Many animal lovers balk at the idea, but animals like donkeys and dogs are believed to communicate in an autistic way, that is they exchange images with one another, they think in terms of images, not words. They can be trained to experience and understand some words, but that is not their language, not the way they communicate with one another.
This is essential to understanding them and communicating with them in a profound and even spiritual way. I have been working on this for 15 years, Maria comes to it naturally, she does it almost instinctively, and the intuitive donkeys respect, they become one, they exchange emotions and feelings. I can’t wait to write about this in my next book “Talking To Animals.” After the Simon book this October.
The Carriage Horse controversy in New York is filled with irony and illusion. There is this idea, seriously advanced by the city’s mayor, that vintage cars that cost $160,000 apiece and and run on electric power, are more “eco-friendly” than horses, which cost about $2,000 apiece and require only grass and hay and water.
They call the vintage cars “cruelty-free,” yet the campaign to bring them to New York is rife with cruelty and rage.
They claim that the horses are not suited any longer for Central Park, but they don’t seem to know that the park was designed for them by Frederick Law Olmstead, who criss-crossed his beautiful park with bridges and trails for the carriage horses to ride easily on.
Almost magically, the horses weave in and out of the landscape of New York’s Central Park, they are as natural to it as trees and shrubs and flowers.
When I think of the carriage horses, I always think of the children, and when I take a photo like this I think this is something that the children of New York and the many visitors and the lovers and newlyweds and wide-eyed visitors will never see again, if the horses are banned.
What value do we place on magic in the world? And history? And on our own individual connection to Mother Earth? The horses are calling to us, pleading with us to wake up and see what we are doing and recognize what is ancient and important in our world. They are in danger of extinction by the hollow men and women, the legions of the angry and the soulless.
Every man has a property in his own person, wrote John Locke. Nobody has a right to this, he said, but himself.
This simple – and at the time, groundbreaking – idea was so radical Locke couldn’t even admit he wrote it until he acknowledged his authorship in his will. It became the framework that endedf the monarch’s absolute rule in England and was also the driving idea behind the American Revolution.
Few people in America even know his name, but John Locke is, in many ways, the true father of the American experiment. His passion was shaped by moral and social conflicts like the Carriage Horse controversy in New York. He understood their importance, just as we are beginning to understand them. They speak to the morality of government and the true meaning of freedom. I don’t know if the carriage drivers have ever heard of John Locke, but his spirit hovers over the stables for sure. His words might hang one day from the stable stalls.
In all the argument and hysteria and rage, it is easy to forget what the carriage horse controversy is really about. Locke, who risked his life to write about liberty, reminds us.
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A British physician and philosopher in the 17th century, John Locke is widely considered to be the most influential thinker about human rights and liberty in world history. King Charles II tried repeatedly to capture and kill him, and for good reason. Locke’s words eventually undid the idea of the unchecked power of the monarchs and tyrants, they ruled the earth at the time. Freedom was unheard of.
Locke’s masterpiece, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is considered the best writing ever done about the moral obligations of government, the limits of government power and the basic rights of human beings. It changed the world. His work and ideas greatly shaped the French and American Revolutions, he influenced Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and many other founders. Many of his words and thoughts appear in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and they shaped our system of checks and balances.
In a sense, he pioneered the ideas or moral government and of freedom.
One of the primary ends of government, Locke wrote, was the preservation of property. The reason why men enter into society and create governments, he wrote, is the preservation of their property. The purpose of law is not to abolish or restrain individual liberty, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
“No one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”
For some years now – especially in the past seven or eight – private individuals and groups calling themselves supporters of animal rights have mounted a vast and expensive and frequently quite cruel assault on the carriage trade owners and drivers. It is surprising that they have withstood it, most people and institutions would have given up and moved on. It is rare to fight for principle these days rather than surrender to the threat of controversy. Any good lawyer would tell them to take the money the developers are offering them and run.
These organizations have sought to harm the carriage trade people in their lives, health, liberty and possessions.
They donated enormous sums of money to the campaign of the new mayor of New York, and helped him win election. He has defined himself as a proud member of their movement. In a city with some of the most daunting and intractable social problems in the world, he declared banning the horses from the city to be the number one priority of his new administration, he vowed to do it in his first week in office. In this, he has failed.
The groups that call themselves supporters of animal rights have repeatedly made claims and accusations against the horses that are provably false. By the accounts of scores of reputable veterinarians, behaviorists and trainers, they have shown great ignorance about the lives of the horses and misrepresented their lives. They have claimed the horses are confined to tiny cells, overworked, that they live horrible lives, that their manure lines the streets of New York, that they are lonely, unloved, filthy, that they contribute to global warming by slowing traffic, that they are abused, that they can’t turn around or lie down in their stables and struggle with the weight of their carriages, that they are a danger to citizens, that they are depressed and neglected and sent off to die while young.
None of these accusations are true, it seems, and all have been denied or disproven. The horses are regulated by five different government agencies and regularly inspected by animal doctors. All report that with few exceptions, they are content, well-cared for, they live longer lives in greater health than animals on rescue farms or in the wild.
These organizations have attacked the people in the carriage trade in the ugliest and most personal terms, accusing them of cruelty, abuse, greed, thievery, neglect and behavior so inhuman that they cannot be accepted into the moral community of their city. They have defamed and libeled them in front of their fellow citizens and families.
They gather regularly to insult them and yell at and intimidate their customers and wave placards at the horses to try and spook them. The animal rights groups will not speak to the horse owners or drivers other than to shout insults in the streets. They will not touch the horses or negotiate with the horse owners or listen to their denials or see for themselves how the horses are being treated. The mayor will not even come to the stables or even meet or speak with the owners or the drivers. They have dehumanized these most human of people so that they can justify destroying their way of life.
Tyranny is a strong word, I am wary of being hyberbolic, but words and deeds have meaning. Truth matters. When I think of tyranny, I think of evil Kings, not New York City mayors, but the term really refers to abuse of political power. You will have to decide for yourself if it applies, dictionary.com defines “tyranny” as “the government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler; oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler.” John Locke said governments and leaders that trampled on freedom and seized property were tyrannical.
The mayor and the animal rights groups are not seeking to improve the lives of the horses or build them new stables or improve their access to the park in traffic. They are not seeking humane solutions to their concerns or make the lives of the horses better in any way. They are insisting the only solution they will accept or consider and it is the most severe: the banishment of the horses from the city, the dismantling of the carriage trade and the seizure of property. If exiled, the fate of the horses is uncertain at best, some would go with their owners, some to rescue farms, some certain to join the 155,000 horses sent to slaughter every year in America.
For years now, the people in the carriage trade – more than 300 people – have lived under this cloud, uncertain about their work, income or the lives and welfare of their families. The health of many people has suffered both mentally and physically as a result, their families left in a permanent and unnatural state of anxiety and confusion. Drivers have to explain to their children and friends that they are not abusers of animals, some have been refused when seeking to adopt rescue dogs because they work in the carriage trade. “It’s so hard on the families, ” one driver’s wife told me in New York. “We have been living in a war zone for years. It is awful to have to explain to your children why the awful things said about their father on TV are not true.”
The carriage trade people have suffered much more than the horses have, something that quickly becomes clear to anyone who bothers to look, listen and ask, to talk with them. There are many concerns raised about the horses, none about the people who live and work with them. No one in government or the animal rights movement has shown a shred of empathy or compassion for them or any concern about their welfare.
The mayor of New York and the animal rights groups are determined – with no evidence of any wrongdoing – to take away the liberty of the people in the carriage trade. To close their stables, deny them their long tradition of working with horses, to take away their income and their subsistence. The mayor and his supporters seek to deny them their way of life, work that has been handed down to them at great cost and labor by their parents and grandparents, none of whom ever had any reason to doubt the future they were passing down. In New York City, the idea of rights for animals has become a corrupted and inverted system of values.
In seeking to ban their horses, the government is also seeking to take away their property, their possessions – the horses themselves, the most valuable things they own, the source of their income. It is extraordinarily rare in American history for government to take away the work and property of people who have committed no crimes, are not a threat to the public welfare – no human being in New York has ever been killed by a carriage horse, hundreds are killed by cars every year – have broken no laws and violated none of the 144 pages of regulations that govern them.
The legislation proposed by the animal rights groups and supported by the mayor of New York would forbid the carriage trade owners from selling their horses to any entity that would require them to work or generate income for any human beings. They could only be sold to rescue or private farms.
Beyond this, the mayor of New York has said the only thing he will discuss with the carriage horse drivers is the details of their transition to driving vintage electric cars, which he and the animal rights groups say will replace the horses in Central Park. No one has asked the drivers if they wish to do this work or will do it – we seem to have forgotten the idea of free choice and will. No one has asked the public either, so far the people of the city and the people preserving Central Park seem almost universally revolted by the idea. Locke wrote passionately about the King’s power to force citizens into the army or other work against their will. “It is the role of government,” he said, “to support free will and free choice, not to curb it.”
It is said that Americans no longer read textual essays like this one, that they just eyeball, click, like, share and scroll through videos and bits of information; that there is no such thing as truth or fact. I see that my writings about them are being read carefully, and in many different places. Words matter, so does truth and justice, the horses are speaking to us.
As the arguments rage on about the carriage horses, it is time at last to talk about the rights of humans. I love the animals in my life, they are not my equals or superiors. They deserve rights, but not rights at the expense of people. My animals are totally dependent on me, they have no conscience, no tools with which to alter their lives or improve them, they cannot write plays or books, invent democracy, vote for their leaders, halt the ravages of climate change. They need the goodwill of people in order to thrive, and unfortunately the animal rights movement in its current incarnation is alienating many more people than they are helping animals to get rights. Animals are not superior to people, they are not due lives that our better than ours. They share the earth with us, and all of its joys and travails.
No one has the right to banish the carriage horses from New York. No one has the right to take work away from the people in the carriage trade, no one has to right to damage their health or seize their property. No one has the right to redefine legal notions like cruelty and abuse to fit the mood of the mob at the moment. Mobs are, by nature, fickle and dangerous. Laws are meant to protect all of us from the rage and fevers of the mob. The campaign against the horses is a hysteria, not a movement to support the lives of animals. If they can do it to these people, they can do it to us. And if they succeed here, they will.
Locke wrote that if the moral obligation of government was the preservation of freedom, the duty of the citizen was to preserve justice. Whenever I write about the carriage horses, I put myself in the shoes of a carriage driver. The issue becomes very clear. We are all carriage drivers in this time, what they do to them is done to us. That is our obligation.
When government fails to protect freedom and property, wrote Locke, it loses it’s moral authority. The unseen tragedy of the carriage horses is that this is already happening, right before us, anyone can see it if they look.
I had a panic attack Sunday afternoon, it is the first one in some time, my life used to be bounded by them. When Maria and I first got together, we were both living in he most acute panic and anxiety, we felt like two children on a life raft in a typhoon, we just clung to each other. Once in awhile, the trauma, change, turmoil and joy of the past five or six years catches up with me. I get exhausted just thinking about my life, which felt like one of those car wrecks in the big action movies, it just came apart. I will always be putting it back together, perhaps the most creative challenge of my life.
Panic attacks are wicked things, mine can last a few days, they just take my breath away. When I started the blog, I swore to myself that I would write honestly and openly about fear because so many people feel it, especially in our fragmented and phobic culture. I’ve learned a lot about fear, I’ve dealt with it every day of my life, so has Maria. Fear is a killer of things, a smotherer of things. It cripples our thinking and our actions.
People will throw their lives and dreams away rather than risk failure or accept fear. Fear is a great killer of lives and spirits. I believe courage is to never let one’s actions be influenced by my fears, when I am afraid of something I know that it is usually something I need to do.
“I love the man that can smile in trouble,” wrote Thomas Paine, “that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection…” Me, too, that is the man I hope to be, that I sometimes am.
We live in a great system of fear. We are afraid to leave our paychecks, our IRA’s, our mortgages, our pensions and retirement funds, our dreams and our passions, work that we love, peace of mind and freedom. We admire the leap of faith, but cannot always make it. We are told every day that subjugation is responsibility, that fear is the toll we pay for our health care, our ticket to security. I look around me and see everywhere, slaves to fear, people pushed into hollow lives, told every day their dreams are not practical, our world is too complex and expensive.
But they are never told that living in fear is a choice, not a sentence.
I have learned to study fear to death, to think it down to size. I can never run away from fear, I will never completely control or fully suppress it. I can understand it and think about it, learn from it, consider, look in squarely in the eye and said to it, “you are not in charge of me, you are a ghost, mist in the morning, echoes in the brain, just another shirt to wear sometimes.”
When I am afraid, I get up, I read a book, I write something, take a beautiful photo, look at the incontrovertible evidence that life can be beautiful, free and filled with fulfillment. I love a man that can smile at fear.
I also love and admire the responsible man and woman, they are heroes in our time, they are doing the best they can. But fear is not something to ever get comfortable with, to surrender to, to live for. It is not our inevitable state, there are always choices to be made. Fear is a geography, a space to cross. I love the man or woman who can wake up in the middle of the night, shivering in terror, wondering if they will get through the day, cope with the world, dare to find love and meaning, Then they take the fear in their hearts and pull the strength from it, and walk bravely out into the world to live their lives.
