I am so happy and grateful to tell you that the converted Canon Monochrome camera arrived this afternoon, Bernie brought it on the UPS truck, I felt like a little boy waiting for his first bike. It is smaller than my other cameras and lighter. I am charging the batteries and poring through the manual, I hope for enough light to at least get a few shots in. I am excited.
The camera above is the new one, I’ve attached my Canon 100 mm macro lens to it, if I get it charged and running, I’ll be ready.
This is a big step for me in my work, and in my notion of photography as an art. I am also humbled and profoundly grateful for the support so many have given me in this project, I could not have done it without you. I asked for help in buying this camera, a Canon 7D digital converted to Monochrome for black and white only by maxmax in New Jersey.
The camera and the conversion cost about $3,000. I have ordered a tripod, a flash, a flash card and a strap. I have not counted all of the money yet, or sorted the Paypal contributions from the voluntary payments and subscriptions, I believe I have just over $3,000, thank you and thank you.
Maxmax bought a new Canon 7D and converted the sensors from color to monochrome. This camera is only for black and white, and it is my hope to get to the next level as a photographer focusing somewhat on black and white. I will still be putting up color photos from the farm with my digital Canon.
I wish I had better words to express my gratitude and your faith in me and respect for my work. You can probably feel it.
I am excited and grateful to be able to grow and be challenged, this will take some learning, patience and experimentation. I will share it with you every step of the way. The contributions have come via Paypal – [email protected] through “Friends And Family,” and my post office Box: P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. I am halting the project tomorrow, if any contributions are on the way, as some of you have messaged me, they will be put to good use. I will take it from there.
I am especially touched that I did not use crowdsourcing sites for this, but just the community on my blog, and we are a community.
I have some repairs to make on my other cameras, and I will be sharing this process and the results with you every step of the way. I might have some photos to look at tonight or tomorrow morning. I want to be thoughtful and take it one step at a time. i am not great at being patience.
I thank you very much for your help in this. My photographs, as always will be shared and not watermarked. Feel free to use them in any way you wish, as screensavers or printed out or just enjoyed. They are my angels, sent out into the world to bring some light and color to the earth. I have a lot to learn, I need to get at it.
I love to watch Fate run in the meadow, she is transformed in front of me, not the joyous, enthusiastic creature I sometimes see, but a dog living her destiny. She runs through the meadow, stopping once in awhile to turn and look back at me, at Maria, and then I picture the history and the destiny of the dog. This is where dogs come from, I think, where they started. We are communicating, I think, she seems to me at peace out there, against the light and the beautiful sky. Fate’s Meadow, I think I will call it. There are few things as gratifying as seeing a dog fulfilling her destiny.
Several years ago, a retired carriage horse driver and passionate defender of the carriage trade named Eva Hughes met me at the Clinton Park Stables in New York City.
We spoke briefly, and have not met since, but I well remember what she told me: the carriage horse controversy was triggering a new social awakening, a turning point in the way we view animals and the people who love them, live with them and work with them.
And a new idea of what the rights of animals really are.
Eva was prescient. The social awakening is occurring, and it is changing the dynamic between animal rights activists and the growing number of their victims. They are coming together to form a new community of animal lovers, and it is both uplifting and positive.
The sad (for animals and people) but increasingly disturbing excesses of the animal rights movement have created a new and diverse kind of community: a growing national network of linked people who have been victimized by animal rights organizations and are forming their own powerful community.
They are rushing to support and defend one another in the face of confounding, often anti-democratic and Orwellian attacks that reveal an animal advocacy movement that is increasingly into a rogue, hated and feared militia.
Yesterday I wrote about an assault on the Benner Family Farm in East Setauket Long Island. It shocked me and many others.
A visitor to the farm met one of the Benner cows, a two-year-old beef cow named Minnie, and she learned that Minnie would be slaughtered to help feed the Benner family.
She demanded that the cow be turned over to her so that she could send her to a rescue farm, and when the Benners refused, she contacted various animal rights organizations who have unleashed a furious assault on the farm – death threats, threatening phone calls, hateful e-mails, physical demonstrations and protests, Facebook pages and online petitions. The groups are insisting that the cow the Benners have raised for food be kept alive for the rest of its life.
The farm, a popular, humane, environmentally conscious, much-loved destination in urbanized Long Island finds itself under an awful siege for raising their own food in their own way. The family has not been accused of cruelty or abuse or broken any laws of regulations. The woman who instigated the attack on the Benner Farm told reporters Bob Benner should go buy organic beef for his family from the very trendy Whole Foods chain, and keep Minnie alive.
But something new and different is happening.
The Benners are not alone. Offers of help, money, support and encouragement are pouring into the farm by the thousands. Their own local community is standing behind them, and Bob Benner is standing in his truth. He is demanding the right to live by his own values and feed his family in whatever way he deems best. He is also fighting for the idea that all animals are not pets, and ought not be viewed in that way. Unlike his persecutors, he has lived with farm animals all of his life and understands them.
Today, the farm’s Facebook Page had 5,000 likes and countless wonderful reviews. He has collected 10,000 signatures on a change.org petition launched on his behalf. You can sign the petition here.
The new community is rushing to defend him.
This kind of incident may seem shocking to many, but it is becoming all too familiar to people who love and work with animals. Social media have permitted like-minded people who know and understand animals to talk to one another and use new technologies like social media to help each other when this new and awful kind of mob descends on them. And the Benner incident was no isolated one, this is happening all over the country, to farmers, dog and cat lovers, people with horses, pony ride operators.
The New York carriage trade made history this year by soundly beating back two separate attempts by the mayor of the city and his supporters in the animal rights movement to ban the carriage horses from the city.
People all over the country used Facebook and Twitter to spread the truth about the horses. There was enormous data to show that the horses were not being mistreated.
People in this new community used the Internet to send contributions, to organize rides in New York and visits to the stables, to send letters to New York officials, to support the carriage drivers and the stable owners, to spread the word that the horses were safe and content and well cared for. The carriage trade itself turned to social media and the Internet to post daily photos and stories, and to counter the often wild and demonstrably false accusations being made against them by so-called animal rights activists.
When the farmer Joshua Rockwood was falsely accused of animal cruelty during the awful winter cold of 2014, crowd sourcing efforts and farmers and supporters from all over the country quickly raised more than $70,000 in legal fees and other support for him. They well know it could have been any one of them. They helped Joshua to beat back all of the spurious charges against him, reclaim the three horses improperly impounded, and helped him to equip his farm for the next winter.
He has said this new community saved his farm and his work.
I saw this with the carriage horses, with Joshua, with the Benners. The community has no name, no leaders, no official organization, it is a community linked by logs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and e-mail. And by a love of animals. When something happens like the attack on the Benner Farm (my own post about it on this blog had more than 3,000 shares in just a few hours), they organize quickly and come running.
The animal rights movement has unaccountably alienated many people who actually know animals and live with them. Animals like Minnie are not pets, they have worked and lived with and served people for thousands of years. The new movement understands that we need to keep them in our world, not drive them off to hidden preserves and the private lands of the wealthy.
These controversies are erupting all over the country, and they demonstrate that the animal rights movement is one that claims to love animals but promotes the persecution and hatred of people.
The victims of the animal rights movement, in many ways closer to a series of hate groups than a social welfare movement for animals, are piling up: the man in New York who lived in a van and whose dog was taken from him and euthanized without his knowledge because a so-called animal rights activist thought the dog wasn’t getting enough medical care; Tawni Angel, who gave pony rides to children for years, and whose business was shut down by the Santa Monica City Council because three animal rights demonstrators claimed falsely that they had dirty water and no room to turn; a Delaware housewife whose dog was taken from her porch and killed because a secret informer called the police and claimed it was abused. There was no hearing of any kind.
And there is the very poignant story of Blue Star Equiculture, a horse rescue and organic farm center in Palmer, Mass. where rescued and retired work horses are cared for to the end of their days in the cleanest and most loving of circumstances. Because they support work for working horses, (the animal rights movement believes work, by definition, is abuse) the farm has been the subject of relentless attacks and hateful messages and harassment, including one effort to break open the farms fences and release the horses onto a busy road.
No animal and few people could live a better life on the earth than these horses – I have been there many times – yet the staff and directors are subject to the cruelest kinds of insult and attack and hate messages. If this is the vision of the animal rights movement, it is surely doomed and has no moral authority to speak for the rights of animals.
Scores, if not hundreds or thousands of farmers have suffered Mr. Benner’s experience. Secret informers call the police, and quite often farm animals are seized because cows are out in the snow, horses are lying down to take a nap, their herding dogs are running or sleeping outdoors, pigs look cold. Farmers are being charged for having unheated barns, or chickens who run in the road, or barn cats running loose near barns.
The most striking thing to me about the New York carriage horse controversy was how little the animal rights groups knew about horses.
They claimed the horses were depressed because they stood with their heads down or legs hocked. They claimed there was rodent feces in the grain bins. They put up photos of dead horses killed in accidents in the Southwest and claimed they were abused carriage horses who died on the streets of New York City.
They used the pictures to raise enormous amounts of money online. They claimed it was cruel and abusive for 2,000 pound draft horses to pull light carriages on asphalt in Central Park. They claimed the horses were dangerous to the people of New York, even though no human being has been killed by a carriage horse in 155 years of operation.
And the woman who brought all this misery on the Benner Farm did not know cows are eaten for food, and are not poodles sleeping in beds. She had no idea that the food in grocery stores comes from slaughtered animals just like Minnie. She had no idea that this is how farmers survive and feed their families. Or that farmers can’t afford to shop at pricey stores like Whole Foods.
The new community is on the case, the Benners will have what they need. They are no longer alone. Facebook was ablaze with support yesterday and today.
This new community is remarkably diverse, it transcends the left and the right, it has people of all genders, faiths, points of view. It has animal lovers, pet owners, farmers, vets, farriers, shearers, dog-walkers, behaviorists, trainers, liberals and conservatives. They are disparate, but they are united in their conviction that the freedom and property of people who love animals and work with them should not be arbitrarily invaded and disrupted by an outdated movement whose only principle seems to be to attack and destroy, with or without cause, and to remove animals from people.
Animals unite people, not divide them. The country may be polarized on many issues, but on on the national love for animals.
The new community is loosely but clearly linked by new technology, primarily social media, and is ready to donate money, moral support, political and legal expertise when necessary. At Joshua Rockwood’s first court hearing, more than 300 outraged farmers and neighbors showed up. A Glenville town council member told me the leaders of the town were stunned, it was one of the largest turnouts in the history of the town.
This is something new and important. The animal rights movement was born out of good intentions, and has done considerable good, but it has become a source of conflict, abuse of people, persecution and irrationality. Animals and the people who love them deserve better.
Eva Hughes was correct in her vision of a new social awakening. We are not comfortable re-defining the nature and meaning of abuse arbitrarily and outside of the law and without discussion or reason. We believe in science, not emotion – we respect behaviorists, biologists, trainers, veterinarians and animal lovers when it comes to deciding the future and well-being of animals. We believe animals have their own need for rights and protections, not the rights of humans.
I am happy to be a part of this movement.
We believe it is moral to love animals and people, and treat them both with dignity and respect. We believe in the right to privacy and to choose our own way of life. We believe working animals want and need to work.
We believe it is not the business of government or private citizens to threaten the freedom and property of people who have done no wrong. We believe that absent clear and convincing evidence of cruelty or neglect, the privacy and values of animal owners ought to be respected, not wantonly invaded by secret informers, bought-off politicians and politicized animal rights workers.
We believe the primary goal of any animal advocacy movement ought to be the retention of animals in our world and our everyday lives, not their removal from work, human populations and human contact.
We believe the fate and future of animals ought to be decided by people who know them and understand their needs, not by people who emotionalize them for their own purposes and who use them as vehicles for hating and harming human beings.
Bob Brenner has done no wrong, he has almost heroically kept his small farm running for years, humanely and efficiently. His animals are treated lovingly and well, it is wrong to subject him and his family to threat and disruption and terror because of one human being who knows nothing about animals, farming, or where food actually comes from.
Victims of injustice are among the most motivated of people. They are eager to do good. The victims of the animal rights movement seem ready to help others. They are re-shaping our understanding of animals in our world. And much more to come.
Out of darkness, light, out of rage, hope. These social crimes are, in fact, sparking a new social awakening and a new community is rising up to protect the true rights of animals and also of the people who love them and live with them. Many people have had to suffer for that, but hopefully, this suffering is not in vain.
(If you wish to sign the change.org petition in support of the Benner Farm, you can do so here.) They already have 9,000 signatures, the campaign to force them to give up Minnie has 2,000.)
I’m voting today in the New York Democratic Primary, I love going to our little town hall – our City Hall and Town Court – to vote, I feel there like I’m in Kansas at the birth of the Republic. The clerks recognize us on sight.
A friend came over yesterday and I asked her if she was going to vote in the Democratic Primary, and she said yes, and I said I would be voting for Hilary Clinton. She wasn’t pleased. I kind of know never to talk about politics, but I was curious, she has a good and interesting mind, and Maria is not yet certain about her choice, we are talking about it.
Our friend got a bit excited, she told me Hilary Clinton was a monster, a war-monger, and a thief. She said if Hilary was elected, she would start a nuclear war almost immediately. She was dangerous, she said.
I was startled by this outburst, but should not have been. when I lived in the hip and very Democratic and media-savvy town of Montclair, N.J., it was George Bush’s role to be the standing demon. His evil nature was the magic password there, if you didn’t think of George Bush as a monster, you were cast from society, like one of the Salem witches. I never met anyone there who didn’t hate George Bush, it was a kind of religion, the primary dinner table topic, along with obsessing over the kids.
When I moved upstate, Barack Obama was the monster. He still is, to many. My mother-in-law, among others, assured me that Obama was assembling a militia in Texas that would soon rise up and seize power. My farmer friends assured me that he was planning to seize all of their guns. Hilary was a monster also, but she faded a bit while Obama was planning his coups and takeovers.
I try to take monsters out of my politics, one way or the other. As the grandson of immigrants, I could not ever vote for Donald Trump, he reminds me of the little devil that sits on one shoulder and plays the piano keys of our dark side. He speaks to the awful impulses I have learned to hide, suppress or outgrow. And Ted Cruz makes me uncomfortable, he sounds more like an Ayatollah to me than an American political leader. Hard for me to support a politician whose only single accomplishment has been shutting down the government.
I don’t wish to live in Iran.
If you have monsters, then you must have saints, and that is where we are in our political system. We have to hate what we disagree with, and revere and blindly defend who we choose. Our friend has found her saint in Bernie Sanders, he will, she promised, bring the revolution that will change the country and lift the poor. Only a revolution will do it, I am told, and sometimes believe myself.
I am out of sync with the times. I don’t think any of these people are evil, or god-like. Trump and Cruz love their kids too. Next Spring at this time, the Republic will still be standing. I don’t see the world in black-and-white (this may change when my new camera comes), I see it in many different shades.
I covered politics as a reporter, and I met few monsters and saints, just people trying to get by and make their mark on the world. Most of them, like most of us, did not make it. I do not argue my political views ever, nor do I feel the need to persuade other people to vote the way I do. I share my vote because I share my life, but I do not really think it is my business or need to know who you will be voting for or why.
I don’t write this to persuade you or argue with you, and in my digital world, we try not to hate the people we disagree with. Seems like an infectious disease to me, that. Disagreement and difference is our fuel, the system runs on it. I guarantee you, the cowards and outrage addicts on Facebook will have some things to say when they read this, not listening to them or being intimidated by them is a joy and moral obligation, one of my contributions to democracy.
To me, arguing over politics is even more pointless than whining about taxes or the price of gas. Americans no longer listen or change their minds. Our friend, a good person we are very fond of, was not really wanting a conversation, and did not wish to listen. It was more of a lecture, the cousin of an harangue. And even if she had wished to listen, I had no lecture or argument to make in return. She should vote for whoever she wishes, it is not for me to try to change her mind. I don’t see myself as being right, and others being wrong, it is just the way I feel.
I am not called to buy a bumper sticker, or wear a button.
Whatever happens, I hope it works out. I feel comfortable voting for Hilary Clinton, she is no monster to me, and no saint. Like me, I suppose, in that way. She seems confident and steady and experienced, it just feels right. I favor tough and determined people, in my own life I have found stubbornness is a good substitute for talent and riches.
I suppose politics has always been this way, it has always been about fear and monsters, wrote H.L. Mencken, my political spiritualist and guide, a half-century ago.
Fear remains the chief attribute of the voter under democracy, Mencken wrote. “The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugagoos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!”
My polling place opens at noon. This year, I feel called to vote, and proud of this American franchise. I’m not into flag-waving, but the American experiment, for all of its flaws, is still the best one I know of, and my immigrant roots are still deep enough that I appreciate the chance to participate.
I remember my grandparents telling me they were the first people in our family ever to vote for the leader of a country. The czars did not campaign for office. They did not ever take it for granted.
Maria has worked on her Rapunzel Chair – I call it the Fiber Chair sometimes – for nearly two years, she is nearly done. She wants to keep the chair on the farm and start another one in the Fall. There are several old chairs up in the barn. I have been touched and impressed by Maria’s total dedication to her art, she works on the chair every day – she uses baling string from the hay- in bitter cold, rain or sun. Come and see her work on it.
