Day: March 19, 2014

Loving Simon. Every day.

I would never claim my small town is perfect any more than I would say that living on a farm brings me a perfect life. No place is perfect, no life is perfect, my beautiful town of Cambridge, N.Y., has it’s share of nasty politics, few jobs,  poverty, squabbling and pettiness, it is also endowed a wonderful mix of people, artists and farmers, theater companies, a great cafe, a wonderful bookstore, a popular diner, a food co-op, a sweet old Main Street, a restored opera house. I love it, is right for us.

I belong in a small town, it is right for me, it is not right for everybody, including my daughter, who cannot imagine why I am living here. While rural life is under pressure everywhere – politicians and economists don’t think rural communities are efficient in the new global economy – there are many values in Cambridge that are difficult to find in the cities and suburbs where most Americans now live. I told Maria yesterday that I was struck at how many safe and friendly there are places for us here.

* I went to O’Hearn’s Pharmacy this morning, on the other side of town from the big chain pharmacy, which sells  lots of things, including beer and cigarettes along with medicine. The people who work there are very nice and very helpful – the pharmacists there have helped me many times. But Rite-Aid is owned by a corporation that seems to value profits as much as health sometimes and the people who work there often tell me they wish they didn’t sell cigarettes along with medicine.  Bridget does not sell beer or cigarettes. If you are in trouble, need medicine after hours,  or you forgot your prescription you can call her at home, come by her house and pick her up,  and she will open up the pharmacy for you and get you what you need. I went in the pharmacy yesterday and a woman came in, walked up to Bridget, and burst into tears. I was startled, she turned towards Bridget, who is always nearby fixing prescriptions. She said her husband had just told her that he was having an affair and wanted to end their marriage.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she said, “I just came to Bridget.” There are few small pharmacies like Bridget, she is up against ferocious competition from big chains who can sometimes charge less and government regulations, which suffocate small businesses. I hope she hangs on forever.

* I went to the Round House Cafe to meet a friend and I realized I forget to bring my money or wallet. “I don’t have any money,” I told Keiry, who was working the counter. She laughed. “Bring it in when you come next,” she said, “we know where to find you.” Sometimes, when I am in town and I need to give myself an insulin injection, I will go to the Round House, there is a room in the back that is private and quiet and I am welcome to use it.

* Maria and I went to get our first haircut in town, we had been going to a different town – walk-ins are welcome and we met Heidi, who cut our hair. She charged Maria $15, but she would only charge me $10 because, she said, I didn’t have that much hair and it wouldn’t be fair to charge me the full amount. Next time I will insist on paying the full amount.

* In the afternoon, I felt  uneasy, I was thinking of the New York Carriage Horses and touched by messages about them from a Native-American chief. I went out to help with the chores and all three donkeys came up to me and pressed their noses into my stomach and my side, they formed a circle around me, almost hemmed me in, they were insistent. I believe they were talking to the horses through me, or perhaps receiving messages from them. This is not something I would have believed for much of my life, but I saw it, something was happening. Perhaps, said a friend, they were thanking me for sticking up for the horses.

* In our family, I shop and cook and we have been traveling and running around so much I haven’t shopped much, and I felt I was doing a poor job of cooking (Maria was hinting at the meals getting a bit boring.) I pride myself on good and interesting cooking, I went over to the Cambridge Food Co-op and asked Becca for advice about a good meal for dinner. She took me over to the food shelves and freezers and she recommended chicken and vegetable dumplings along with some sticky sushi rice, and she gave me instructions on cooking the rice and a good bottle of Soy Sauce. Whenever I need help choosing dinner or trying something new, I go over to the Co-op and someone helps me.

* Ever couple of weeks, I go and see our friend Mandy Meyer-Hill and get a massage. I didn’t use to get massages, they are now an integral part of my health care. I haven’t been sleeping well this week, a lot of things on my mind, money stuff, the horses in New York. Before the massage, Mandy always asks me what my needs are and I told her about the sleeplessness, echoes of my old panic attacks. I thought I was done with them, but one is never completely done with the past. Mandy said she thought the message from the Native-American chief – Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Calf Buffalo Pipe of Peace, was important. She thought I was right, the horses are sending me messages (I will write about this tomorrow). She said I should go out into the pasture and stand firmly on the ground and feel my feet going down to the center of the earth, then coming back up. I did.

*This morning I went to the dentist, it was a 7 a.m. appointment and I asked the receptionist if I could bring Red in, he was in the car. They said sure, and I brought Red in and he cuddled with just about every woman in the place and then lay down on the floor while my teeth were being cleaned. They all asked me to be sure and bring him in next time. Dogs relax people, Red relaxes me, he has the gift of entering every space I go into and joining me there.

I love my town, I expect to spend the rest of my days here.

Waiting for hay, watching for Red

When Red came to me nearly two years ago, he was very healthy, but his coat was bright red and dry, the hair bristly. At the same time, I was having some problems with Lenore, whose skin was also dry and who had developed allergies and was scratching and licking quite a bit. Frieda had also developed allergies, and an extremely dry coat.

I called several of the vets I had interviewed for my book “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die,” and I asked each one to recommend a dog food that would do several things for me. Give Red a softer, fuller coat, help Frieda and Lenore with dryness and allergies.

All three vets mentioned Fromm as the best available dog food in America, the one they all recommended the most. I got some, and I was so impressed I contacted Fromm and said I would be willing to have them as a sponsor on my website if they wished to be here. They did. As the oldest family-owned holistic dog food company in America, Fromm is very careful about their food. They do not outsource any of their food products, they have never had a recall.

Red’s coat turned shiny, and then brown (he needed vitamins) and Frieda and Lenore stopped scratching. All three coats are lush and healthy, and although it is indelicate to mention it elsewhere, I will also say I pay a lot of attention to stools, they are a wonderful measure of health. My dogs are doing great, and I am proud to have Fromm as a sponsor, the only sponsor of the blog, the only food my dogs eat.

This year, Fromm’s nutritionists have agreed to come onto my Facebook Page every Wednesday morning (they are there right now, today) to answer your questions about nutrition for your dogs and cats. I appreciate this service, it is not easy to get honest and immediate information about healthy nutrition. In coming months, a veterinarian associated with Fromm will also be coming onto the site to answer questions. Each week, we give the best question a free bag of dog or cat food, so I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity and post your question on my Facebook page today. We’ll choose a winner later, this will happen every Wednesday morning.

I am very fussy about my dogs and my sponsors – Fromm is the only one I have ever considered. I recommend them and their food completely and enthusiastically.

If you love animals, you will never have a clearer choice to make than the one New York City is about to make, between iconic work horses and fake vintage electric cars.

Here we are, once again, this time in our greatest city, preparing to choose one more time to drive animals out of our world to make room for machines and buildings and the ugliest and most  dispiriting of human ideas and creations.

We have made this decision so many times. We have now driven most of the animals away and most of them are gone from the world,  and we are ruining the earth as well. It would seem that we have learned nothing, being progressive in New York City sounds a lot like being a mall developer in New Jersey.

In the deepening and  painful controversy between the New York Carriage Horse Trade and the people who claim the title of animal rights advocates, I’ve tried hard to think and write mostly of the horses and speak on their behalf – Liam Neeson can speak for the carriage trade and the animal rights groups can speak for  themselves.

The horses desperately need to be spoken for. The carriage trade has a vested interest, the animal rights groups claim to be their protectors, but they have lost much credibility  with me  and with many others. They have little respect for facts, they seem to know nothing about horses or animals, and they are crueler to people than anyone has been to the carriage horses.  The people in the carriage trade have told me no lies I know of, they appear to understand their horses well and love them very much.

They City Of New York appears committed to a course that will banish the horses from New York forever and most likely send them away to either eat hay and drop manure for the rest of their lives or go to awful deaths in foreign slaughterhouses,  as more than 155,000 horses did last year alone. Somewhat shockingly, they and the city’s mayor have also decided – without asking them –  that all of the carriage horse drivers will go to work driving fake vintage electric cars. “No one is losing their livelihood,” says the Executive Director of NY Class, who seems to assume the carriage drivers will be happy in the new work she and her group has chosen for them.  Above is a model of the vintage car commissioned by NYClass, the group spearheading  the proposed horse ban. NYClass spent $12,500 to have the model made. The cars would cost roughly $150,000 each and would all, the group proudly proclaimed, make that wonderful “oooaoogah-aoooogah!” sound.

Reading this, I was wondering how the Executive Director of NYClass would feel if the city and the carriage trade banned her group and decided she would go to work for a shipping company in New York harbor. No one would be losing their livelihood, after all.

It is a remarkable thing to me that these groups, which profess to care about the horses more than anyone, do not grasp the difference between a draft horse and an electric car. Small wonder they believe it is cruel for working animals to work. If these cars look familiar to you, it is because there are a number of very similar ones at Disney World and Disney Land. Disney also loves to evoke the past rather than preserve it, the choice New York City seems to be embracing.

I love Disney theme parks, but I would not have considered their faux American Main Street evocations a model for New York City’s Central Park. It does not seem to me that the park needs fake vintage cars to evoke an atmosphere that is already one of the most beautiful  – and authentic – in the world.

This is a very big decision not only for horses but for human beings, for all of the people reading this, and for all of the animals they know and love. In the sorry history of people and animals – the carriage horses are a rare and lucky exception –  what New York City decides to do with the horses will be a seminal decision, one that will reverberate everywhere people still live with animals or might wish to. If New York City gives up on the horses, many other cities and communities will follow. It will be a powerful statement that animals cannot survive in cities, have no place there any longer. Is there any more important place for animals to remain and be seen than in urban America, where people have become so disconnected from the natural and animal world?

Make no mistake about it,  this is a vote for mechanization over the natural world, for technology over nature, for machines over horses. There are many things New York City could do to make the horses lives better than they are now, and there is no real evidence they are not good. The city could designate horse lanes as they have bicycle lanes, they could insist that real estate developers build spacious and modern stables in exchange for land. There is no medical evidence to suggest the horses are suffering from respiratory issues from breathing the same air New Yorkers and their dogs and cats are breathing every day. Only one horse in 20 years has died as the result of city traffic.

These very viable and plausible steps would eliminate almost all of the arguments against the horses remaining in New York, save the quite new and very radical idea that it is cruel for working animals to work, a disheartening and profoundly ignorant argument. The New York Daily News reported this week that it would cost the city tens of millions of dollars to buy out the carriage owners medallions, and then there is the purchase of those eco-friendly cars. (I wonder when horses stopped being eco-friendly, and became bad for the environment?)

Traffic lanes would be a lot cheaper, developers rather than taxpayers can afford new stables. If the mayor spent as much time trying to save the horses as he has trying to banish them and put hundreds of people out of work, the city might have already sent the most stirring imaginable message to true environmentalists and animal lovers all over the world: we are committed to animals being safe and present in our city. We will not banish them to disappear from our consciousness or die. We will not choose cars over animals.

That is a headline that would get me weeping. It is my idea of progressive.

This week, a television actress –  many celebrities are drawn to the idea of animals rights without, apparently much of an understanding about what it means – said she hopes the horses can return to the natural world when they are free. She does not seem to know that humans have already destroyed the natural world of the horses, as we are trying to destroy one of the few remaining worlds the carriage horses have, miraculously right in the heart of New York City.

Draft and working horses have never lived in the natural world, never lived apart from human beings, never lived out of stables. They were bred and imported to work with people, and that is their world. Most of the rescue farms where some of the lucky ones would be sent are really nothing more than larger stables with fences, they are not lush and spacious places. For these horses, carriage work is the natural world, and if we take it away from them for yet another moving mechanical machine in one of the world’s most visible cities, we are sounding a death knell for the very idea of animals remaining in partnership with human beings in the modern world.

Some simple questions for people approaching this issue;

– Would you rather ride in an electric car or in a horse-drawn carriage?

– Would you rather celebrate your love or new marriage in a fake vintage car or in a horse-drawn carriage?

– Would your child or grand-child rather see a horse or ride in an electric car? Ask him or her. Children are our future and the keepers of magic in our world. They have a right to be heard.

– If you visited New York City, would you prefer to see a vintage electric car or a Percheron horse? Does a vintage electric car have any meaning or connection with Central Park,  where the horses have worked for 150 years, and which was designed in great measure for carriages and their horses?

– if you walk in Central Park, would  you rather see a horse-drawn carriage and listen to clip-clop of horses hooves, or hear the “aoooogah-aoooogah” horn of an electric car?

– Look at the photo at the top of this post, and at the bottom. Which would you choose to be in your life, to see and think about? Which is needed more? Which is in dire need of being preserved?  Is anyone going to rush home and record in their journal their magical ride through Central Park in an electric car, painted to look decades older than it is? Why try and replicate the past when it is walking in the park every day?

And perhaps most importantly, if you live in New York City, do you accept the idea that these horses must vanish from the your sight and that of your children forever, to disappear to the farms of rich people and overwhelmed rescue preserves, or, much more likely, be sent to slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada?

I love animals, as do almost all of the people reading this,  and my wish is for them is to remain among us, not to follow in the awful history of so many of their predecessors because we don’t have the will or courage or insight to take the steps to make sure they survive among us. Animals that don’t work with us perish, that is the awful legacy of humans and animal history. We have lost so much of the natural world,  we have cruelly abused the animals we could not find a use for. Rescue is an emotional impulse and good deed, it is not a role for animals to enable them to survive on the earth.  For them, the rise of the human race has been nothing less than a holocaust.

My hope for the Central Park Carriage Horses is that they can be a landmark chapter in a very new and different kind of story, my prayer is that they be spared the two kinds of deaths awaiting them: the death of the slaughterhouse, or the equally cruel  path to invisibility and oblivion. Both are the paths to extinction.

This, for sure, is a genuine test of our will to give animals the rights they deserve, the most fundamental being the right to exist with us and not be driven away, as so many other animals have, to make room for cars and houses and condos and malls.

There is no simpler or clearer vote for animals, no more important or meaningful choice than the one New York City is about to make between vintage electric cards and the New York Carriage Horses. Every animal in our lives, in the world, is waiting for our choice. The horses need is for us, they cry out to us to choose them for once.