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I’ve been dreaming of a resolution to the horse controversy, a fantasy based on John Locke’s idea of a moral government being one that protects freedom and property, promotes justice and seeks resolution rather than conflict.

My dream incorporates Jefferson’s idea of a democratic society, in which differences are resolved by negotiation and compromise, not war. I think as well of Plato’s idea that rulers should be wise and generous and well-informed.  I suppose it is something of a fantasy, but it came to me in a dream and I wanted to share it.

The strange thing about it is that it would work quite easily if our leaders remained true to the principles upon which our society, our great democratic experiment,  was founded.

First, the mayor would acknowleldge that he is not the leader of one group of people, but of all people. His role is not to remove the freedom and way of life from blameless people without legal cause, but to understand the sometimes complex and painful issues that occur wherever people gather and and live.  The role of leaders in our government is not to rule by fiat, but  to try and resolve conflict in a way that is civil and protects both liberty and subsistence.

A leader talks to everyone, not just the people he likes and agrees with. So in my dream, the mayor calls the principals in this conflict together, into Gracie Mansion for a conference on the carriage horses – the carriage owners, the carriage drivers, the real estate developers interested in the stable properties, veterinarians, the police, the A.S.P.C.A.,  N.Y. Class, the Humane Society,  city transportation officials.

Other people and groups could be heard and participate: the leaders of the other animal rights groups that have been trying to drive the carriage trade away for years now. Some children should be considered, some tourists and visitors, the older immigrants who built the carriage trade, and the guardians of Central Park. The conference would include some participation from the citizens of New York, the Teamsters, members of the Chamber Of Commerce, the many people who wish to horses to stay and who do not believe it is abusive for working animals to work.

The proceedings would be televised so that citizens could make up their own minds, not be manipulated by disturbing images and eternal arguments and media hysterias.

Before any meetings, it would be stipulated than all parties enter in good faith and dignity, the issue is not abuse or cruelty, it is not where the horses might go if they are banned, it is not how many incidents have occurred over the past decades. The meeting is not called for argument or accusation but for resolution and common ground. If people cannot agree to communicate without argument or accusation, they will be prohibited from attending, cut out of the conversation, booted out of the conference. People who love animals as much or more as themselves will want to be there. On a much smaller scale, this is essentially the same rule I apply to my own website – disagreement, even heated disagreement, is welcome, so is discussion. Attacks, accusations and hostility are forbidden. It works, banning hateful people is a joy and a privilege. It is how the country essentially was founded.

l. The mayor would ask the animal rights groups what their concerns are and what steps might be taken to address them. If they are concerned, for example, that the horses are breathing too many fumes from cars and trucks, would they accept regular tests of the horse’s respiratory systems from accredited veterinarians as proof that they are okay in the city? Would they agree that new and bigger stables closer to the park – or new traffic lanes during rush hour for the horses – might make everyone as safe as possible?

2. The mayor could ask the developers if they would buy the horse stables in exchange for tax or zoning benefits and in exchange for building or paying for and building open spaces for the horses – perhaps in the park, perhaps in the many acres of green along the West Side. The horses could spend even more time outdoors, with one another and in rest. A place where they could graze occasionally in good weather and spend their long vacations,  rather than be hauled to farms in New Jersey or Long Island.

3. The mayor could ask the police if they needed any additional resources to monitor the horses or the stables, or, as appears to be the case, are they satisfied that the regulations affecting the horses – there are 144 pages of them –  are adequate?

4. The mayor and the city government would guarantee not only the rights of the horses, but the human rights of the carriage trade owners and drivers. If it is cruel to abuse animals, it is equally so to abuse people. The people in the carriage trade have the right to their livelihood and their way of life, so long as they break no laws, commit no crimes, violate no regulations, as they have all repeatedly agreed to. They have the right to work free of unproven accusation and harassment. Their customers, especially the children who ride in their carriages, have the right to ride through the park in peace.

It is not that difficult to imagine what might be accomplished if the mayor decided to be both humane and progressive in the case of the carriage  horses. Anyone who wonders what a city like New York might accomplish need only to walk through Central Park or the Cloisters or the bridges and tunnels and take a look. Building traffic lanes or a new stable or providing some access to grass is petty stuff compared to that.

The issue is not whether the horses should be banned, that is the demand of a tiny fraction of citizens with no mandate or broad public support. This movement has already failed – and quite  spectacularly –  in that goal, and in their looney-tunes plan to flood the park with vintage electric cars they claim are more eco-friendly than horses. Even if the mayor can’t admit it,  he surely knows it. The question now is how to move to a better place, past all of the arguments and accusations and ugliness. So far, the carriage trade people appear quite willing to talk to anybody about anything. The animal rights people do not seem willing to talk to anybody about anything.

The mayor, who calls himself a progressive and has close ties to the animal rights movement, could quite possibly bridge that gap and demonstrate what it really means to live in a progressive democracy. These steps and processes are not controversial, radical, expensive, difficult,  or even new.

They represent the best ideas of the founding fathers – Jefferson and Washington pulled together warring factions from all over the country and made them work together until they found common ground and resolution. Solving the carriage horse problem should be a good deal simpler and faster. The inspirations behind our world, men like John Locke and Thomas Paine and Jefferson, all believed conflict was inevitable in a society, but their ways of dealing with it were quite new and successful, they shocked the world with what they accomplished. Jefferson would have handled the carriage horse issue at lunch, it should never have gotten this far.

The horses have a right to exist in our world, so do the people who own and work with them. Those of us who wish, also have the right to live among them. That is the most urgent right of animals in our time, to survive.

The mayor has undermined his own credibility and sense of moral purpose. In aligning himself so closely to people who appear to dislike the democratic process, in taking sides with people who have given him so much money, in refusing to so much as speak to the stable owners or drivers, he has damaged his own moral authority and that of his government. He has the right to his opinions. If he feels the the treatment of the horses is inhumane and needs improvement, he has the tools and the resources and the mandate to make their lives better. So far, his only idea is to destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of people and send the horses away, something his constituents have made it clear they don’t wish to happen. In a democratic society, that ought to be the end of it, not the beginning.

There are substantial issues to be considered here, the world is watching. Animal rights. Human rights. The future of animals in our world. The connection of urban environments to the natural world. The power of money in politics. The abuse of free speech and political expression.

The dignity and freedom of people must be protected by government. The animal rights movement has deprived the carriage trade human beings – the owners and drivers – of their dignity and sense of self, they have tried to exclude them from the community of moral people. They must be given their dignity back, they deserve to be heard. No one is more affected by the outcome of this struggle than they are. How can anyone justify taking the position that they are the only elements in this conflict that have no right to be spoken or listened to? Persecution without representation is not an American idea.

John Locke, the inventor of liberty in modern times, wrote that “the improvement of understanding is for two ends; first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.” Government needs leaders, wise and thinking men, not combatants incapable of thought, afraid to listen.

Wise and moral leaders must listen to all of the arguments and propose solutions that are seen as fair and untainted by power, money or influence. The mayor has a wondrous opportunity to rise above this ugly fray, this symbol of a dysfunctional government and hysterical dialogue, a perversion of democracy in many ways,  and demonstrate to the city and the world how free people resolve their differences,  how the system was meant to work. To respect, not demonize. To resolve, not argue. To listen, not overwhelm. To understand, not intimidate. To compromise.

How sad that the very process that founded our country seems like a naive fantasy in it’s greatest city.

There is much talk in New York City these days about cruelty to animals.

I do not live in New York City and most of my blog and book readers – scattered all over the country and some of the world – do not live there either. We watch – transfixed and sometimes appalled – from a distance, as the controversy grows and deepens, spins and winds through the great city.

The horses have called down the wind and the thunder over their future, just like the Native-Americans always said they could. The carriage horse debate is a living thing now; it began as a squall and has become something of a hurricane. It sucks more and more people into it every day and gets bigger and louder.

The arguments rage, the protests, accusations, tweets, counter accusations, blogs, interviews, bumper stickers, videos, Facebook warriors, nasty e-mails, pages, petitions, phone chains, links and pledges, demonstrations, placards and slogans, editorials, polls, donations and signatures, blogs and website rant and boil. All of this over the fate of the New York Carriage Horses. It is no longer a local story, but a great battle of differing values.

For centuries, the great philosophers – Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes – have wondered what it really is that separates human beings from the animal kingdom. Not surprisingly, it was Mark Twain who came the closest to answering the question.

Human beings, he wrote, are the only animals capable of immorality. “Man is the cruel animal,” he wrote. “He is alone in that distinction.” That is the real story of the New York Carriage Horses. There is great cruelty, much abuse. But it is not against the horses.

It is the humans who are the cruelest animals.

Every day my readers message me about the horses from all over the country – on Facebook, in e-mail, sending links and blogs. And in the five months that I have been writing about the carriage horses, I am struck by how many of those messages say the same thing. My readers are a diverse bunch, they have all kinds of different opinions on everything. But not on the carriage horses.

“I don’t understand the hatred I see” e-mailed Jane Kirkland from Oregon. “Why is the movement against the carriage people so cruel?”

“It is hard to grasp this,” wrote Joe from Denver, “the attacks on the carriage horse people just seem irrational. They don’t seem to know a thing about animals.”

Good people can – do – disagree about whether the big horses ought to be in New York City.

I believe that they do, but I understand that there are different ways to look at the world. The future of these animals in our cities and towns is an important subject, it ought to be debated and discussed before the horses, like so many other animals, disappear from our world.

Most of my readers and me  have been talking about animals with each other for some years now. I have animals who are pets and some who are farm animals, I live and write on the boundary between the two cultures; I share my life with animals, all of its travails and joys. My work and blog have drawn many people from both worlds, farmers and breeders, rescue groups and animal rights and welfare advocates.

We have conducted a rich and open dialogue together for a long time; we are figuring out to do it, even on the Internet in 2014. People can still disagree with one another in a civil way, perhaps not in Washington, maybe not in New York City. Too bad for the horses. My websites and blog and open groups are anger-free zones, safe places. It can be done.

More than anything else, the people who message me have mirrored my own very disturbed feeling about the controversy, above and beyond the arguments themselves.

Why is this discussion so cruel, why is the campaign against the horses so personal, so implacable, so ideologically rather than fact driven?

The carriage owners and drivers are being systematically dehumanized. The assaults on them are mostly demonstrably false and hurtful. In the last week or so, I have tried to leave some of the arguing behind –  there are plenty of other people slugging it out – and am working to try to understand the context, on why this is happening and is so ugly. For me, it is a time to try and be useful, not loud.

One reason this issue is unfolding in such an intense way is that the carriage horses have become the Battle of Bull Run in the deepening cultural, civil war between people who have pets and people who have animals. It is the first great struggle of an inevitable conflict.

A conflict between between agricultural and urban people, between people who live with animals and people who live with pets; between people who see animals primarily in terms of creatures to be rescued, and people who see them as partners in our lives.
It is a conflict between people who believe animals should live perfect lives without struggle, work or danger, and people who believe they share the travails and comforts of their lives with human beings.

The story of Tony Salerno, the driver of Spartacus, the horse who fell down last week when his carriage tipped, is a symbol of what is so troubling about this story: the demonization of human beings, a sad feature of human history.

Salerno, an experienced owner/driver well-liked and well known for his effusive personality and his affection for his horse, behaved nothing short of heroically last Thursday, by all accounts but one. He got the tangled harness off of Spartacus; he calmed him, got him safely to his feet, made sure the horse was not hurt, and that no human was injured. He righted the carriage and took the horse back to his stable, made sure he was all right, and sat up all night crying.

To understand the rhetoric of dehumanization, imagine if PETA held a press conference about a gay or African-American man or woman was involved in an accident with a horse and said he was less than a real man, or she less than a woman. Twitter would have exploded with outrage and denunciation, the mayor would be knocking over reporters to get to a microphone to distance himself.

Why is it all right to say this about Tony Salerno, whose only crime was to be a working class immigrant? Because African-Americans and gays and women have fought for their right to be human, Tony Salerno and the carriage drivers have had their humanity taken away. They are only beginning to understand what is being done to them, since the carriage horse controversy in New York marks the first time in recorded human history that work has been considered abusive for working draft horses.

To apply the rhetoric of enmity, you must first take away the human being.

In a different world, Salerno would be going to City Hall this week to get a medal for acting so calmly and professionally and for preventing harm or injury to any living thing. But the mayor of New York, who seems not to be the mayor of all the people but only some, is an animal rights activist who could not acknowledge that Salerno did well.

The mayor watched from the sidelines as Salerno was pilloried in the most irresponsible way by several animal rights organizations as a greedy and callous person and by a mysterious witness who talked like a PETA demonstrator.  Palermo was called an animal abuser, described as something less than a man, someone who only cared for the carriage, not the horse, as a liar and person without morals or feelings.

The carriage people, mostly Irish and other immigrants to America, have lived under this cloud and these awful circumstances for years now. They have been called all kinds of names, many obscene and some personal, accused of all sorts of animal cruelty, forced to live in uncertainty, subject to continuous and very personal attacks, threatened with the loss of their livelihood as well as their animals. They mayor refuses to meet with them, developers are drooling over their stables, the naive think work for work horses is horrifying, and they the target of well organized groups with enormous amounts of money. Every week, demonstrators gather in the park to call them murderers and torturers, thieves and heartless abusers.

How to make sense out of this?

If you step back a bit, the story behind the story becomes clearer. I have studied attachment theory for years; we all use animals in different ways and for our own needs. I have border collies and Labs for a reason; I have rescue donkeys and chickens and dogs for a reason; we all use animals for our own purposes; we view them in the ways we need to view them, we get the animals we need. Almost all of those reasons and purposes come from our own pasts and emotional histories.

We are all mythmakers; we need myths and stories to explain who we are, to paint portraits of ourselves, to heal our wounds and justify our existence, our origins and our destiny.

The abused animal has become one of the most powerful myths in our disconnected culture, millions of people have embraced it to give their lives meaning and purpose, and a sense of morality in a valueless time and status in a world where ordinary people have little power. It is a pathway to community, identity and connection – and a chance to do good – in a fragmented world. But with this  movement, one of the oldest and  most enduring myths in human existence – Joseph Campbell has written about it a thousand times – has been reborn: the rise of the demons and monsters.

In the animal world, especially the animal rights world, the demon of myth is the abuser. He is everywhere, lurking behind every corner, in every home, on every horse carriage. He is the demon resurrected, he is not only evil, he justifies being evil.

Narratives about human monsters and demons without mercy or morality have gripped the human imagination from the cave dwellings to the New York Carriage Horse Controversy. The drivers have become a myth for the animal rights movement. They are no longer human beings who might or might be wrong in their views, to be talked to or negotiated with – they are monsters, to be treated without empathy and mercy.

It is dangerous to view a human being as something other than human, because it justifies any lie, abuse or cruelty against him or her. If someone is not human, we are not bound by any moral laws or restraints in our treatment of them. We can say anything about them, call them the most offensive names, accuse them of the most dreadful things,  even take their work and their private property away.

In critical moments of life and conflict, wrote the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the rational forces that resist the old mythical conceptions are no longer certain of themselves. “In these difficult moments the time for myth has come again,” he wrote, “for it is never very far from us.” Unlike animals, myths are never far from human consciousness; they have never really been vanquished or subjugated. Myths are always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for their hour.

The dehumanization of people is almost always preceded by what is called the rhetoric of enmity. Human beings – African-Americans, Jews, Serbs, the Irish,Native-Americans, Mexicans, Rwandans, many women, Gypsies, gays – have all experienced the rhetoric of enmity, they know exactly what it is, they recognize it instantly.

It always begins with the use of language and rhetoric as a weapon in which human beings are reduced to stereotypical myths. They are lazy, immoral, greedy, somehow not human or less than human. They are inferior, devious and furtive, untrustworthy, without the traits or right to join the community of moral and righteous people.

This rhetoric is the dominant and most shocking characteristic of the animal rights groups and their assault on the carriage trade. They do not simply disagree about the horses; they detest the people who own and ride them, even the people who pay to ride in them. Their protest signs are filled with accusations of cruelty, abuse, indifference. Over time, the campaign evolves, it is no longer about the horses, everyone can see that, it has become an angry demon of its own, it exists without reason or restraint.

I was rendered nearly speechless at a Central Park demonstration one Sunday afternoon by animal rights protesters watching three women and a young man scream obscenities at a carriage driver and three visibly frightened children riding his carriage with their European parents.

“Murderers go home,” they shouted, “greedy people go home! “F—— A——-s! Go home!” The demonstrators charged at the horses, poking placards in their faces as if to startle them, perhaps provoke an accident with children, one much better publicity wise than the feeble story of Spartacus’s falling down and getting up.

There was something eerily familiar about this scene for me. As a reporter, I traveled through the South during the racial troubles of the 70’s, and I saw this kind of hatred in the faces of people a number of times. They were indelible scenes to witness, they spoke of the worst traits of human beings, I have never forgotten them, I never expected to see them in Central Park on a peaceful and beautiful Sunday.

Was I really seeing this again, I wondered, in a demonstration over  horses aimed at people trying to make a living by driving carriages that belonged to other people? But then, the dehumanizing of people is all about the loss of perspective, the myth of the monster dies in the presence of perspective.

The rhetoric of enmity has a long and meticulously-documented history. The subhuman is not really human at all, they do not deserve  respectful disagreement or dignity. You have no need to meet with them or negotiate with them, you can accuse them of anything at all with no proof of any kind, even the harshest names in front of innocent children. They are lesser beings; they exist on a lower rung of the great chain of being.

When animal rights groups held their press conferences after the fall of Spartacus on Central Park South, they quoted the visitor from Oklahoma who said she saw a group of men – “if you can call them that,”  saying they had to protect the carriage first, as it might cost them money. The driver held the horse on the ground, keeping him in needless pain. She said it was the worst case of animal abuse she had ever seen. She said Salerno made the horse, who she said was limping, go back to work. She said a bus spooked the horse. There is no evidence of any kind that this description of the incident was true, there is much to suggest it was not.

The animal rights groups did not know or care that the driver barely spoke English. They choose to make Salerno less than a man, less than a human, because it served their principle – to drive the horses and all of the people around them out of their work and a way of life.

I know some of these people; they are familiar fixtures in the animal world; I have interviewed them for articles and for research on my books. Therapists would quickly point to their anger and rigidity as the classic symptoms of people who bring their own histories into their activism, who project their own anger and sense of victimization and childhood fantasies onto animals.

This rage is a common and rapidly growing phenomena as people lose touch with real animals and project human neuroses onto pets like dogs and cats and then, to all animals. In a sense, we are using them as living trash cans, dumping our stuff onto them, a new kind of abuse, conducted under cover of loving animals. We turn them into damaged versions of us, then insist they are too fragile to live anywhere but in no-kill shelters and on rescue farms.

It is the presence of demons that turns these quite unsuspecting animals into objects of rescue, symbols of monstrous abuse, and thus, of human heroism and human worth. Then,  the rage: the protesters are not attacking humans; they are simply exposing and rooting out demons and monsters, taking their work and their animals away from them. The animals are then given perfect lives – no work, no connection with people, a sylvan existence in the wilds of nature, on beautiful rescue farms with endless fields of green grass.The fantasy becomes complete. The animals, saved from the demon human beings,  get to live the lives we never got to live.

For the drivers and owners of the horses, the moral challenge is to never become the demons who are attacking them. I think it is among the most difficult things to be cruelly and unjustly attacked and hold one’s sense of well-being and spiritual ground. If the danger to the horses is largely imagined, and almost completely unproven, the danger to the people in the carriage trade is all too real. They are being abused.

One day, the placards will find their mark; someone will get hurt. There will be enough money to buy a ban from the mayor and the City Council. A stable owner, exhausted by years of conflict and harassment,  will finally accept the millions of dollars being offered by developers.  One day they may all lose their jobs, their income, their homes. One day their horses may be taken from them, forced onto rescue farms where they will eat and drop manure for the rest of their lives, or to slaughterhouses, where 155,000 horses a year go every year.

It helped for me to go back and re-read Mr. Twain, a shrewd observer of human nature, and to take his idea and place it in the modern context of the carriage wars in New York City:

Man is the cruel animal.
He is the only animal that deals in the atrocity of atrocities, war.
He is the only animal that for principle and ideology will march out..and help to injure, lie about and attack strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.
And in the intervals between attacks and campaigns will wash the blood off of his hands and rinse the lies from his tongue, and work, with his mouth only, for the love of animals and the brotherhood of man.

We all make our own myths; we all choose our own. Joseph Campbell called up on us to choose our individual myths wisely, our myths determine who we really are and wish to be.

Here’s mine:

“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world,” he wrote. “We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can chose to live in joy.”

On one afternoon in New York City last weekend, a a woman was mowed down and killed by a driver in an SUV, a homeless man was fatally struck by a car in Queens, and on the Upper East Side, a 63-year-old woman was run over by a cement truck, severing her left leg below the knee, according to police. That same afternoon, a hit-and-run driver in Brooklyn struck a nine-year-old boy on a bicycle, leaving him in a coma. The incidents were reported on an online traffic registry. No reporters went to the scene of any of these accidents; there were no photographs or videos posted online, no public officials made any statements about any of them, there were no protests by demonstrators from any organization of any kind.

Thursday, the carriage being pulled by a horse named Spartacus tipped over and Spartacus fell down. Several minutes later, he got up and rode home. It was a very different story.

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(Note:  I want to say to the busy and distracted people reading the story of Spartacus recounted here that it seems that almost every single thing about this story as reported by several animal rights organizations, then widely disseminated by the New York media, and recounted below, has turned out to be false, including perhaps the identity and existence of the mythical Oklahoma “tourist” who is believed to have started it all. )

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Thursday afternoon of this week,  shortly after noon, an incident occurred in Manhattan involving Spartacus, a 15-year-old draft horse. More than a dozen media outlets – some on radio, some on news blogs on the Internet – broke into their regular news coverage – several issued “bulletins” and “special reports” to report that a New York Carriage Horse was “spooked” by a bus, collapsed on Central Park South, was held down cruelly by carriage drivers seeking to save a carriage, and then forced, while limping,  to return to work. A tourist from Oklahoma, said the animal rights groups,  immediately e-mailed the photograph above to PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals) and also NYClass, the leader of the move to ban the horses from New York.

The visitor allegedly texted that the incident was one of the worst animal abuse incidents he had ever witnessed. He said a bus came close to the horse and “spooked it (rightfully so I was also scared of how close the busses were to us.)” The horse,  said the tourist, bucked and started to run when it’s carriage went off the curb and pinned the animal to the ground.”

“The men (if that’s what we want to call them),”  the tourist reported, “proceeded to hold the horse down and save their carriage (yes, carriage, not horse) from further damage. He said the drivers  said they were refusing to cut the carriage away because they would have to pay for the damage, and the driver, he said, “clearly had no concern for the horse.”

Finally, said the tourist in a statement widely disseminated by PETA to news organizations for several hours on a score of New York media outlets, “the men proceed to strap the horse back into harnesses and continue to work even though he was clearly limping and hurt!!!”

–

I thought the tourist’s quotes were strange for a passerby. He sounded just like an animal rights protestor.  I contacted a New York reporter, a former journalism student of mine, he said no one outside of PETA spoke to this person, the reporter looked for him at the scene and at the animal rights demonstrations later that afternoon. Like me, he thought his quotes oddly familiar, very close to the rhetoric of the animal rights demonstrators and spokespeople he has spoken to. No one spoke to him, and there was, as of this writing, no evidence that he actually exists, at least not in the form of a disinterested Oklahoma tourist. I checked the MTA routes online, and busses don’t stop where the carriage horses line up. And the concerned tourist said he was close enough to overhear the driver’s speaking, but it seems he was not close enough to see that at least one of them was a woman.

I wonder if this person exists, and if he does, why he would take the trouble to contact PETA with his very inconclusive photograph, utter numerous statements that turn out to be completely untrue (no one at the scene, for example, reported any contact with busses), and then vanish without speaking to any reporters or contacting any news organizations. If he had witnessed the abuse he describes and felt strongly enough about it to contact PETA, why wouldn’t he also tell his story to news organizations eager to report it without any substantiation at all. Mike, the reporter, e-mailed me again this morning, “I can find no evidence that there is such a person,” he said. He said PETA would not respond to his questions about it.

If he does exist, I’m sure the animal rights organizations will want to offer him to the public and media, his story of animal abuse is quite awful and ought to be heard in greater detail. If there is no evidence that he exists, why is he being quoted?

_

The mayor of New York City told reporters that the incident proved that carriage horses should not be in New York City traffic where there are busses and cars. It is not, he said, humane. The executive director of the animal rights organization  NY Class, said in a statement that the driver could have gotten Spartacus up on his feet in “two seconds” but was more interested in saving the carriage then the horse. The carriage trade cares nothing about the horses, she said, the horses are “just a commodity.” PETA issued a statement on their website saying “a horse named Spartacus was pinned under a carriage in a horrifying accident outside the Plaza Hotel.” Animal rights demonstrators showed up very quickly; their protests were all over the evening newscasts.

They seemed almost gleeful, a horse abuse story, just in the nick of time.

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The fall of Spartacus is compelling on many levels, it helps us understand the politics of animal abuse, the fall of journalism in the  digital age,  how animals are exploited for financial and political gain by people who claim to be their advocates.

The rise and fall of Spartacus also shows us how easy and manipulative it is to disseminate images of injured animals to people. Most Americans have become utterly disconnected from the real lives of real animals.

The most striking thing about the version of events reported above in New York City most of the day yesterday – and continuing throughout the night and this morning –  is that they are either a gross distortion and misrepresentation of a very insignificant accident or a a complete fabrication.  The only fact reported in the early story that was true was that there had been an incident involving two carriages and that a horse  (and his carriage) had fallen down and then, got up. That was about it. The incident was not only not horrifying, it was not even especially interesting.

It revealed nothing about the safety or viability of carriage horses in New York one way or the other, it had nothing to do with traffic, abuse or the health of animals. On a horse or rescue farm, it would probably have not made it past the conversation at dinner. I’ve had equines on my farm fall down several times. Unless there is something broken, you take your time and help them to get up. Life occurs, then goes on.

Both the New York City Police and the MTA, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, said no busses were involved in any accident involving a carriage horse, there were none near Spartacus when the accident occurred. A number of eyewitnesses, including Christina Hansen, a carriage driver and spokesperson for the carriage trade and someone I know well  (she is also a person I have found to be truthful in all of her many statements to me during lots of research on the horses) were present when the incident occurred. The horse was not “spooked” at any time, she said, but was remarkably calm throughout. The wheel of his carriage caught in the rear wheel of the carriage in front, and the carriage overturned causing the horse to fall on the ground.

Spartacus, she said, was on the ground for between two and three minutes.

Hansen, an eyewitness and historian and equine authority,   was not quoted in any of the early stories or breathless accounts of  the incident, mostly from the unnamed and strangely hostile- to -the -carriage trade Oklahoma tourist. In the heat of the moment, and while transmitting a single photograph, he managed to portray New York City and it’s busses as incompatible with horses, and  the entire carriage trade industry as greedy and uncaring, mirroring precisely the arguments of the organizations trying to ban them. That’s a lot of political messaging in a hurry, sent before he disappeared or could be interviewed.

Hansen said the “tourists” account was inaccurate in almost every detail other than that Spartacus fell. She said an unattended horse that was not tied to a pole pulled out from behind, clipping the back wheel of Spartacus’s carriage. He then went up on the sidewalk, tipping the carriage over. There was no vehicle of any kind involved and the carriage did not fall on the horse or trap him.

Allie Feldman, the executive direct of NY Class – she was not present –  took off from the “tourist’s” message and said the carriage driver was clearly more interested in saving the carriage than the horse. No one seems to have asked her how she could possibly know the driver’s motives, since she was not present, does not know the driver or the horse, did not speak to anyone who was involved.

She said the incident involving Spartacus was “tragic,” a quote widely disseminated all over the city Thursday afternoon in stories and headlines. Although this quote appeared all over the Internet, I did not understand it. Something that is tragic pertains to a “dreadful, calamitous, disastrous, or fatal” event. I’m not sure how a horse falling down and getting up meets the definition..

There were other witnesses, but none of them were quoted in most of the media reports. Jane Dorman, a reader of my blog and a visitor to the city who was looking to take a carriage ride e-mailed me last night and said she was present, unlike most of the people who were talking about it.

She was stunned to see the news reports on television and online when she returned to her hotel room. “They were quoting all of these people who weren’t there. I was; a bunch of drivers rushed right away to help the horse, they were very concerned about him; they talked to him, gave  him carrots, gently got the harness off him, made sure he was ready to stand up, they got him out of there right away and said they were taking him back to the stable. It was all over in a few minutes.  I could not believe the event I saw was the one I saw on TV and read about. That was much more frightening to me than the horse falling – you could see he was fine. But the lying, wow, you have to see it to believe it.”

Jane was getting a lesson in modern media and also a window into the dynamics of the carriage horse controversy. If the supposed Oklahoma tourist had not taken his cell phone picture and send it off to NY Class, there would probably have been no stories about Spartacus, no bulletins, mayoral statements or demonstrations.

Dorman, who owns a horse ranch in Michigan, told me she texted two news organizations and NYClass to relate what she had seen, but no one answered her or seemed interested in quoting her. What she told me is essentially what was eventually confirmed by almost everyone involved.

Hansen and the drivers said they kept the horse on the ground so that they could safely remove his harness. It is common practice when equines fall to keep the animal down, to keep their heads down. Horses can do great harm to themselves if they try to stand up in a panic.  If the horse had gotten up too quickly, said Tony Serano, the driver, he could have been injured, equine veterinarians support what he did. Salerno said Spartacus remained calm, and he fed him pieces of a carrot to keep him still. It is not true, said anyone involved,  that the horse was either limping or returned to work.

Spartacus was taken immediately back to his stable on the West Side and examined by a police veterinarian, who pronounced him healthy and unscathed. There was not a scratch on the horse, said the veterinarian, whose stable was immediately opened to public view for anyone to come and see for themselves.

The mayor and the animal rights organizations pushing the carriage ban have been taken a beating lately – polls of New Yorkers, the city’s three newspapers and a number of labor unions and business groups all show there is enormous opposition to the proposed ban, and the proponents were excited and well-prepared when offered a “horrible” and “tragic” incident reported by a phantom with a cell phone. Yesterday, they seemed almost desperate for something tragic to happen.

“The one yesterday was not the first one – it was one in a long line of accidents,” said Mayor deBlasio. “And it’s for a very simple reason – horses don’t belong on the streets of New York City.” The mayor has not yet learned that accidents happen everywhere, and the horses have fewer of them than most horses anywhere.  If this is the kind of incident he is talking about, the horses ought to be here for a long time. Four carriage horses have died as the result of accidents in the past thirty years, while undertaking more than 3 million rides – no human fatalities ever, no horse deaths in the past 20 years. Last year, more than 15,000 New Yorkers were taken to hospitals as the result of collisions with motor vehicles, bicycles, trucks and busses  in New York.

There is no evidence that Serano did anything wrong, he seems to have done everything right, only to be accused of caring more for his carriage than his horse.  It does seem that the horses are a commodity.  It is important to remember that the animal rights organizations invoking horse abuse – NYClass, the A.S.P.C.A., the U.S. Humane Society, have drawn many volunteers and celebrities and raised millions of dollars in New York portraying the carriage horses as abused in a long and ugly campaign. They have used the money to give millions of dollars to politicians, to construct prototypes of the much reviled eco-friendly vintage electric cars and make themselves significant players in New York politics in the process.

The animal rights movement is  widely credited with electing Mayor deBlasio and de-railing his major opponent, a former City Council President who opposed the horse ban. The carriage horse controversy is at the epicenter of their recent rise to power and influence, they appear determined to keep it going. I am a supporter of animal rights, I am an advocate for animals, and they are not well served when they are used and portrayed in the way Spartacus was this week.

It is worthwhile to understand and de-construct this incident, even if the New York media may not do it, because it tells us so much about this story and the ways in which animals are being exploited and threatened by people claiming to be speaking for their rights.

It is hard to follow the line of reasoning that suggests and accepts the idea these the carriage owners or drivers would abuse a horse in full view of thousands of people in one of New York City’s most trafficked tourist locations in the midst of a heated controversy over the future of their industry when any mistake or incident is surely going to be pounced upon as a justification to put them out work and end their way of life.

That is beyond cruel, it would be insane. It makes no sense at all. Is it really plausible that a carriage driver would tell a strange tourist in New York with scores of people standing around that he didn’t care about his fallen horse, he only cared about the cost of the carriage? And that he would put a limping animal back to work in front of hundreds of cellphones with cameras and video capability?

The truth matters in this story, there is a lot at stake.  There is a 150-year-old popular tradition on the line, more than 300 jobs, and the fate of 200 working horses. It’s worth a phone call or two.

I called the New York Police Department and the Metropolitan Transit Authority and I learned in several minutes that there was no bus involved, there was no accident, there was not even a police report. The horse was not injured in any way; he was not abused in any way, he was not forced to work limping, or at all, in fact he was not limping. No human beings or passersby or tourists were hurt, no harm was done other than to rattle the nerves of an excitable Oklahoma tourist who might not even exist. Even the carriage was not harmed.

I talked with a friend who has a horse farm in Saratoga Springs and I asked her how many horses are injured in accidents on her farm, she says it is quite common for horses to stumble or fall, injure themselves on fences, to be spooked by birds or strange objects and hurt themselves running away. She said it was standard practice when a horse in harness falls to keep them down until the harness is clear and certain they won’t harm themselves by getting up too quickly – their legs can be fragile, they can sometimes twist or break getting up the wrong way. I called our equine vet who said the same thing. “The drivers did the right thing,” she said, “they were putting the horse first. The last thing you want to do is cause more damage.”

The emotional power of injured animal images might explain why we never see images of the many New Yorkers – nearly 300 a year – who are killed in real accidents, and who don’t get right up like Spartacus and walk away.

If we saw photos of the people injured and killed in those accidents that week in New York, the mayor would be re-arranging his priorities very quickly, perhaps getting to the comparatively much safer horses later. For me, the big story for Friday is not Spartacus, who is getting some time off, but why the mayor, the people at PETA and NYClass all reported things that were not true. Why they made so many statements that proved to be false, why so many news organizations mindlessly repeated them. New York City is trying to decide if domesticated animals that are not pets can remain in cities and among people. Hysterias like the one that swept the city yesterday are not helpful.

In the real world, in cities, on farms, on animal preserves life happens, accidents occur all the time, the horses are no more immune than the rest of us. They just get a lot more media coverage than the many more accidents that occur to people.

There are, in fact, two sides to everything, concerns about the carriage horses are legitimate, it is important to have a debate about them. But the story of the rise fall of Spartacus was not a debate, it was a hysteria fueled by new technologies that make it easy to spread information, difficult for people to find out the truth. It is still there, if anyone wants to take the time to look for it.

–

– And what, I wondered, of that homeless man struck down, that woman who lost her leg on the Upper East Side, that child in a coma, in Brooklyn. Is the story of a healthy horse who fell down and got up more important than the lives of human beings who are grievously harmed and truly abused?

Just imagine when you think of the rise and fall of Spartacus would would happen if the photos of these poor injured and killed people were all over the Internet every day, if the eyewitnesses to their accidents were all over the news with their cellphone photos and videos. It would be traumatic for the people seeing those images, just as it is traumatic to see horses lying down in the street. It is dishonest to present these rare occurrences as representative of the lives of horses or other animals.

 These accidents were real tragedies involving real people, not phantom manifestations of cruelty manufactured  by the truly callous people for political gain. What we saw in New York City on Thursday is a culture that pays too much attention to the lies, and ignores the things that are true.

We know where Spartacus is, we know every detail of his mishap. We will never know what happened to that 63-year-old woman, who that homeless man was, how the boy in the coma is doing. There has not been not another word about any of them. They mayor made no comment about them, the media wrote no stories about them.

There is perhaps no crueler thing one can say to a person who loves and lives with animals then that he or she abuses them.

It is, in so many ways, the cruelest kind of slander in that it is hurtful and almost impossible to answer. I have been accused of animal abuse three times.
Once when I euthanized a dog after he bit three people; again when I returned a flock of elderly sheep to a poor farmer who couldn’t afford to keep them alive and sent them to slaughter; and again, when I chose to euthanize a blind and aging pony who was being attacked by my donkeys and was facing another winter.

Each time, I was called an abuser of animals, and each time, it was not true by any moral or ethical standard I know of.  Almost every one of my accusers lived in a city or suburb and had little or no contact with animals which were not dogs or cats.

I came to understand the great and widening schism in the animal world. There are people in America who have pets and people who have animals, and many of the people who have pets have lost touch with the natural world, and the real lives of real animals.
I recognize them, every day, in the carriage horse controversy. They are the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights, and they are the sole architects of the new abuse.

It is painful for any animal lover to see – over and over again –  an image of an abused animal like the one above. These images are the new propaganda of the animal world – images of abused animals are one of the mainstays of social media, the world’s most emotional, unthinking and unfiltered medium.

The specter of abuse is also one of the most lucrative solicitations one can offer to people who love animals.  NYClass, the organization spearheading the drive to ban the horses,  uses the above photo and slogan as a logo for their website. It is up their every day; it is an Internet sensation, it generates thousands of petition signatures, volunteers, draws celebrities, political support, gobs of cash. The poor carriage trade owners, the working class children of immigrants mostly,  have seemed until recently, almost helpless in the face of such an onslaught. How does one prove he is not an abuser, what image can counter that?

For the animal rights movement, the idea of the abused carriage horse has been spectacularly lucrative. The allegedly abused horse above is the Golden Calf of the campaign to drive the horses out of the New York. The group and it’s leader had more than a million dollars to offer the campaign of the city’s new mayor, Bill deBlasio, There were hundreds of thousands more for the City Council President and other candidates, and they had another half-million dollars left over to take out ads pushing the horse ban and to design those “cruelty-free” eco-friendly fake vintage antique electric cars.
There was still more left to hold some high-tone fundraisers in swanky Manhattan hotels, complete with photos of pols in black ties, grinning for money.

The old stereotype of the animal rights activists – kids in T-shirts waving cardboard signs – is over. The animal rights activists are the new corporate tycoons of the animal world.

The evocation of the abused horse – often seen kneeling poignantly or lying on a pavement – has been the focal point of the supporters of the horse ban for years, it is the foundation of the movement to exile them to rescue farms or, more likely, slaughterhouses. Although the accusations against the carriage trade have grown, even mushroomed, into all sorts of allegations, without the original and daily accusations of abuse there would be  no campaign to ban the horses.

That means it is critical to pose a question that, shockingly enough, doesn’t seem to have been asked much by the city’s media, political leaders, animal rights supporters, or residents: Is it true? Are the horses abused?

The term abuse is all over the animal rights websites, all over Facebook and the Internet, all over discussions of animals in America. If you think about it, you are very likely to meet a  dog on any street of any American city whose owner will volunteer that the dog has almost surely been abused. If you trawl the Facebook and other Internet rescue sites, it sometimes seems that there are no animals that are not being abused.

The new definitions of abuse are everywhere in the carriage horse controversy. Politicians and animal rights organizations do not confine themselves to the traditional and legal definitions of animal abuse or cruelty any longer . Their ideas seem new and fluid; they change to meet their own emotions, goals, fund-raising needs, social agendas,  and to justify what they are doing. Some groups now consider work like carriage-pulling to be abuse, even though it has been practiced for centuries and has never been considered abuse.

Others have expanded their notions of abuse to include the tethering of animals like dogs to trees or fences, or leaving them alone, or letting them run freely. Some groups seek to ban outdoor cats or the use of animals in laboratory experiments. Farmers say they are staggering under an unending stream of expensive regulations and rules fostered by animal rights groups showering legislators with money and petitions outlawing “abusive” practices that have been used on dairy and other farms for generations.  Some animal rights groups seek to make the breeding of dogs and other animals illegal, considering it unnatural and cruel.  Sports like horse race are increasingly under scrutiny and investigation for alleged abuse of horses.

Pet stores, once the mainstay of retail animal stores, have largely been driven out of business by new laws and restrictions seeking to outlaw them and to target puppy mills, a worthy target of animal lovers. Pet stores have vanished from malls; unsavory breeders have largely moved to the unregulated terrain of the Internet.

There is little doubt that some of these targets were and are abusing animals; it is also true that animal rights organizations have largely become authoritarian and invasive, conducting inquiries, secret investigations, often going to war with people who love and live with animals. It is sometimes hard to distinguish animal lovers from the police.

In rural life, where I live, many long-standing animal practices are now considered abuse by the mostly urban-center organizations that call themselves supporters of animal rights. Farmers usually let their dogs roam freely around here, I see them running alongside trucks. I know farmers who leave their dogs to wander the farm when they go away, leaving food for them in the barns.  People here have grown up with working animals, they know domesticated working animals love to work with human beings. Some farmers prefer to shoot their dogs when they get sick and old, considering that more humane than taking them to die on the floor of a veterinary office. In many urban areas, these practices are considered abusive, they are illegal.

If we are confused about the meaning of abuse, politicians are happy to exploit the confusion. The animal right groups in New York hoped to see the horses banned in January, but that is proving complicated and is taking longer. The horses and their owners are not co-operating; they are not going quietly in the night. The animal rights organizations did successfully lobby the City Council to pass a new, somewhat Orwellian measure three previous mayors had vetoed – an animal abuser registry. Convicted animal abusers in New York City are now required to report to a registry similar to those created for sex offenders. New York City residents convicted of animal abuse crimes will be required to register upon their release from incarceration, if they are not jailed, they must register within five days of sentencing. First time offenders will remain on the registry for five years and those guilty of subsequent abuse, for 10 years.

There is no city registry for convicted murderers.

The carriage trade has wandered unknowingly into this brutal new collision of values, this redefinition of abuse. Carriage horses have existed in our world through most of human history. While many horses have been overworked and mistreated in their long time with us, hardly any have been as well treated or monitored as the New York Carriage Horses. How curious that their owners suddenly find themselves in the middle of a wrenching struggle for survival that would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago.
One of the least glamorous or notorious trades in western culture – the carriage driver – has become one of the most controversial, swept up in the wake of the new abuse.
The reason can be found on the websites and blogs where the very emotional and sometimes hysterical re-definition of animal cruelty and abuse is occurring.

The carriage trade is learning this lesson the hard way. The new abuse is upon us.

These groups are using images like the one above to raise enormous amounts of money and become politically significant, another new side-effect of the Internet. Few big-city mayors in American history have ever completely embraced the political agenda of animal rights organizations, but the animal rights groups have a lot of money now, and that has helped elect then a big-city mayor who is one of them. He believes it is cruel for horses to pull carriages, he believes animals like horses have no place in cities like New York.

Abuse is an increasingly difficult thing  to see or define. It often mimics genetic or behavioral or training problems, and since animals don’t talk and abusers don’t brag much, I often ask people how they know their dog is abused – most dogs seem to be these days?  How do they know the horses are abused? Do they tell us? Have their handlers confessed?  Oh, it’s obvious, I’m told, the horse looks depressed, his ribs are showing, or the dog is afraid of sticks, or the people at the shelter told me, or the rescue volunteer suggested it. I have a lot of friends and know  and have interviewed vets who work in shelters and rescue groups and every one of them has told me more than once that the quickest way to get a dog out of a shelter and into a home is to suggest he or she may have been abused.

My own sense is that the idea of the abused animal in need of rescue has gone over the top, it has become the primary prism through which America is beginning to see animals.

So what is abuse when it comes to animals like the carriage horses? The Humane Society of The United States – a group that has become increasingly politicized in recent years and all the less credible for it – claims that 65 billion animals are abused in the world each year, and on the same site say nobody knows how many animals are being abused. Their website claims that millions of animals die each year from abuse and that dogs seem to be the most abused animals. The term has different connotations for different animals. A pet is an animal kept primarily for a person’s company or or protection, as opposed to working animals, sport animals, livestock, laboratory or therapy animals. Abuse and cruelty is considered and defined differently for all of them.

Until recently, most of the interactions between people and their animals were considered personal, even private. That is no longer true, government is getting in quite deeply into the middle.

The people who own these animals and the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights now have wildly divergent notions of what abuse means and is. The people who own working dogs and working horses are shocked at the idea that work is abuse for animals, but it is a growing platform of the animal rights movement. The TV star Alec Baldwin and other celebrities are making a video in support of the horse ban in which Baldwin claims the horse carriages are “torture wagons.” The statement seemed like a laughable hyperbole to me, especially since Baldwin is known as an ignorant blowhard, but this view is taken very seriously, and has generated enormous amounts of money and support for NYClass and other groups.

So what is abuse, anyway, and how often does it occur? Despite the rhetoric online and from politicians, abuse is not a vague idea or opinion, or emotional response, it is a crime, and it has a legal definition. According to a legal dictionary, cruelty to animals is the crime of inflicting physical pain, suffering or death on an animal, usually a tame one, beyond what is necessary for normal discipline. It can include neglect that is so monstrous (withholding food and water) that the animal has suffered, died or been put in imminent danger of death.

PETA, the nation’s best known animal rights organization, offers a fact sheet of incidents involving horse-drawn carriages, it widely circulated on the Internet, I offer it here because people have the right to see it in this context and need to make up their own minds about the horses. But it is not possible to confirm any of the incidents listed here, and several that are reported to have occurred in New York were not confirmed by the police and did not show up in records or online searches. It is not clear if all of these incidents occurred, or how they occurred, but it does not seem that any of them were the result of deliberately cruelty or intent to harm, the definition of abuse. Take a look for yourself.

The list mixes farm, Amish, carriage trade,  even private, incidents involving horses and traffic. It is also not clear what proportion of rides and journeys and interactions the accidents represent. Accidents happen to people as well as animals, none of us live in a perfectly safe world. Context is critical to understanding the idea of safety and abuse.

When I saw the “Stop Horse Abuse” accusation on the NYClass website, I called the New York Police Department. They told me of one arrest in 150 years for abuse, that was in December, at the end of a heated mayoral campaign in which the horses had become a major campaign issue. A driver was charged with animal cruelty for driving a horse with thrush, a hoof infection. The story was major news in New York, it was covered much more prominently than the six murders that occurred in the city that day and a breathless New York Times story quoted animal rights advocates as saying the arrest proved the horses needed to be banned from the city.

Unnamed animal experts, said the reporter, warned that  the horse could have died from thrush.

This is true, but any animal can die from any untreated infection, Thrush is caused by dirty, usually unmucked stabling and is easily treated, the horse was back to work quickly after a two-week vacation and is working and healthy now. It was appropriate to cite the driver, of course,  but a case of Thrush is not really that big a deal in the context of systematic abuse, it is difficult to keep stables spotless, horses drop a lot of manure and not always on time. It does not come close to justifying wiping out an entire industry, putting 300 people out of work and banishing the horses from New York City.

There have also been a few citations against the carriage drivers for overworking horses – 10 hours rather than eight – and two for overcharging tourists. But abuse is a crime, not an argument, and if there is continuing evidence of abuse against the horse, why aren’t the accusers presenting it to the police now? I’m certain the mayor would be overjoyed to learn about carriage horses being abused,  and I’m sure his new police commissioner would be happy to make some arrests.

The A.S.P.C.A., the Humane Society of the United States and the New York Police Department all say there are no accurate or reliable statistics on the number of animals that are abused. The animal rescue site Petfinder says “no one knows how many animals are abused or neglected in America each year.”  According to the N.Y.P.D. there are approximately 4,000 plus animal-abuse-and-neglect calls that come in every year to the police in New York City. Most of them are from neighbors reporting things they see or suspect, the great bulk of them do not result in prosecutions or arrests. In the past five years for which records are available, none of these complaints were made against carriage owners or drivers, and none were made regarding abuse of the carriage horses.

How are citizens to reach any kind of informed judgement if they are bombarded by these manipulative and disturbing images, but then learn there are are simply no facts, incidents, procedures or other information to support these claims?  If the horses must be banned because they are being cruelly mistreated, even tortured, if we must stop horse abuse, as NYClass is demanding that we do, why wasn’t there a single allegation of abuse made against the carriage trade all year, or in the preceding four? That would require a massive cover-up on a grand scale.

Animal advocacy groups are nearly hysterical in their alarms about animal abuse – they take in many millions of dollars in that way – but they are thin on facts or details. Or research, it seems. The Humane Society of the United States states clearly on its website that there are no figures available on the number of animals abused in America, there is no national reporting system. On another page, the HSUS says “the shocking number of cruelty cases reported daily in the media is only the tip of the iceberg. Most cases are never reported, and most animal suffering goes unrecognized or unabated.”

I was a reporter for more than two decades, and an editor after that. I have to wonder how, if most abuse cases are submerged, and few are reported or seen, does the HSUS know that the cases that are reported are only the tip of the iceberg? I wonder if part of the reason is that people are much less likely to send in their hard-earned money to build $450,000 vintage electric cars that will hopefully never be seen in Central Park if they think abuse occurs less frequently than animal rights groups suggest.

The few studies that have been done nationwide on abuse – two veterinary association surveys,  one by the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School, another by the animal scholar James Serpell – have all found that animal abuse occurs in America, but that it occurs much less frequently than people are led to believe, or than the media leads them to believe.
It’s those images of fallen horses; they are made for the Internet; they are all emotion and no perspective.
All of these studies find that people are quick to attribute behavioral and other problems to abuse. The studies reach the opposite conclusion of the animal rights movement –  there might be less below the tip of the iceberg than we think. But without this notion of abuse, and without the idea that it is massive and epidemic, the power, relevance and importance of these groups – and their fund-raising abilities – would be greatly diminished.

There are some useful statistics to consider when it comes to abuse. In media-reported animal cruelty cases, says the HSUS, 64 per cent involved dogs, 18 percent involved horses, 25 percent involved other animals. According to the American Horse Council, Americans own more than 9 million horses. Of the more than two million Americans that own horses, more than one-third have a household income of less than $50,000. The society seems to be suggesting that people with less money are more likely are more likely to abuse or neglect their horses for economic reasons.

But the bottom line is pretty clear, and getting clearer, for all of the hype and hysteria.  We do not know how much animal abuse there is in the United States; there is nothing like universal agreement as to what abuse even is, the legal definitions have been largely abandoned by the new animal advocates. Emotional images are a lot easier and more effective. Perhaps that is the discussion politicians and legislators need to have about animals in America: what is abuse, really? And can anyone with a website, or any politician seeking election funds,  re-define it in their own way for their own purposes? Is slander a valid tool for a more compassionate view of animals?

The NYClass site guarantees that every single one of the horses will go to a loving home, but that is perhaps a screen for another new kind of abuse, not a shield against it. The animal rights groups do not own the horses; they cannot dictate where they will go, they cannot possibly know where they will go. The mayor has not re-defined private property yet –  and  none of them has revealed just who and where the loving homes are and who will pay for the horses care. All over America, horses are being sent to slaughter – more than 155,000 last year –  because rescue farms are overwhelmed and underfunded. Are there really rescue farms waiting to receive 200 big and healthy and hungry draft horses? Is it possible to love our animals to death?

It seems cruel to me to inflict on the horses the pain of being uprooted from their work, companions, humans and homes to be traumatized beyond what is necessary for normal or healthy life. It is both insensitive and monstrous to cause a healthy and content animal to suffer and be put in imminent danger of death, in the name of preserving animal rights.

It sounds like the old kind of abuse to me, and abuse is a crime not an argument.