8 February

Lessons From The Carriage Horse Debacle, Cont. God Save The Horses

by Jon Katz
Lessons From The Debacle
Lessons From The Debacle

There are important lessons to be considered from the collapse last week in New York City of the mayor’s latest effort to destroy the carriage trade and remove the carriage horses from New York. For animal lovers, journalists, for the horses.

At one point – it was some time during last summer, I think, it began to be clear to everyone – reporters, editorial writers, city council members, labor organizations, city residents, animal lovers – that the jihad against the horses (increasingly, the mayor does seem suicidal in his obsession) was not about the welfare of animals.

It was about something else. I will be the first to tell you I don’t know what that something else is,  although everyone in the city is long on opinions and short on proof.

There is a point in any campaign to de-humanize and destroy any social or human entity when it becomes persecution, not politics, and the mayor has passed that point. If he continues, the courts or prosecutors will have to stop him.

Precisely what has driven the mayor in so self-destructive way has never been clear to me.

I do not believe he is simply corrupt, just shilling for real estate developers. His behavior  suggests something of a religious conversation, his robotic and soulless incantations of inhumanity and immorality are chilling, not persuasive.

It seems to me the mayor was Born Again into the animal rights movement sometime during the mayoral campaign- there is no record of his ever having mentioned animals before that – and found a certain kind of  implacable and single-minded faith there that is traditionally associated with zealots and apostles.

Politicians generally run away from things that fail, that is their survival technique. Fanatics never do, but that is the mayor’s characteristic trait on this issue.

There are calls all over the New York City media this week for state and federal authorities to investigate his connections to  NYClass, the animal rights group that has spent millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying and marketing campaigns to ban the carriage trade.

The group gave him an awful lot of money. He has never made it clear what the money is for, or how it relates to his carriage horse policies. Political observers say that is becoming increasingly obvious.

Any politician who invites that kind of scrutiny in the age of Twitter and cable news,  for no reason and without clear justification,  has lost his bearings and is living outside of the realm of conventional political behavior.

I have this feeling if he tries to ban the carriage trade again, the horses may well just finish him off for good.

The collapse of the city council bill last week was not just a crushing defeat for the mayor, it was an equally humiliating defeat for the animal rights movement in New York City. The movement there haslost almost all credibility in their continuing insistence that the carriage horses are somehow being tortured and abused and are suffering from pulling light carriage through the streets of New York and In Central Park.

Their eagerness to send healthy and content animals out into almost certain death and diminishment has shocked and aroused animal lovers all over the country. It is almost unfathomable to claim the horses need to be traumatized, dislocated or killed to keep them away from motor engine exhaust, the fumes that New Yorkers and tourists and their children breathe every day. If it’s not safe for the horses (there is absolutely no evidence to support that), perhaps visitors ought to be banned from Times Square.

The bill’s defeat also shed light on the shortcomings of contemporary media, and offers some lessons on how to report on issues relating to animal welfare and animal rights.

For some years, when an issue has arisen relating to the care and well-being of the horses, most reporters have turned to PETA and NYClass, as if they are credible, detached and informed sources on issues relating to animals. When I first began examining the carriage horse controversy – I am a former reporter, editor, media critic and TV producer – the first thing I found was that the statements being made by these organizations were false and unfounded in almost every instance.

That is now apparent to almost anyone who is paying attention, including the vast majority of New York City residents.

Almost no one involved in the controversy is even claiming the horses are being abused now, yet this was the underlying rationale for years for the whole idea of a ban. One of the animal rights organizations said the animals were lonely, and ought to be released into the wild so they could eat together. No one who has ever witnessed 220 horses trying to eat together would wish that on any of them.

The new rationale is that the horses are unsafe in the city, but no human being has ever been killed in New York by a carriage trade horse, not in more than 150 years. That leaves the mayor without any rationale for banning the horses.

Among the more outrageous lies widely disseminated for years, not months: that the horses were sick and overworked; that they lived in “cells” too small to turn around in; that they were “depressed” because they hung their heads in carriage lines and cocked their legs (signs of relaxation and contentment in equines. Horses are prey animals, they do not lower their heads when anxious. That the horses get no time off (they get at least five weeks a year), that their food is rotten and rodent-infested; that they work in extreme heat and cold, that they are dying from fume-caused respiratory diseases.

You can lie to people for a good long while, but not forever. As these groups lose their credibility and influence, the animals will suffer for it. We do not have a movement that speaks for the rights of animals or their welfare.

No reporter every went to the stables to see for him or herself if these accusations were true, it took waves of horse lovers and veterinarians to show up before these falsehoods were debunked. It wasn’t that no horse had ever  been abused, rather that almost all of the carriage horses were not.

Just look for yourself on the websites of NYClass and the Coalition to Ban Carriage Horses.

You can find what I found. Almost nothing on them is researched, reported, proven or true. No claims are substantiated, no experts are quoted, there is not a single comment from one veterinarian, behaviorist, trainer or animal writer. When NYClass quotes anyone, it is apt to be a TV star or pop singer – Hollywood celebrities love to save animals, it is about the safest cause going, their fans love them for it.

Accusations are different from facts, it is the journalist’s job to tell the difference.

And there are these images of fallen and stricken horses all over the Internet along with pleas for money. Some are horses from New York, some are not.  And how would we know? The images raise a lot of money, but if you can find a single animal, horse or otherwise, that this money has saved, rescued or helped, you are a better journalist than I am. And before you send any, you ought to know the money you send NYClass goes to political contributions, not animals.

They are on their own.

The animals of the world are vulnerable now, they are left without anyone to speak for their future, their welfare, or their rights. The animals rights movement has shown us that they are mired in the past, formed in a time of liberation movements, before the state of the world was clear, while many animals still lived in the wild and in nature. Since 1980, half of the animal species in the world have disappeared, according to the World Wildlife Fund. There is no more wild for them to go to.

Do animals really need an animal advocacy movement that fights to send hundreds of healthy and well cared for horses to join that sorrowful parade?  And that fights all the times to separate animals from people and make them harder to adopt and care for?

Journalistically, this early coverage of the carriage horses was  often both unethical and inexcusable, especially in a city whose media claims to be as tough and sophisticated as New York City’s. Why call NYClass for comment, when they are admittedly, even rabidly,  biased,  and when they also seem to know absolutely nothing about horses or other animals and can claim no expertise or credentials for defining animal welfare or animal health?

I’m afraid the answer is too obvious: they are easy and they are available. And they are loud.

Asking NYClass to talk about the welfare and health of horses is just like asking Donald Trump to talk about civil discourse. There are actually lots of people in the world who know something about horses, I  have found they are readily available and happy to talk about what they have learned.

They are not combatants or ideologues, they are committed scientists, they are just the people journalists should turn to for guidance and comment.

Why not ask the two most prestigious equine veterinary organizations in America instead of people who have never been near a horse and don’t know a thing about them? I find no record of them ever having been quoted by the New York media.

If animals are to remain in our world and be well cared for, it seems urgent that journalism awakens to the real issues that affect the future of animals. They are environmental, not political. And they are social. We need them, they need us, we have always worked well together. They are our partners in the world, it is a tragic mistake to take them away for no reason.

Any serious animal advocate knows that the New York Carriage Horses are not the animals who need millions of dollars spent on them in a false and lost cause. How about using some of those millions to help the nine billion animals trapped in often horrific industrial factory farms?

The carriage trade has figured out how to keep animals among people, to treat them well, give them safe and regulated work and also to help people feed their families. What could be a greater ensurer of their survival than that? Give the carriage trade a medal, not a ban.

This is not shameful abuse or exploitation, this is the model we all should be turning to in order to keep animals alive and on the earth and in our every day lives. That is the best outcome for everyone – animals, people, the environment.

Journalists, of all people, ought to know how to look in the right places for the right information. When I started calling city agencies two years ago to ask about the horses, I was amazed to learn time after time that I was the first person who had ever called them to check out the stories NYClass was feeding daily to eager journalists who seemed in a rush to post accusations, but slow to check any of them out.

___

There are critical lessons too, for animal advocates. The entire civic, cultural, political and business community of New York has rejected the claims of the animal rights organizations – PETA, NYClass, The Coalition To Ban Horse Carriages, The Humane Society Of The United States, The A.S.P.C.A. – that it is cruel for working animals to work and that the horses are lonely, depressed and in need of being banned to private rescue farms and preserves.

In recent years, these groups have all melded together – joined by vast infusions of well-meaning contributions from unknowing people – to join in the new and very radical idea that animals need to be liberated from people. The are not different groups but one group, they speak in the same strident voice now.

As a result, animals like the horses (and ponies, and elephants) are being forced out of their work and away from their long and often meaningful association with people. These animals  are disappearing from our world.

As the lives of animals have gotten more complex, the animal rights solutions have narrowed and calcified: they seek to broaden the definition of abuse, to remove the animals from people and work. They appear to have become an urban political and lobbying and fund-raising movement, disconnected from animals and the natural world.

The animal rights movement as a whole seems to have lost the realization that because some animals are being mistreated, that doesn’t mean that all animals are being mistreated. An animal welfare scenario that can only see animals as abused and can only see people as abusers has failed in the most elemental way to plot a path whereby animals can survive, and remain and live and work with people.

And working and living among people is by far their best opportunity for survival, especially for domesticated animals, as the New York Carriage Horses demonstrate, and as history reminds us.

There are more than 12 million animals languishing in shelters awaiting homes. They need a movement that makes that easier to happen, not more difficult.

The very good news out of New York is that the city’s mayor, for all of the wrong reasons and in the most unknowing and uncaring way, has focused attention on the true plight of domesticated animals in urban areas: their need to stay, not leave.

If there is a debate in New York that very much needs to be held, it is this: how can we encourage and support the carriage trade, which almost alone in the urbanized world has shown us how animals can be kept among people safely and productively and humanely?

Rather than ban the horses, how can we make their lives even more secure, safe and present in the lives of people, including the disabled, the poor, the children? Can we remove some cars from some streets, install horse traffic lanes, work with developers to build bigger and more modern stables? Can we put horses to work in more places, not fewer?

Can we speak for Mother Earth and the environment by asserting in our greatest city that animals are an important alternative source of energy. That they are as important as cars and condos,  as safe as people,  as important as money, campaign contributions and giant and ugly new buildings? The lesson of the carriage trade – this is also often the lesson of the small family farm – is that the people who live and work with animals are not often the ones who abuse them, they know them better than anyone and most frequently love them more than anyone does.

In any debate like this, we lose our way when we turn only to the ideologues and the feckless politicians for guidance. There are plenty of people in the horse and animal world who know what they are talking about, and can guide us in rational and knowing ways about what is best for animals and how we can best keep them  among us. The reporters covering this story would do well to call them.

Scores of veterinarians, behaviorists, trainers and animal lovers traveled to New York to look at the horses and see for themselves, something no reporter in the city did until Liam Neeson showed up at the Clinton stables two years ago. The mayor will not listen or speak with any of these people, their scientific and medical knowledge is of no interest to  him or to the animal rights people.

The mayor doesn’t even pretend to listen to the experts, he only wants to speak about the horses to other ideologues with money.

It looks like many of the rest of us are willing to learn, and that is very good news.

God Save The Horses.

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