4 August

The Carriage Horses: Horseshit And The Boundaries Of Protest

by Jon Katz
The Boundaries Of Protest
The Boundaries Of Protest

A friend of mine in the carriage horse trade posted a story online about a farmer who dumped a truckload of horse manure in front of the French National Assembly to protest the policies of the French government. The police arrived and hauled the farmer off before he could drop the entire load, but he made his point and it was a big one.  The manure dump was a major sensation in France, it was covered everywhere and almost universally celebrated and applauded. The farmer touched a deep nerve, it was a classic moment in the rich history of protest.

My friend in the carriage trade was a bit horrified, I think, he said the carriage horse owners and drivers would never do anything that negative, if they ever protested at all. The dropping of manure would simply annoy the public and turn them away from their cause. I think I made him somewhat uncomfortable, my gift to the world.

I said I thought it would be great to take a wagon load of good horse manure – I have great donkey manure – from the carriage horse stables and dump them in front of the offices of PETA or NYClass, the animal rights groups seeking to ban the horses from New York and put hundreds of people out of work for no legal reason. it is after all, where horseshit would be much at home.

The people in the carriage trade are not like the kids from the Occupy Wall Street movement that called for global revolution. They are not barefoot anarchists without a particular cause or purpose. They are just like us, our neighbors, friends and family members. They are generally conservative, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, they are clannish and generally averse to conflict. They have a just cause and a powerful case to make.

Their caution and reticence is why the animal rights movement had nearly carte blanche to abuse them for years, accusing them of all sorts of things that were not true, or were grossly distorted. A compliant and generally clueless media was happy to relay these many falsehoods  as if there was some truth to them.

Almost everyone in New York – me, too- assumed the horses were being cruelly overworked and mistreated. I had no idea that the horses got five weeks of vacation, worked an average of six hours a day, had heated and air-conditioned stalls and were healthy and lived a good long time – longer than horses in the wild or on rescue farms.

In the past year, the carriage trade has begun to fight back, organizing their own media, standing in their truth, making their own statements and they have turned public opinion around in New York, uniting the fractious city to an almost unprecedented degree. 66 per cent of New Yorkers want the horses to stay, so do all three newspapers, the labor unions and the Chamber Of Commerce. Nobody can remember when there was that kind of unanimity about anything in New York. The mayor, who refuses to meet with the carriage trade people, visit the stables or communicate with them in any way – he is happy to talk to the millionaire animal rights activists seeking to banish them – says he does not care what what the people of New York think, he has his own mandate.

Still, protest and media management are not natural gears for the people in the carriage trade, they prefer to work and raise their families.

The animal rights groups are ingenuous, if not especially fact driven or congenial, they have taken the idea of the protest to a whole new level. They don’t really have much to protest – there is absolutely no evidence that the horses in the carriage trade are being abused – but they demonstrate  continuously, usually weekly, mostly just shouting insults at the carriage drivers and the tourists and kids who want to go for rides and holding up photos of horses who fell down years ago. It is true in our world that if you repeat lies loudly and frequently, people will eventually come to believe them, the Internet is the great friend of the lie in many ways.

Is there a better cause for protest than this issue of the carriage horses for anyone who loves animals and the freedom to choose our own way of life?

Protest is not radical or offensive. America was founded on protest and civil disobedience, the founding fathers believed it is the citizen’s duty to protest and defy arrogant and abusive government. Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the government is best which governs least,” and he went to jail rather than pay taxes to support slavery.

Creative protest has taken many twists and turns in America. The patriots went out to Boston harbor to toss tea overboard because of a governmental authority seeking to take the colonists livelihood and way of life away – much the same issues the carriage trade faces. The first feminists rode bareback through the capitol and disrupted Congress to focus attention on women’s rights. Martin Luther King (and Gandhi before him) understood the power of focused and non-violent and symbolic protest, they accomplished more than massive armies with many guns. King believed it was an honor and a duty to protest injustice, and his notions of creative protest worked. He did more with his marches and protests than politicians and legislators did in centuries.

The horses have been visiting me in the night again, and their message is both vivid and clear.  They are showing me images of scores of them blocking off the entrance to Central Park, standing in beautiful and powerful and silent protest to the indefensible effort to banish them from the city and ban the people who own them,  seize their property and force them into work they do not want – driving vintage electric cars around the park. Banning honest and hard-working people is not the business of government,

I also see children all around the horses – every child on the earth would wish the horses to stay, if anyone would listen to them – standing with them as they seal off the park and shut down the traffic all around them.

It is an unacceptable thing to be banned for no reason other than that a millionaire with an angry obsession has purchased a mayor’s will in back rooms and hotel ballrooms.

In contemporary culture, many Americans think protest is posting an angry message on Facebook. Politics means signing a petition or hitting the “like” button. But creative and brave protest is as honored and patriotic an American idea as Fourth of July parades. We have just gotten out of the habit of  going outside.

I don’t quite agree with my cautious friend from the carriage trade, although I understand his caution. When I began researching and writing about this story, I had an open mind about it, like most people, I expected to find the horses in rough shape, worn out and abused, as I had been hearing.

Instead, what I found was a conspiracy of lies that made me angry and makes me angry still. This controversy is an injustice, it should never have happened, there is nothing to it or behind it.

PETA and NYClass – along with their newly-radicalized lapdogs in the S.P.C.A. U.S. Humane Society – have lied repeatedly, distorted the truth about minor and meaningless events, utterly misrepresented both the real lives of the horses and the ways in which they are cared for. They have exploited the good will of animal lovers everywhere by manipulating dishonest imagery in order to collect  money. They have taken a handful of minor and utterly predictable events and sought to portray these gentle beasts as dangerous and destructive, an awful thing to do to and a libel to these gentle and domesticated and hard-working animals.

They have damaged and corrupted the political process by working in secret to flood the decision-making process with money and circumvent any kind of openness, due process or fairness. They are putting hundreds of horses in thoughtless and unnecessary danger misled the public. These are not the horses that need rescue, these are not the people who abuse animals.

I want to tell my carriage horse friends that creative protest is not an ugly or unseemly thing to do. It is the essence of being American, what we can do when government goes too far, what we ought to do.

I would happily donate some of the good and pungent manure that comes to the farm every day from my three donkeys, and from the sheep as well. There is a lot of it and it is good stuff, you could smell it from the NYClass office right to the stables. I think it is the perfect statement to make to people for whom horseshit is standard practice, a means of communicating, an ethical state of being.  I would be happy to load up a truck and drop it off myself.  Martin Luther King said there are times when civil disobedience is the most heroic thing a citizen can do for his country.

And think of the impact. It would be an overnight sensation on Facebook, and Twitter,  it might well awaken many people to the true horseshit – this utterly pointless assault on people who are doing what people have done for thousands of years – working with horses that they value and care for.

And if they hauled me and my manure off to jail, I would be proud, I would think of Thoreau, sitting in his cell.

“Must the citizen for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men [and women] first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

The flies would have to come too.

 

 

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