he said, are the ones to pity.  Horses need work, says Brannaman.)

These are not the animals in need of rescue. The horses are, by every account, healthy and well cared for. Most of them are rescue horses themselves, purchased at auction. The carriage owners and drivers have not broken any laws, violated any regulations, committed any crimes. The assault against them is the invention of a small fringe of well-funded ideologues who have simply decided to reinvent definitions of abuse and mistreatment. There is no evidence that NYClass has saved or helped the life of a single animal, they seem mostly to raise enormous amounts of money by posting manipulative photos of injured animals and donating them to favored political causes and politicians. Like the mayor of New York and members of the City Council.

We need to reclaim the notion of animal rights. In this controversy, the groups who profess to speak for the rights of animals have lost their credibility and right to speak for the future of animals. They have not told the truth about the horses and their treatment. They have been caught in lie after lie, exaggeration after exaggeration. In many cases, they have simply invented incidents and accusations that have no basis in reality or fact. They have not accounted for the millions of dollars they have taken from well-meaning people and spent, and their campaign against the people in the carriage trade has been unconscionably cruel, abusive and insensitive. They appear again and again to be utterly ignorant of the real lives of real animals, thus have forfeited the right to speak for them.

I do not know the secret strategies of the carriage trade, they haven’t told me. My guess is that they will take it one step at a time. First, fight the ban, and if it actually is passed, then fight in court. They are threatened by powerful and wealthy interests – the millionaire founder of NYClass, who has spent millions trying to drive them out of business, the mayor, the City Council President, billionaire real estate developers eager to scarf up the West Side stables where most of the horses live, increasingly strident animal rights organizations who claim to speak for the rights of animals but do not.

I would imagine real estate development in Manhattan will engulf the horses before the mayor does, but the next six months will tell. People who love animals will have their cause, and will be called upon to represent it. The questions for us are elemental: do we want animals to remain in our world? Will we sit by as one animal after another is driven from our midst, only to vanish in the holocaust wiping out so many animals in our world? Will be silent as the rights and freedom and property of fellow citizens are taken from them?

This is not a right-or-left thing, it is a right and wrong thing. There is nothing progressive or humane about taking someone’s work, way of life and property away for no reason. Government exists to protect freedom and property, not take it away without cause.

Civil and political rights, according to Wickipedia,  are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals, and which ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression.

The rights of the horses – to be safe and secure and continue their historic work with people – are threatened. The rights of the carriage horse owners and riders are being infringed upon by government in New York, and by wealthy private individuals and social organizations. They are threatened with the loss of their work, way of life, freedom and property without any kind of representation or due process or cause.

That is the very definition of a civil rights violation. If they can do it to them, they can do it to us.

The mayor, after a year of dissembling and dodging and equivocating, is finally coming out into the open, it appears, and making good on his surprising campaign promise. He was given a huge amount of money by NYClass for his mayoral campaign, many believe he really has no choice but to pursue the carriage trade ban.  I believe this ban will fail, that he will find the horses  powerful and worthy opponents. They have rallied their city and called up some powerful spirits to protect and defend them. They have called upon us to consider the way we treat one another, and the way we treat them and the earth. Animals do have a voice, and the horses are speaking loudly and eloquently.

For the sake of animals, this is a struggle that needs to happen, a debate that is overdue. Will animals survive in our disaffected world or not? Or will they be driven away, taking the wind and rain and thunder with them? Who gets to speak for the rights of animals, the people who own, love and work with them, or the people whose only vision is to take them away?  I believe they belong among us, they have as much right to be here as we do. If there are ways to make them safer and healthier, then let’s hear them and talk about them and make sure they happen. That is what animal lovers do.

We need them, and they need us. In the next six months, those of us who love animals will get to find out who we really are and what we believe in. And whether animals can remain among us, or are doomed to banishment and extinction.