Maria and Red and I are heading out of the farm shortly for Hartford, Connecticut, I am scheduled to give a talk at the Connecticut Library Association. Talking to libraries is something I think writers are morally obliged to do, I do not accept any fees for library talks, they can pay for the hotel. They very wanted Red to come along, so he is. I’ll be back tomorrow, I have lots more to write about the New York Carriage Horses.
It is fun giving talks with Red, nobody is paying all that much attention to the speech, they are too busy cuddling the dog. It looks like our septic tank is full and near overflow, we will have to deal with that when we get back. Life happens, every day.
Thanks and credit for this photograph to Nina Galicheva of Nina Galicheva Photography, a gifted photographer who is capturing the world of the New York Carriage Horses.
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People who put principles before people are people who hate people, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The truth of this statement reveals itself more and more every day, in our crippled national political system, of course, and very recently and clearly in the long drama of the New York Carriage Horses and the fall and rise of a horse near Central Park.
There has always been something painful and disturbing about the New York Carriage Horse conflict for me. I felt it the first moment I walked into the Clinton Park Stables on West 52nd Street. Part of it was the issue of the horses themselves, of course, and the many false statements about them I kept running across and discovering.
There are two very different realities in this story, the one you read and hear about, the one you see and feel.
But mostly, I was shocked at the tone and cruelty of the many statements and attacks directed at the people in the carriage trade from the animal rights movement. From a distance, it felt like another of those eternal arguments in politics. Up close, it feels very different. The attacks on the drivers and owners seemed deeply personal, even vindictive to me. It did not feel like just another controversy; it felt like something much more ugly and alarming. They don’t just disagree with these people, I thought, they seem to hate the very idea of them.
And if I may speak from the heart a moment, I need to say it is something that is ugly and alarming. Just ask Tony Salerno.
The people in the carriage trade – most of them immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants – are very real people, they have never seemed to me the demonic cardboard cutouts portrayed by the mayor of New York City and the animal rights workers and volunteers. The carriage trade is heavily Irish, but the drivers are immigrants from everywhere – Mexico, Ireland, Russia, the Ukraine, Israel, Italy, South America They love many things about their work and their lives, although it is hard work – they meet all kinds of people, deal with cold and sun and rain, work with animals, are outside, and live far from the regimentation and tensions of the corporate world.
In their language and values, these are working class people, the American story; they live in Queens, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Long Island, they make a good living, they work hard for it, they do not have a lot of money. To their amazement, they have the most controversial jobs in New York City, perhaps America, at the moment.
I Imagine a function of humanity – of my humanity – is empathy. Empathy is the cornerstone of compassion; you cannot have it for animals and not for people, or for people and not for animals. The drivers and owners run the gamut of human behavior, most seem nice, some seem withdrawn and remote, some are funny, some are quiet, there is great and palpable affection for their horses who are, after all, the center of the enterprise and the focal point of their work. People who work with horses have a way of life, not a job.
And people who live with dogs, horses or donkeys, understand that you cannot ride or control a large animal like a draft horse – or handle a working dog or donkey – without developing a particular kind of relationship with them. We also know that the animals are always a mirror of their humans. Angry and brutal people do not have responsive, calm and contented animals, they do not ride their horses through city streets and on rides in the park if they do not work together and in tandem. You can not herd sheep with a border collie if you are angry and frustrated. You cannot trust a bomb-sniffing dog in a train station if you are not connected to him or her in a special way. The animals reflect us, they never lie. For the people in the carriage trade, their relationship with animals is very individualistic, they do not see the big horses as pets, they see them as partners, sometimes family members.
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People knowledgeable about animals noted after the incident on Thursday that Tony Salerno was able to keep his horse Spartacus calm and to lie still on the ground for several minutes, until it was safe for the horse to get up. Not only was that not an act of greed, callousness, or cowardice, it was a testament to the horse’s trust in him. I was impressed by it, he deserves credit for it. And nobody – not a tourist passing by, not some animal rights bureaucrat in an office, not a mayor hiding in his ideological bubble – could know better than Salerno at that moment what his horse needed or might do. No one in an office in Brooklyn or downtown Manhattan has the right to second-guess him from their computer screens.
With the help of the ever-manipulable media, the campaign against the horses has always sought to portray people like Salerno as inhuman, even sub-human, in order to justify taking their work and their horses away from them. People who put principles before people are people who hate people, and the campaign against the carriage horses has, from the first, has been in large measure a hate campaign against people. In this instance, it is no longer a movement to advance the well-being of animals, if it ever was. If you pay much attention, it is hard to characterize it in any other way.
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I was not completely able to put my finger on what is so disturbing about this issue it until this weekend when I watched the brutal campaign unfold to dehumanize Salerno, a 62-year-old carriage horse driver, an immigrant from Palermo, Italy, and the owner of Spartacus, the horse who fell down on Thursday. And then got up a few minutes later, unharmed. Within minutes, Serano was being stripped of any humanity, decency, compassion or dignity, accused of some awful things, even some crimes. He was no longer a human being.
Spartacus was not harmed, nor was the driver or any person. The carriage sustained minor damaged to one of its lanterns. There was no contact of any kind with any motorized vehicle. I was interested to note that no animal rights spokesperson or activist, no public official, including the mayor ever said at any point that they were grateful no one, including Spartacus, was hurt. That is the first thing an animal lover would say, but of course the mayor couldn’t say that. It would mean the accident was not “horrible” or “awful,” or “tragic.” Nobody would send in any money or sign any petitions for a horse that fell down and got up, there would be nothing to demonstrate about, nothing for the reporters to write. There would be no abuse.
And it would mean that Tony Salerno might be human after all, and compassionate as well. That is not in the script, that would not advance the principle – the horses do not belong in New York City.
PETA’s account of the incident – as a”horrible” and “tragic’ incident in which the horse collided with a bus, was held down by his heartless driver in order to avoid damaging the carriage was based upon a text message sent by an Oklahoma tourist who talks like a PETA protestor and seems not to exist. He is, in fact, a magician as well as a tourist, vanishing right in front of a crowd of drivers, people, tourists and reporters without leaving a single trace. There is no one who saw him or knows who he is. He has not come forth, even thought he said what he saw was the worst case of animal abuse he had ever seen.
Even though nobody saw or heard him, or saw anyone standing near the drivers, PETA said this tourist quoted the driver as saying he had to worry about the carriage first because he had to cover the damage, even though the carriage belongs to him, and there was no substantial damage – and the horse is far more valuable than the carriage.
Why, I wondered, would reporters quote people with such a clear and biased agenda to describe an event they did not see, were nowhere near, have no qualifications to analyze, hold no position. These groups have a long history of distorting and misrepresenting facts. Why tell their transparently false version of a story when there were a dozen carriage drivers right on the scene – and many real bystanders – who saw everything and were eager to talk about it?
Because, one of the drivers told me, we are not human, we don’t matter, we couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.
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The social scientist David Livingstone, author of “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others,” writes that when people dehumanize others, they must first conceive of them and represent them as subhuman creatures. Only then, he says, can they unleash their aggression and exclude the target from the moral community. At that point, it is acceptable to attack the target in an immoral way.
In the long campaign against the carriage trade, Fitzgerald’s observation and Livingstone’s explanation have both been played out before us. It was very clear on Thursday. Sometimes it is good to be on my farm upstate, it is easier to see things than in the middle of the din. There is no way to describe the vilification of Salerno other than to say it was an orchestrated and distasteful effort to portray him as a subhuman. He was represented as being free of any compassion or morality, a greedy person devoid of any responsibility. He had no feeling for his horse, it was just a thing, like a loaf of bread. This characterization is familiar by now, it is consistent with the continuous portrayals of the carriage trade owners and drivers – as less than human people without any moral values.
Because they make money from the horses, they must not care about them. Visiting the stables and talking to the drivers, I had a different idea, an important one in the debate over whether working animals for money is tantamount to abuse. Because they make money from the horses, they must care about them a great deal. The food they buy depends on it.
Salerno is Italian-born, he speaks broken English but he is quite human, full of emotion. The other drivers describe him as loving his horse very much. He is a character, he has a vivid twinkle in his eyes, his emotions are all over his face. You can see this for yourself in this video of him taken after the accident involving his horse. He showed great love and concern for his horse, and at the same time, considerable empathy for the other, younger drivers, who are worried about putting food on the table for their families if the animal rights groups succeed. Palermo says with great passion that no one is ever taking his horse away; Spartacus is part of his family. If he is faking it, he is a brilliant actor.
Tony Palermo said in the video that he has always stayed silent in the face of taunts and curses shouted at him at least once a week in the park.
“But why,” he asks in the video, “do they lie and lie?”
I love that Salerno veered off his discussion of Spartacus and launched a hilarious broadside at the city’s mayor for eating pizza in a restaurant with a knife and fork, rather than with his hands. He seemed genuinely shocked by this behavior, he said he doubts whether Mayor deBlasio could really be Italian, Italians eat pizza with their hands.
Salerno, said a spokesperson for NYClass, viewed his horse only as a “commodity.” He could have gotten the horse up on his feet in “two seconds,” she said, but he chose not to in order to prevent damage to his carriage. And clearly, she said, the driver was lying about what happened on Central Park South. The horse collided with a bus, she said, it was a horrible thing to see. Except no one saw a bus but the mythical tourist, and no busses run by the horse stand across from the Plaza Hotel.
This de-humanization is a characteristic of the conflict over the carriage horses, which evokes a number of class issues and the distinct whiff of elitism. As Livingstone writes, it is essential for rabid ideologies to de-humanize their targets. If they remove them from the moral community of people, it makes it so much easier politically to abuse them. Serano could not possibly love his horse, he is less than human.
When I saw the photograph of Salerno hovering over his Spartacus, the first thing I felt was empathy for him. There is little in life more painful than to see an animal you love and work with lying on the ground, in danger of harming themselves trying to get up. But the first response of NYClass was to suggest with absolutely no evidence that Salerno felt nothing, thus was not only not human, he was not even a real man.
“One man suggested cutting the carriage and the other said no because it would come out of his pocket (he clearly had one concern, of which the horse was not), ” said NYClass at a press conference,” quoting their ephemeral Oklahoma passerby by, the only one of thousands of people nearby who saw the things he said he saw.
____ De-humanization campaigns are familiar in our time; they have been used against all kinds of people in all kinds of places. When you stop seeing someone as a human being, you will soon stop treating them as one, as has happened to people in many parts of the world, as is happening to the people in the carriage trade. When someone is not really a person, they are not worthy of meeting face-to-face, of compromise or negotiation, of even choosing their own work. They have no rights, are entitled to no fair or due process. They have no right to even exist as they wish, even if they do it in peace and within the law.
If one de-constructs the rise and fall of Spartacus, you will quickly get to the real story, it is right there staring us in the face. Nothing much happened to the horse, the heart of the story is the effort to dehumanize Salerno.
The incident came at a time when the controversy over the horses is at a crossroads, the animal rights groups are alienating almost ever major demographic in the city, people, business owners, newspapers, unions, they are rapidly losing public support and are desperately seizing on Spartacus’s mishap to regain their flagging momentum and call for protests and demonstrations – one Thursday, another at City Hall on Monday. Last week, they accused Liam Neeson of being cruel to animals by going to his condo, shouting at his neighbors, and being cruel to him. It is not yet clear how this has helped a single animal on the earth.
The mayor, by his rigid support of this idea to ban the horses and his close association with the people attacking the carriage trade, is endorsing the dehumanizing of the people in the carriage trade, he is putting the full weight of a powerful government behind it. He refuses to visit any of the stables, talk to any of the owners or drivers or acknowledge that they have any legitimate values or concerns. It is almost unprecedented for a city-wide politician who is seeking to ban an industry that has broken no laws and is accused of no crime to refuse to even meet with the people whose livelihood and long traditions he is seeking to take away from them.
This refusal to acknowledge the carriage people as worthy of talking to is, in itself, an act of dehumanization. It speaks of contempt and disrespect at worse, cowardice at best. To refuse to speak to someone you have great power over is a demeaning insult in almost every culture. The mayor frequently attends fund-raising events held by the animal rights organizations; he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from them, and says he is proud to be a member of their movement. He talks to people every day, all over the city, about all kinds of things. Putting 300 people out of work ought to be worth a few minutes of his time.
I have asked every carriage owner and driver I have met if any member of any animal rights organization has ever come to the stables, talked with them, pet a horse, given one a carrot, asked them any questions, offered to hold any discussions about the horses. It seems no member of any animal rights group in New York City ever has. They refuse to come near the horses in the park as well. Every Sunday, they come to Central Park and shout all kinds of insults at the drivers, calling them greedy animal abusers and worse. They call the drivers names, wave their placards in front of the horses as if to spook them. Yet they are permitted to speak for all animals and anything that happens to them.
People who put principles before people become people who hate people. The drivers are just doing their jobs, why single them out in this way?
What is it about the carriage trade that makes them uniquely undeserving of one meeting, a single visit to their stables?
The answer may lie in the fascinating press conferences held by PETA and NYClass, and in the continuing protests and demonstrations in the wake of Spartacus’s stumble and fall; it was said more than once that the “men” trying to save the carriage – “if you can call them that..” cared nothing for the horse. There was, in fact, at least one woman involved, no bus. There was not a single expression of sympathy for the driver or the horse, no recognition of the quick and humane and professional work done to end the situation quickly and safely.
Over the course of this conflict, the carriage drivers have been accused of cruelty, abuse, neglect, of cheating tourists and riders, of ignoring city rules and regulations, of working their horses to death, failing to treat serious injuries and illnesses, cheating horses out of their time off, of keeping the horses in filthy stables where they cannot even turn around, of housing them in firetraps, working them in heat and cold, even of contributing to global warming by slowing up traffic on the way to and from Central Park. No public official or politician or newspaper editorial has ever protested or criticize this assault on working people who have broken no laws.
The people in the carriage trade have been relentlessly dehumanized. Otherwise, the mayor wouldn’t dare not speak to them. And as the mayor says – he has never even owned a dog or cat, let alone a horse – they should be excluded from the civic and moral community of the city so that they can be banned in a way that is politically and culturally acceptable. Normal rules do not apply to them.
Carriage horse drivers like Salerno are not even deemed to be worthy enough to have a say in their own futures. If there is any single thing that lays bare the elitism and class contempt – and and the dehumanizing ethos- that hovers over the horse people, it is the assumption by the mayor and the animal rights groups that the drivers will abandon their horses and their trade and willingly go to drive eco-friendly electric cars instead. No one has ever asked them if this is what they wish to do, this has been decided for them.
There is the air of fantasy about this campaign. There will be no victims, say the animal rights groups. The horses will all go to rescue farms; the drivers will all get into their carts.
Imagine telling the employees of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, or the reporters at the New York TImes, or the fancy doctors on Park Avenue, or the producers and technicians for CBS or NBC or ABC, or the members of the City Council, or teachers in Brooklyn, or the art galleries in Chelsea, that it has been decided by superior and more powerful people that their professions and companies aren’t working or aren’t humane or in keeping with the times, and thus will be banned. And that other careers have been chosen for them – perhaps working in the city’s parks to run recreational programs or directing traffic. In the progressive city, rank elitism is all right, as long as it is well-funded.
Since it is presumed that the horses are only a “commodity” for the people in the trade, they couldn’t possibly love them or their work. Putting them into electric cars – and not knowing the difference between driving a horse and a vintage car – this makes sense. Why would it matter to people like this – the children of immigrants, plain-speaking working people, people without blogs, people who do not shout at people in the park every Sunday, people who ride horses for money – what kind of work they might do?
These people might as well be selling shoes or working in the Central Park Zoo, it makes no difference to them, they will be just as happy.
But here is the logic trap, reporters who were awake would see it in a flash: if the drivers are as callous, greedy, cruel and dishonest as the animal rights groups say they are, why should they be allowed to ferry people around Central Park at all in either carriage or car? They should all be in jail. Can’t you just picture an eco-friendly fake vintage car driver ignoring a tourist lying in the road after an accident to make certain his $160,000 cart wasn’t damaged? Would we want someone like that near our children? How is it they are not good enough to drive horse carriages – horses cost about $2,000, they are rescued at auction – but are worthy enough to drive $160,000 fake antique electric cars?
An effort is finally underway now to humanize the people in the carriage trade. It’s about time. There are photos of drivers and horses on websites, cute videos of tourists riding through the park, spokespeople in position to quickly answer accusations, testimonials from their many supporters and admirers from all over the world. The famous actor Liam Neeson deserves much of the credit for helping to remind New Yorkers that people like Tony Salerno are very human.
A handsome Irish immigrant and global celebrity with a knock-out brogue, Neeson seems to me an exceptionally moral and grounded person, so much more gracious and generous and credible than the people now attacking him for defending the carriage horses and his many friends in the trade.
Neeson has focused on the humanity of the carriage trade people, and restored it to a great degree in the public mind by talking about the carriage trade’s Irish roots. He has talked about his love of horses and knowledge of them, about the jobs that would be lost. He has described the good and humane treatment of the horses. He has avoided the cruel and angry rhetoric of the animal rights community, the ceaseless cycle of argument and counter-argument. He has exposed the feckless values of the mayor by highlighting his refusal to come and see the horses for himself. He has evoked the history of the iconic horses and their rich place in the history of the city. In relating the impact of the ban on the more than 300 people, many with children, who would be affected by it, he has sparked great sympathy for the drivers and the horse medallion owners.
He exudes authenticity and credibility.
I do not have the megaphone of someone like Liam Neeson, or his influence, (I am just about as good looking, I am assured) but I have seen the same thing and written about it – this is not a story about an abstract and rigid political principle. It is a very human story.
Perhaps because I am Jewish, and because that I am aware that many women, African-Americans, immigrants and gays, a growing number of corporate workers in America, have been dehumanized and have had and still have to fight to be recognized as human beings. I am conscious of the awful effects of dehumanizing people. I do not define myself in this way, I do not relate to the culture of victimization, but it is a destructive thing. The Irish understand dehumanization as well as any people, they have been dehumanized for centuries, their unique culture, language, politics and worldview have been shaped by it.
I think they are well equipped to stand and fight for their lives and their horses, as Tony Salerno did this week. But the history of New York is grim when it comes to class struggles, when political power and big money collides with ordinary people. Sooner or later, these elites will surely triumph and push these people and push their horses out of New York City, and they will vanish from our world. In the corporate nation, the little guys rarely win in the end against big money and big power. Even Jacqueline Onassis couldn’t stop the destruction of the beautiful and iconic Penn Station, destroyed to make room for an ugly sports arena. It seems some lessons are never learned.
But maybe they will not vanish this year. They are putting up a hell of a fight.
The carriage horse people came to this country in part to escape being dehumanized, they are struggling to make sense of it. This work was good for their fathers and grandfathers, why is it suddenly no good for them, the horses, or the great city? I see the pain in suffering in their eyes and faces when I go and interview them and photograph them. It is very real. It has made some of them sick, there is a dark cloud permanently hanging over their heads. A mayor who is truly concerned with being humane would put a stop to it. Anyone is welcome in the stables, anyone can go and see this for themselves.
Despite the diverse nationalities of the drivers, the carriage trade is still very much an Irish thing. How ironic. Every day, this seems more and more like an issue about class, not horses, and in the city that calls itself the most progressive.
Stereotyping people as inhuman or subhuman for political gain or principle is the tactic of the ideologue, not the moral man or woman. It is always an ugly thing to see, especially when unthinking celebrities and politicians and the media mob join in the righteous chorus. Modern history is pretty clear about what happens to dehumanized people, this ancient practice has left an awful trail in its wake.
The issue involving the carriage horses is whether or not the horses can exist humanely and safely in New York City. It is whether animals can remain in our urban world or not, and whether we care to try and keep them. It is not whether Tony Serano is greedy, callous, or less than human.
To dehumanize someone means removing their humanness, their dignity, and their sense of themselves as a person and a citizen of equal rights and standing. We are all entitled to respect and dignity and freedom, that is the promise of our country. Dehumanization is a far worse and crueler offense than anything that has been done to the carriage horses of New York, or even alleged to have been done.
I will credit the animal rights people as being human, they deserve to be treated as such, even though I do not believe there is a single reason to remove the carriage horses from New York. The spiritual challenge of caring and spiritual people in our time is to try and never become what disturbs us, or calls us nasty names on Facebook. I hope the carriage trade people can do it.
For many years, the animal rights movement has been viewed as an extremist and irrational fringe, making lots of noise, invading the lives of many people with animals and anger, but never setting public policy in a mainstream way. No major politician in any big city has ever endorsed them in the way the mayor of New York has or joined their movement. This struggle in New York has changed the dynamic of animal rights politics across the country. These groups have a lot of power in New York, they have millions of dollars, they have bought themselves a City Council President and a mayor, and he is committed to their cause.
The country and much of the world is now waiting to see how the animal rights movement handles their new found power, or whether, as seems to be the case so far, they will continue to abuse it in this arrogant, frequently dishonest (where is this Oklahoma tourist, anyway?) and often hateful way. To date, they seem unable to grow and modify their xenophic view of animals and their deep animosity towards people. If they continue to choose blind principle over people, then they will, in fact, become people who hate people, and they will fail. Almost no one in the city outside of their own bubble is liking them or their message, the silver lining in this angry cloud. Their cruelty to people, their distortion, lying about facts, and their over-reaching is repugnant. If they don’t change, most people – and most people are just like the carriage people – will reject them and their mayor and their message.
Sometimes, I think the assaults by the animal rights groups on people like Tony Salerno are not by-products of the campaign against the horses, they are the real point of it.
I want to end this long piece (sorry for that, but it needs to be said somewhere) by offering my testimony that Tony Salerno is very much a man, very much a human being. He is entitled to keep his good reputation and his dignity and the horse he loves to work with every day in the greatest park in one of the world’s greatest cities. He has lived a good and hard-working life, he deserves the support and comfort of people who truly wish to be humane and compassionate.
Dehumanizing people is wrong, it constitutes abuse in the most literal sense. No matter what the outcome of the carriage horse struggle, it is so much much crueler to take a human being’s sense of self away than to make a working horse walk in traffic.
