When I moved to my farm upstate, my wife then did not come, and did not wish to come. We began to move apart, she drawn into her work as a journalist in New York, me falling deeper and deeper into my life on a farm with animals, and the chance to write about them day and night. I knew I could never go back. I came to know she could never come with me.
I did not see until it was too late what the move really said about my life and long marriage. I took care of the farm, she visited once every month or so and we both told ourselves and I told the world that this is what a good marriage is, a marriage where people are free to live and work apart and love one another so much it doesn’t matter.
There is one thing we did together, we planted lilac bushes, the traditional bush of the family she farm, the bushes memorialized by the great poet Walt Whitman when President Lincoln was assassinated. It was something we did together in the waning days of our marriage together, it gave me hope that our marriage was not lost.
That was not what was to be, but I appreciate lilacs and love to see them bloom as beautifully as ours. Thank you, Paula, for that. This is in memory of our plantings.
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“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
I believe dog training starts the moment the dog arrives, and continues until they die or move on. Fate has all the makings of a great dog. Karen Thompson says – correctly – that good training is 50 per cent breeding and genetics, the other 50 per cent is up to the human. She comes with a clean slate, it is up to Maria and me what is drawn there.
Fate has been with us three days now. She is housebroken, responds to her name, comes when called about 70 per cent of the time. She chews on her toys, not our things. She is very energetic, very smart, she crawls through tiny spaces, pushes doors open, gets mouthy with people and things. She is intensely social, we continue to socialize her.
She is behaving beautifully in Maria’s studio, she sleeps there, lies in her crate, leaves Maria to do her work. Working dogs will do this for people, they seem to grasp the nature of work.
Fate barks when she sees Minnie, who runs from her. Flo stands her ground and looks her in the eye, and Fate backs away. She wants no part of Flo. Flo is fearless. At night, she needs help in slowing down, I put my foot on a long lede and keep it there, she cannot move far. She struggles to get away, barks in protest, then lies down and begins learning how to be still.
I insist that she learn to be calm in our house, she has a lot of good stuff to chew, but she must learn to settle down.
She watches Red through the fence as he herds the sheep, she is intent on it. We are not taking her to sheep any longer.
We are working on two things at the moment. The first is calming training, a passion of mine. Dogs like Fate (and most Labs) know how to do everything but nothing, and nothing is what they most need to learn how to do. I don’t want a hyper or crazy dog, a crate helps her stay calm within herself, occupy herself, calm her sometimes frantic energy. When we are not watching her, and she is in the house, she is in a crate.
No surprises, no trouble, no accidents. She can do nothing but chew on her stuff and settle down. Already, she goes to the crate when she is tired.
Maria is doing much of the training now, I helped get it started. She feeds Fate, walks her, takes her out, gives her treats – all of these are bonding behaviors. Shaping behaviors occur when the dog is given a chance to do what we want them to do, so we can praise them for it and mark, or shape their behavior.
We are training Fate to walk off-leash on our country roads and paths in the woods. Dogs ought not be given the opportunity to misbehave – this is why crates are so important. They must also be given a chance to do good. On our walk, we took the leash off of Fate for several minutes at a time. Maria offers her treats, praise and excitement when she comes when called, which she mostly does.
We never give her a command we do not know we can enforce. Shouting a lot of frustrated words at confused dogs wrecks most training quickly. If we say “come,” she has to come, even if we have to slowly pull her to us. We do not yell her name when she is clearly distracted or paying no attention. We wait until she is watching, or we use the leash to pull her to us then praise her for being there.
Dogs this age do not have long attention spans or deep reasoning skills, so training needs to be light and clear and quick. We walked quickly ahead and Fate tended to follow. Once or twice, she got stuck sniffing something, we walked ahead quickly. She would look up, be startled that we were come, and come running to us. Then, we could shower her with praise.
We did very well for the first day. She walked a quarter-of-a-mile up the hill with Maria, on the way back she ran into neighbor’s barn to investigate some smells. A reminder to take nothing for granted, we will work at it a little bit every day. We are shaping a behavior. We walk up this road every day, it will become a tradition. If she never runs off these next few says (border collies are not nose dogs, they rarely run away from their people, they’d rather herd them). Maria praises her, offers treats and affection. I believe she is getting this, and by the end of next month, she will be there.
I am mindful she is a small, not yet developed dog. She needs a lot of patience and clarity. And a lot of love.
The schism between people with pets and people with animals, and the great conflict over animal rights and animal welfare, has cause great controversy and confusion when it comes to understanding animals. We do not seem to know any longer what is the moral way to see animals and what is immoral.
Most people have lost touched with animals, and only understand the lives of pets, and partly because of this, it seems moral to many people to treat all animals as pets, and to drive them out of the everyday lives of people, and thus, out of the world.
The New York Carriage horses are a testament to this new confusion. The mayor of New York City, who has never owned a dog or a cat, has been led to believe it is immoral for horses to pull light carriages on asphalt in Central Park. He is seeking to ban the horses from the city because he believes that this is the moral thing to do.
In fact, he will be destroying the good lives of the horses, and the good lives of the people who own, live and work with them. We all see the world through our own lens, but I believe history and common sense will ultimate make it clear that his path is not the moral one.
Some ideas about morality and animals in the modern world:
l. It is not moral to drive animals from the world, the moral choice is to keep them among us and in our every day lives. The animals of the world, domesticated or not, are vanishing from the world, only the pets are surviving. The remove of each animal – every carriage horse, every elephant, each pony in a farmer’s market – from the lives of people is a tragedy, and most often, death sentence in the modern world. It is not moral to kill an animal in order to save it.
2. It is not moral to use animals to dehumanize, assault, intimidate, frighten or hate and harm human beings. Love and compassion stand on their own ground, in their own terms it is not moral to claim to love an animal white abusing a person. Animals and people are partners in the joys and travails of life, they are not the same thing, they are different things, but neither can survive in the world without empathy and compassion, dignity and respect.
3. It is not moral to deprive working animals of work. Asian elephants, draft horses, donkeys, ponies, sheep, many dogs, have been working for and with humans for thousands of years, helping one another to survive, building a safer and more peaceful world. It is the moral duty of human beings to give working animals – draft horses, herding dogs, ponies in the farmer’s markets, farm animals, even those earmarked for food and human consumption – and yes, some elephants in the circus, the right to work with people. It is their only pathway to survival and purpose and humane treatment on a planet where the natural world has been destroyed.
Animals that work with people enable human and animal lives, working animals with work survive, it is immoral to condemn them to inactive and purposeless lives in the name of morality. It is the very opposite of moral.
4. It is immoral for citizens of the world to lose contact with the natural world, with the lives of farmers, with the lives of animals. The earth is bleeding, animals are struggling to survive. People who make judgements about their care and welfare and rights are behaving in a profoundly immoral way if they know nothing about them or what they truly need to live in a healthy and humane way. It is immoral to not understand where food comes from, how it is prepared, what the real life on a real farm is like. Mother Earth demands that we understand her and help her to heal.
5. It is immoral to see animals only through the prism of abuse, neglect and elitism. It is immoral to stop the poor, the working class, the elderly from adopting animals that would bring them comfort and give millions of animals purpose and meaning – and homes. It is immoral to denigrate the things animals and people have learned to do together as “stupid tricks,” or to deride carriage drivers as “random people,” or farmers as ignorant abusers of animals.
6. It is immoral to misuse the notion of abuse and apply it to the normal, real and ancient lives of animals. It is immoral to accuse people of abuse and cruelty when they are guilty of neither, the targets of arbitrary and unthinking redefinitions of animal rights.
For most of human history, we were sporadically concerned with the idea of animal welfare, that is promoting the humane and merciful treatment of animals. In our time, this notion has been supplanted by the idea that animals are entitled to the same rights as human beings. The people who once determined the future of animals knew them and lived with them – much of America was still in populated agricultural areas. Today, most Americans lived along the coasts and their idea of morality and animals is increasingly ideological, remote and detached. Like the mayor of New York City, many of the people speaking for the rights of animals know nothing about them.
This has caused great suffering and conflict to people and the animals they live with. We no longer have a rational or moral view of animals and their future in the world, and there is a new social awakening about the disappearance of animals from our lives. The New York Carriage horses have, for many, become a symbol of this confusion and the great harm it can do.
It is immoral to condemn working animals to lives of idleness and irrelevance. It is wrong to drive them to extinction and out of the lives of people. It is wrong to end the way of life that has led so many people to lives with animals and a powerful connection to them. It is wrong to separate animals from the people who have come to know and love them. It is immoral. The moral thing is for the horses to remain in New York City, and live their good and safe – not perfect lives.
Fate continues her exploration of the farm, but with her big brother close at hand. She was dying to check out the donkeys, but when they returned the favor, she ran to Red. The donkeys see to be getting used to her.
“Environment: the social and cultural forces that shape the life of a person or population.” – dictionary.com
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So this is what you should do, wrote Walt Whitman, you should love the earth, and the sun, and the animals.
Every single human being who loves any or all of these things has a personal stake in the outcome of the struggle of the New York Carriage Trade to survive in New York.
It is a horrifying thing when we have to fight our own government to save the environment, that is the new chapter in the agonizing and profoundly unjust assault on the New York Carriage Horses, the people who live and work with them, and the environment of New York’s Central Park, the crown jewel of the city’s history and one of the world’s great examples of preservation, urban design and civic vision.
The mayor of New York has asked the City Council to ban the carriage trade and send the horses out of New York City. He says carriage work for horses is immoral and seeks to replace them with expensive and very large vintage electric cars, which he claims will be better for the environment than horses. In fact, the coalition of animal rights organizations seeking to ban the horses have claimed that the horses damage the environment because they slow traffic when they walk through the streets – this, they say, adds to global warming, and because they drop manure on the roads in Central Park.
The City Council has scheduled hearings on the proposed ban in June, and is expected to vote on the ban in July. The fate of the ban proposal is uncertain, the carriage trade lobbyists feel the ban would fail if the vote was today, but the mayor and his aides are intensely lobbying for their ban, and the uncertainty and fear that has hung over the carriage trade for many years is likely to continue.
As required by law, the mayor has appointed an environmental review study of the proposed ban – what would the environmental impact be if the horses were taken from the park? He shocked and enraged the carriage trade and many City Council members by appointing a long-time animal rights activist – one with close business ties to the millionaire who has been lobbying for the ban for years, to head the commission.
Of all the curious twists and turns of the carriage horse controversy, none is stranger than this idea that banning the horses and removing them from the city is somehow good for the environment. There is nothing more natural than animals living and working with people, it is seminal part of the history of the earth and of human life. Animals have enriched human lives since the beginning of recorded time, if you look at the faces of the children who see the carriage horses for the first time, you can see that they still do.
I know of no legitimate environmentalist who believes that vintage electric cars – the one meant for Central Park cost more than $500,000 for a single prototype – is more eco-friendly than a horse. The cars will have engines that generate heat and will require a substantial amount of steel, rubber, vinyl and other materials to build.
The horses do drop some manure, but the carriage trade has, for years, employed people to clean it up and remove it from the park. The horses have been dropping manure for 150 years with no record of having harmed anyone, the many thousands of motorized pedicabs, cars, trucks and other vehicles pouring through the park each day spew tons of carbon and fumes into the air. It defies any idea about common sense to claim the cars are more eco-friendly than the big draft horses.
Then there is the environmental history and vision of the park. Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of the park, wrote that he designed the park so that people of all classes and incomes could see the carriage horses streaming through the park on paths and bridges he specifically designed for them.
Thomas Kinney, “an associate professor of history at Bluefield College in Virginia – wrote a book about the horse-drawn carriage trade. He told the Wall Street Journal that “Central Park was created as a venue for the carriages … It was a chance for people living in crowded urban areas to go for a drive in the country without leaving New York.'”
The 1974 Central Park Designation Report, which accompanied the decision to landmark Central Park, describes the “picturesque serpentine carriage drives” where a “brilliant array of carriages drawn by horses . . . were a conspicuous feature of the afternoon drive when New Yorkers turned out in force to see and be seen,” and notes that “some of the many footpaths which laced the park . . . followed the drives at certain points so that the pedestrian could also have a good view of the passing parade.”
The horses are as much of the park’s history and design as the fountains and flower gardens and paths.
There is also the issue of animals and the environment. The carriage horses are the last domesticated animals to live and work in Manhattan or almost all of New York City. If you believe animals are important to human history and human life, it is time to pay attention to the New York Carriage Horse controversy, a significant escalation of the national movement that is replacing concerns over animal welfare with legislation supporting animal rights. In New York, the animal rights movement finally elected a mayor who was one of them. He said his very first act would be to ban the carriage horses, he failed in that promise, and may fail again in a few weeks.
I believe that human beings are broken without animals, to me, there are few issues affecting our social and literal environments than the need to keep animals in our every day lives. Alice Walker says that an animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language, the psychologist and animal scholar Boris Levinson wrote in 1963 if the animals disappear from the lives of people, then humanity will be broken, and will turn to pets in desperation to heal. This prophecy has come true. There were 15 million owned dogs in the United States when Levinson wrote “Pets And Human Development,” there are more than 75 million owned dogs in America today.
But the number of animals, as opposed to pets, is diminishing rapidly. The World Wildlife Federation estimates half the animal species in the world have disappeared since 1970. And it seems the animal rights movement is working feverishly to get rid of the other half, and claiming the mantle of speaking for the rights of animals.
The campaign against the carriage horses is an inversion of morality, it is an exploitation of morality. Work is not cruel for working animals. The carriage horses, far from being abused, are considered by behaviorists and horse trainers to be the luckiest horses in the world – they have food, medical care, shelter and stringent regulations governing their work and lives. The truly abused animals – those suffering in industrial factory farms – don’t seem to bother the mayor of New York as he sets forth his new national progressive agenda.
While many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, writes author Michael Pollan, “in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in our history.” And we are dooming many more animals than we save. People who say they support the rights of animals are quick to try and ban carriage horses from New York, ponies from farmer’s markets where they give rides to children, elephants from the circuses, where all their tricks are labeled “stupid.” Yet there is little real consideration given to where these animals will go, who will care for them and take responsibility from them once they are removed from the visible human world.
“The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality… the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals — and specifically the loss of eye contact — has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species,” writes Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma
We are confused. Our entire idea about animals seems to be centered on rescue and abuse, not reality or survival. We are quick to judge circus trainers, carriage drivers, pony ride operators, but slow to take responsibility for what we are doing to our environment, and for our destruction of the natural world of almost all of the animals on the earth.
Will the environment really be helped or saved in any way by banning the horses from Central Park and replacing them with cars? The mayor’s stacking of his environmental commission with a well-known animal rights activist is a grotesque assault on the environment, and of the history and vision of one of the world’s greatest man-made creations: Central Park. If the horses are gone, our greatest city will lose any connection with the animal world, will break the ancient contract between people and horses that has been cherished and honored for centuries. It will also destroy the lives and figures of many hundreds of people who live and work with the horses and depend on them for their livelihood.
And there is this issue of joy, romance and magic. Imagine the park with no horses, filled with more big cars, pedicabs, taxis, bicycles? For generations, the horses have delighted children, tourists, lovers, residents, there is magic in them, they touch us, make us smile, envelop the park with a timeless sense of time and place. It is their home in so many ways, not ours, what a travesty to ban them and replace them with more cars, and then claim the environment is being helped?
In his dishonest and ill-considered assault on the carriage trade, the mayor has betrayed the horses, his promises to support the working class, and now, the environment as well. Is it really progressive to remove animals from the world, put people out of work, pave the way for yet more development and towers?
Animals have always shaped the cultural and social forces of New York City and our world. They were – and are – the living soul of Central Park. The horses are the only animals left in New York who are not pets, the city could give them a better life if it wished, easily and economically. Banning them is an act of cowardice, cruelty and denial. It will mark the end of a way of life, a sacred connection between people and horses that helped define what environment means.
The mayor has seen to it that we will never see or read a real environmental assessment of their potential removal from New York, I imagine he would not care for an honest one.
But there is, I think, an awakening. Many people rallying to the side of the carriage trade, and to the excesses of the movement that claims to speak for the rights of animals. They dread a joyless world without animals, a place where people who call themselves progressive tolerate machines without limits but cannot find the money, room or soul to keep 200 carriage horses in their safe and protected world, where they walk right through the every day lives of countless people.
