Red has his bi-annual standoff with some Vermont Alpacas today, we went to Brandon, Vt. to drop off the shorn wool from our sheep so Maria can sell the yarn and the roving. I always take Red over to see the Alpacas, it is always interesting to watch. The Alpacas are fascinated with Red, they rush to the fence, stare at him, try to get his attention. Red’s philosophy is that there are no Alpacas. He won’t look at them, try and herd them, accept their curious gazes, bark at them or sniff them. They are just not there. Border collies can be pretty smart.
The carriage trade and the Teamsters Union, organizers of Mondays’ noontime rally to save the jobs of the carriage drivers, to be held on the steps of New York’s City Hall asked me today if I would write a statement about my feelings about the proposed ban on the carriage trade so they could circulate it to the media at the rally.
I wrote it this afternoon and sent it along, I thought it only fair to share it with you also:
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Statement:
Beyond the politics of New York City, the long assault on the carriage trade and the ban being proposed by the mayor has mesmerized and horrified much of the animal world beyond. There is a lot at stake here for animals and the people who love them, in New York City and elsewhere.
Horses have lived and worked and helped build every one of the great cities of the world, from Rome to New York. Why, after thousands of years of this glorious partnership between animals and people, it is suddenly cruel and abusive for them to remain among us?
We need a wiser understanding of animals than this. We need to find a better way of treating the people who own and live and work with them.
The horses call to us to have a real dialogue about the future of animals in crowded cities, not this false and meaningless farce of a dialogue, the one going on in New York.
There are real questions to be considered and discussed here, none of them are being considered or discussed by the mayor or his allies in the movement that claims to speak for animals, but does not really.
Who speaks for animals in our world, what are their rights, who defines their welfare? Can they be kept safely in our world, or must they be driven a way to rescue farms and slaughterhouses, where they will never been seen again and will vanish from the earth, as so many other species have.
The city that built Central Park can find a way to keep the carriages horses here, that is by no means the greatest challenge New York faces.
It is clear by now – many veterinarians, behaviorists, trainers, equine advocates and rescue groups, writers, reporters and city residents, police and health department inspectors have testified to it – that the carriage horses are not being abused or mistreated.
The organizations in New York seeking the ban of the carriage trade have simply reinvented the idea of abuse and what it means to suit a political, not an animal agenda.
Their shrill and dishonest campaign has failed to convince anyone in New York that the carriage trade is cruel. Sixty-six percent of New Yorkers want the horses to stay, along with all three newspapers, the Working Families Party, the Chamber of Commerce.
The carriage horses are not abused. To the contrary, famed horse trainer Buck Brannaman, the inspiration for the movie “Horse Whisperer” have said that the carriage horses are the fortunate horses, they have work, are well supervised and cared for, are healthy and content.
The worst thing for horses, says Brannaman, is so sit around with nothing to do but drop manure. The carriage horses are lucky. Like people and border collies, they need something to do.
Sadly, that is not true for the many horses in America who are being abused and neglected, the carriage horses are not among them.
The truth is that these are not the horses that need rescuing, these are not the people who abuse animals. If any New Yorker comes to my upstate county, I will show them what it means for a horse to be abused – horses living without shelter, adequate medical care, good and fresh food. Horses with sores, cracked hooves, covered in filth, out in the snow.
I can show them horse rescue farms struggling to feed the sick and dying animals they have already, laboring to take on huge and healthy draft horses and feed them for years.
More than 155,000 horses were sent to slaughter in Mexico and Canada in the past year, it is simply not rational and surely not humane to send horses that are safe, healthy and well cared for out into the catastrophe that is engulfing horses and overwhelming horse rescue farms all over America. And filling slaughterhouses.
They could meet Simon, my donkey, who was taken by the troopers from a nearby farm, he was starved, covered in lice and sores, his hooves had grown out a foot on either side, they had not been trimmed in years, his teeth had grown into his jaw, he was ours from being dead.
Perhaps some of the millions spent in New York to ban the horses and win over the mayor could have gone to Simon or the many animals in New York and elsewhere who are really suffering.
No reputable equine expert believes it is cruel for working horses to pull light carriages on asphalt and flat ground through Central Park. Draft horses were bred to work, like border collies and police horses and bomb-sniffing dogs in the train stations, and therapy dogs and search-and-rescue dogs.
Here’s the thing. Horses are not dogs, they are not cats, they are not furbabies or children. All animals are not pets. The horses are real animals who come from the real world of animals. They are not depressed in the park, or lonely, they do not make career choices and pine for the mythical wild where they have never lived and would not last long.
They need to work, it is central to their health and well-being.
How does one accept the mayor’s claim that it is immoral for horses to be in the city, but moral for police horses to be stabled and housed in the same places and in the same way? Or for dogs to live in the train tracks of Amtrak sniffing for bombs that could tear them to pieces?
No carriage horse in New York works as hard as my border collie Red, who does not get five weeks of vacation, does not have an air-conditioned bedroom, who works in heat and cold and is regularly butted and trampled by ewes and rams?
When will they come for him?
Horses have always lived and worked in cities, been housed in stables, been connected to people. Draft horses have never lived in the so-called freedom of the wild, they were never bred for it, would have no idea how to survive.
Carriage horses in the wild would struggle to find enough food (they eat four large bales of hay a day), be easy prey for predators, and suffer from exposure, cold and heat, the absence of medical care, violent conflicts with other horses, or any kind of regulation or human attention, which they crave and have always known.
That’s why they have never lived in “freedom.”
Although much has been made of the danger the horses pose to the congested city, this myth is no more real than the allegation that the horses are being cruelly treated.
In the 150 years of the carriage trade, no human being has ever been killed by a carriage horse. Just this fall, two people walking in Central Park were killed by bicyclists.
The mayor is not proposing to ban bicycles from the park, he is seeking to make the park safer for bicycles and pedestrians. Why is the same principle not applicable to the carriage horses, who have killed no one? There are many theories that are ugly and disturbing, the banning process seems to have undermined the idea of a progressive city committed to fairness and freedom. It makes no sense to animal lovers anywhere.
I know of nowhere else in the world where giant electric cars are considered more eco-friendly than these gentle and biddable horses. A rational and progressive society would be working to keep their horses, not to banish them.
Famed biologist Jared Diamond has said said that draft horses are the most domesticable animals for cities on the earth, they are friendly to other species, trainable, strong, calm and adaptable.
Conditions for them have only improved in New York City, not worsened. A century ago, dozens of horses died in New York streets each week from fires, disease, collisions, mud ruts, rat bites, animal attacks. It is an utter and ignorant (of history) idea that horses can not life safely in the crowded streets of New York. Veterinary and health officials have found no evidence of any kind of respiratory disease caused by the city fumes that the horses are supposed to be sucking in every day.
No horse in New York City died from anything but natural causes in 2014. In the past decade, there have been only a handful of accidents occurring among millions of rides. No animal or human has a better safety record in New York than the carriage horses and the carriage trade.
One could easily argue that horses are better suited to cities than dogs, they do not bite hundreds of people every year and send scores of children to the hospital for treatment of bites.
Dogs remind us that animals can adapt to the city if there is a will, and if people will fight for their right to own and keep them, as the carriage trade is doing for their horses.
As animals vanish from the world, pressured by development, climate change and human greed and predation, the people in the carriage trade have found a way to keep animals like horses in the city, and care for them well.
The carriage horses are loved all over the world, they symbolize the magic of New York, the beauty of Central Park, the romance and magic that animals can bring to our lives.
Central Park was created in part for the carriage horses, they are as natural and organic to the park as beautiful trees and walkways.
Beyond those and other issues, the campaign against them has been marked by cruelty, abuse and harassment, it seems ironic that the mayor wishes to ban the horses, who have harmed no one, while he sanctions the worst kind of abuse to the people in the carriage trade, mostly innocent human beings who have committed no crimes, broken no laws, violated none of the many regulations that govern them.
Online, in the streets, at demonstrations, the people in the carriage trade have been accused of abuse, torture, neglect, greed and cruelty. Hardly any of these accusations have been proven or found to be accurate.
Abuse is not an argument on Facebook, it is a crime, and no person in the carriage trade is being accused of it or has been convicted of it.
People who love animals wish to keep them in our lives and in our world – the horses live in the heart of our greatest city already. The people in the carriage trade say they are open to any suggestions for making the lives of the horses even better and safer, but the mayor will not speak to them, and no member of the movement that calls itself an animal rights movement has visited their stables or will speak to them.
This is not progressive, it is not democratic, it is not fair or just to take the work and sustenance away from hundreds of people who have done no wrong and been given no due process of any kind.
I can speak for many lovers of animals and horses outside of New York City. We applaud the carriage trade for finding a way to keep horses healthy and busy and profitable in New York City. We stand with them.
We need to keep these horses in our world, their have the right to be here, they belong here as much as we do, they do more good than most of us do.
They feed scores of families, send children to college, put roofs over the heads of hard working and honest people. They bring joy to countless people. There is not a tourist or child on the earth who would not oppose the mayor’s ban, given a voice or a chance to speak.
Those of us who love animals would hope the mayor and the city government and the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights would work to make the lives of the horses even better and safer, rather than establish a Kangaroo Court with a pre-conceived agenda to drive them away.
From my perspective, outside of the city I love the most and have lived in several times happily, it seems as if the White Rabbit has taken over the ban proposal. The carriage drivers have done no wrong. Off with the carriage drivers heads.
John Locke, the British philosopher who conceived of the idea of liberty and moral government, said it is the purpose of government to protect the freedom and property of it’s citizens. Not to take it away without cause.
That might be the biggest issue of all in this painful and poignant struggle.
The cruelty and dishonesty of the long campaign against the carriage trade suggests that the horses need to be represented by people who understand them and their real lives and needs. People who know something about animals, and who will treat the horses and the people who own and live with them with dignity and respect.
Nobody like that seems to be a part of the process to banish the horses from New York.
I believe – and so do many others – that there is no greater right for animals than the right to remain and survive in our world. For the love of animals, and for their true rights, and for the rights of people, the ban against the carriage trade needs to fail.
Tomorrow, Monday, Maria and I are going to New York City to stand with our brothers and sisters in the animal world, the New York Carriage Drivers.
If you meet the members of this very diverse group of men and women, the first thing that may strike you, a thing that sets them apart from many other people in our world, is that they love what they do.
Driving a carriage horse is not simply a job for them, it is a way of life, it is something they love to do. In modern day America, individuals who love their work, who love what do, who are grateful for their work are increasingly rare, they are precious to me, they remind us of the enslavement that comes from doing work we hate for people who don’t care about us in places we don’t wish to be.
You can see this love of life in their faces, you can hear it in the stories they love to tell.
These are immigrants, sons and daughters of the American Dream, they are also the sons and daughters of immigrants who set their own hours, work outdoors in one of the world’s most beautiful parks, where horses have pulled carriages for more than 150 years in peace and safety and won the hearts and spirits and good memories of countless residents, visitors, lovers, children and animal lovers. They work outdoors, free from office labor and corporate constriction, they are almost all following in the footsteps of parents, grandparents, ancestors.
On the eve of Christmas, the city’s mayor and his very wealthy friends in the animal rights movement are asking the City Council to banish this world, to take it away forever. The lives of the horses are stake, but so much more is at stake as well, so much more may be lost if the carriage trade is banned from New York.
The people who seek to ban the horses know not what they do. This is a dreadful mistake that can never be undone. If the horses are banished from New York, they will never been seen in the city again, a generation of children will come of age in the great city not knowing what a horse is like or even looks like.
The carriage drivers, writes Pamela Rickenbach, a former carriage driver and the co-director of Blue-Star Equiculture, the retirement and rescue home of draft and work horses, are carrying the burden of utter uncertainty about the future.
“Will it be the end of life as they know it? For so many of them, it is all that they know, all they do, all they want to do. A way of life, legacy, heritage, culture, tradition from so many different countries. New York City stands to lose a precious and deep garden of humanity.”
Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Sioux Nation, came to New York to see the horses last summer. Horses, he said, are being driven away everywhere. They are no longer loved or respected or needed. This is a betrayal of humanity and animals. They are our ancient helpers and friends, our cousins in the sacred hoop of life. We need them in our lives, in our world.
The people who seek to ban the horses say the horse must be given their freedom. But freedom from what? It is not humane to take working animals like horses – or border collies – away from their work and force them into meaningless lives without purpose, connection. It is not humane for draft horses to spend their lives standing in pastures and dropping manure. This is the new abuse, the exploitation of animals for the emotional gratification of humans.
It is one thing to fight for safer conditions for the horses, for green space, for traffic lines, better signs, less traffic in the park. It is quite another to seek to ban them from the city. This is not protecting the rights of animals, it is about taking away their most basic right: to live and work and survive among us. Animals that live and work with human beings thrive, animals that do not are vanishing rapidly from the earth.
I am not a carriage driver, I cannot stand in their shoes or in their carriages, but I can go to New York and stand with them and share the grief and loss at seeing a culture destroyed in this thoughtless, cruel and profoundly unjust way. No democratic government has the right to take away the property and culture and tradition of honest and hard-working people who have committed no crimes, broken no laws, violated no regulations.
I am grateful that the carriage drivers are finally rallying in public to save their jobs. The mayor refuses to speak with them or meet with them, no member of any animal rights organization has ever visited their stables or asked to speak with them. They have been dehumanized and abused, and they remind us that it is not possible to love an animal and hate human beings.
I have learned this year that the horses have powerful spirits, they are calling me and many others to pay attention to their plight and the plight of the few remaining people who keep them to their ancient partners: human beings.
I believe their call for help is being heard, I am grateful for the opportunity to go to New York City and stand with my brothers and sisters in the animal world: the carriage drivers, the keepers of the carriage horses.
I go as well to honor our culture, our freedom, our own sense of decency and fairness. This is the call of John Locke, the philosopher who invented the idea of liberty and democratic government, one of the founders of our very idea of democracy:
“All mankind being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”
Tomorrow, a new social awakening. The carriage drivers ask us to remember who we are, and who we wish to be.
The “My Reader” edition of Lenore’s picture book, “Lenore Finds A Friend” is out not in time for Christmas. It is available everywhere children’s books are sold but if you buy it from Battenkill Books, my local bookstore, I will sign and personalize it and you will also receive a free tote bag that says “Love. Peace.Books.” You can order the book online from Battenkill or call the store at 518 677-2515. “Lenore Finds A Friend” is aimed at children ages 6 to 8. It is a true story, told in words and my photographs.
