The horses call to us to ask, what are people for?
In Brooklyn, Luis Perez was refused permission to adopt an elderly dog who had been living in a shelter for eight months because he has a full-time and part time job. He was told that he was too busy to care for old and gentle Pit Bull. The woman in line ahead of him got a dog because she has a maid coming to the house four days a week.
In Queens, Stephen Malone he refused permission to adopt a dog because he is a New York Carriage Driver and the volunteers at the shelter told him he thus was an abuser of animals. In Santa Monica, California, Tawni Angel, who has been offering pony rides to more than 300 children a week at the farmer’s market, lost her license to give rides to the children after a handful of animal rights demonstrators petitioned the City Council that it is torture for ponies to give rides to children. Supporters of the pony rides brought more than three times as many signatures to the council, they were ignored.
Angel, who faces the total loss of her income, will have to find new homes for the ponies in a dangerous world for equines.
She says “the difference between my home and a family pet home is, we never outgrow the animals like a little girl may outgrow a pony…that’s what breaks my heart. I know they are safe with us!” In Belcher, New York, a county transportation worker struggles to feed his two horses, who live without shelter and adequate hay because there is nowhere to go for aid or support. “I know they are not eating enough,” he says, “but if the animal rights groups find out, they will take the horses away and they will go to auction and then slaughter. I have nowhere to go for help.” In Iowa City, a farmer struggles to feed his donkeys – they guard his sheep – and he has nowhere to turn for help.
Everywhere, there is compassion for animals, there is little for people.
In New York City, hundreds of people live in fear and uncertainty as the future of the carriage trade is suddenly in doubt because a millionaire real estate developer decided it is abuse for horses to work.The carriage drivers have been the victims of almost continuous and slanderous assault and cruel condemnation and abuse for years while the mayor who seeks to end their work and way of life refuses to even speak to them in the name of being humane to animals.
What are people for?
In recent years, the movement to rescue animals that are believed to be abused – in the midst of an ever widening and completely random and extra-legal notion of what abuse is – has become an epidemic, the prism through which we have come to view animals. Animals of all kinds are disappearing from the world of people because it seems the greater compassion we show for animals, the less we show for the human beings who wish to live with them, and who work with them.
Countless animals suffer every week in America as the movement that calls itself a protector of animal rights claims that people are not fit to live with animals, care for them, or deserving of help in keeping them. Everywhere – in farmer’s markets, on pony rides, in carriage horses, circuses, movie sets, agricultural schools, small farms, private homes – it is becoming too complex, controversial, expensive or complicated to own and keep and work with an animal, especially those that are not pets. Animals are disappearing everywhere, just as the carriage horses will disappear if they are banned from New York City.
The animal rights movement has lost sight of their true and original mission to protect the lives and future of animals. Animals can only survive in the new world in conjunction with people, not apart from them and their everyday lives. Animals are not human children. It is not torture for a pony to give a ride to a child any more than it is abusive for a draft horse to pull a carriage through a park. Everywhere – everywhere – there are animals suffering from real abuse and neglect who are ignored and abandoned.
The reality of animals – the reality of the New York Carriage Horse controversy – is that people are increasingly being abused and mistreated everywhere, and animals are disappearing everywhere from public view and the developed world.
The very idea of abuse – redefined almost at will by ideologues and fickle politicians – is sending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of animals to slaughter because there is nowhere for them to go, no work for them to do, fewer and people people like Tawni Angel willing or able to afford and brave the onslaught that often comes with keeping them.
It is easy enough to say that all of these animals are being abused, even easier to abuse the people who live and work and care for them. How is it morally possible to square one with the other?
And people like Tawni Angel – true animal lovers – seem increasingly helpless and resigned. There is no national movement to protect the rights of animal lovers.
But what are people for?
Is there dignity and compassion in losing one’s livelihood, in being publicly and cruelly dehumanized. Is our goal to remove animals from the lives and consciousness of human beings? The horses are awakening us to understand that there is much work to be done, those of us who love animals have abandoned them to the awful fate of having their fates decided by people who hate people. When we dehumanize people, we dehumanize ourselves, when we dehumanize ourselves, we cannot possible build a world that is humane to animals. Compassion is not selective, we don’t get to choose who deserves it, we either offer it or we do not.
In these episodic and wrenching conflicts, we no longer seem to recall or understand what animals truly need, and we have lost sight as well of what people need and deserve.
Animals can only thrive in partnership with people, without animals people are broken and disconnected from their lives, their past and the world. We cannot be compassionate for animals as we become increasingly cruel to people.
“If you want to be happy,” says the Dalai Lama, “practice compassion.” Do we really wish for the unhappiest people in our world to decide the fate of animals?