Day: January 21, 2014

My most common reaction reading through the arguments about the Central Park horses is the perception of so many public officials and animal advocates in New York City that the work horses in the park that carry tourists and visitors ought to be banned because the horses are not happy. This, as much as any other element of the growing debate about the future of these dignified creatures speaks to the epidemic anthropomorphizing of animals that underlies the fate of these animals, and much of the polarizing arguments that halt any real dialogue about the future of animals in our midst, especially our urban landscape.

You will rarely find people who understand the real world of real animals speaking them as being happy or sad, good or bad. These are very particular human emotions, insofar as they exist in the animal world at all, it is in a profoundly different context that it applies for humans. No one who knows horses believes these mostly middle-aged older work horses think in terms of being happy or not. Or that they would be conscious of being happier out in the wild,” where many of the animal rights activists think they should be.

Animals like horses and donkeys and dogs live in the moment, they follow their instincts, not the narrative of human emotions. My donkey Simon is not pining for the wild, he wants food, shelter, and attention. He seeks comfort, stability, familiarity and security, and more than anything, the company of other donkeys. Like many domesticated animals, donkeys and horses (like dogs) thrive most on work, they are working beings, they have worked for and with humans for thousands of years, it is bred into their genes, instincts and behaviors. Working dogs like border collies are much more comfortable working with people and sheep, they show no desire to be out roaming in the wild, dodging predators, hunting day and night for good, seeking shelter from the elements, dodging hunters, developers and human intrusion.

If raccoons were being tied up and harnessed for the amusement of tourists, I would have no trouble buying the argument that this is cruel, but in fact the very solution the mayor and his supporters are pursuing is by far the crueller option – removing horses from the people and work they have known, the exercise and monitoring they receive, and traumatizing them by shipping them to “rescue” farms where they will be imprisoned without purpose or work for the rest of their lives, assuming most of them even get there, which seems dubious from the news reports emanating from New York. Old animals suffer greatly when they are moved to alien environments, it can cause them profound suffering and pain.

Happiness is a fundamental and profoundly significant word when it comes to animals, and it is the most misused and distorted, because almost anyone who uses it to describe the mood of an animal is thinking in terms of human happiness. The word just does not apply to animals, it is in our vocabulary, not theirs. Animals do not live by emotion, there is no such thing as a good dog or bad, only dogs who behave the way we want them do and dogs who don’t.  We are the only species that evaluates our lives in that way, that has the language and narrative to consider our circumstance, want more money, change partners and spouses, look for other work, buy a bigger house, have more children. No serious behaviorist believes animals think in that way, or view their lives in that way.

When I think about the “happiness” of my animals, I think of these things: shelter from the cold, rain, ice, snow and wind. Healthy, nutritious food two times a day in substantial amounts. Grain and vitamins in cold or challenging weather. Attention every day – brushing, healthy snacks, attention. Work – walking, hauling, dealing with people. Good  health care, exercise of some kind every day, either in walking or space to move. I do not imagine a paradise for them where they can roam freely in the elements, that is fairy tale, a projection of human values. Animals live in the moment, and by their instincts.

Animals love to be noticed and love, they feed on human attention, most horses get little, if any, the Central Park horses get a lot. Along with food and health care, that would be close to the top of my list of domesticated and working animals deserve to have.

As with so many other elements of our culture and political world, the notion of animal rights has been hijacked by unyielding and often unknowing ideologues and shallowly defined by a reactive and manipulable news media, which always succumbs to the loudest, rarely the most just, point of view.

They ought to have those things as a right, they desperately need roles to play among humans in a rapidly developing world, or they will vanish from the earth in any meaningful way. By these terms, the Central Park horses seem quite happy to me, they are content, their needs are being met and then some. My own wish for the people of New York is that every one of them live as well as the horses who are about to be exiled from the city do.

I write these columns on behalf of the Central Park Horses and all of our animals, they deserve to be spoken for, not banished.

I got an e-mail this morning seeking a solicitation from an “anti-animal rights group” seeking to block New York City’s very powerful and organized effort to ban the horses in Central Park. I was sorry to get such an e-mail, obviously stirred by my writings about the horses. I consider myself a passionate advocate for animal rights and am sorry to see the term so exploited and distorted. Is one against “animal rights” if they feel the horses should not be banned from New York” Or in favor of them if they are sent away?

In this painful and complex issue, everyone claims to be speaking for the Central Park Horses and everyone sees themselves as defending their rights. This is understandable, in our polarized world we all see ourselves as defending virtue, and we see people who disagree with us as having only based and distorted motives.

I completely accept that the vast array of interests – “animal rights” organizations, the SPCA, the Mayor, the City Council President – seeking to ban the horses from New York City, mostly on humanitarian grounds – are honest and sincere in their beliefs, but I also see that this issue dense and complicated and speaks to the most fundamental questions about the ways in which we view animals, the rights of animals, the very idea of what animal rights mean.

“It’s over,” said Mayor de Blasio, the city’s new mayor at his inauguration, he said banning the horses would be one of the first priorities of his new administration, ahead of almost any other concern.

Melissa Mar-Viverito, The New York City Council President said in the New York Times that it was “long past time we end these practices which treat the horses so cruelly”

Edita Birnkrant, the New York director of Friends Of Animals, told the Times the horses working conditions are akin to being in prison.  “They are shackled into their carriages, pulling through streets of a chaotic unnatural environment and go back to their cells,” she said. “They need the ability to graze and roam freely. They never get that in New York. They live a life of total confinement, day after day.”

Why do I get the feeling these politicians are living completely within their own bubble, like the people at Fox News or MSNBC, speaking only to themselves, creating their own reality? This kind of rhetoric is troubling to me, it suggests  little understanding of the lives, needs – or rights, for that matter – of real animals, as opposed to urban people who are utterly disconnected from the world of animals, it seems an inevitable outcome of the epidemic politicizing and  emotionalizing of animals in America, and the great schism between people who have pets and people who understand animals. Very few horses graze freely in America any longer, and many of those who do lead very hard lives.

Animals cannot live in the world the way they used to, they desperately need people to bring them closer into the modern world of human being, not cling to emotionalized and very human ideas of what an animal need. We need to understand what is really in their best interests in terms of rights and lives, not what makes us feel better about ourselves when it comes to defining their lives. What a wonderful opportunity – lost already, it seems – to use the Central Park Horses as a paradigm for a new and compassionate understanding of the lives of animals in our world.

Here, there is the chance to make sure they are treated well and properly cared for, to make room for them even in a crowded urban area. To respect the fact that people all over the world and the country love to see them and ride in their carriages. There is the lost opportunity to expand their roles and presence in our lives so they will survive as a species and have a role to play in our distracted and de-humanized world.

We are doing it for dogs and cats, why only for dogs? Nobody thinks it cruel for dogs to live in condos in mid-town Manhattan. If our definition of rights for horses means they all must be roaming freely in the wild, then there will soon enough be no horses in our world. If we equate stalls with prisons, we are accepting the most ignorant and narrow understanding of what it is to be a contented and healthy animal. It is especially disappointing when a mayor unthinkingly embraces this myopic view of what it means to have rights as an animal.

Pulling carts through city streets is the ancient work of many kinds of horses, and is still their work all over the world, the wild is not a friendly place for many animals, including horses, and stalls are not prisons, my donkeys are safe in comfortable in theirs, they have good food, warmth and shelter. Dogs in New York City do not live very different lives than  horses, no dog was intended to live in an apartment all day long and never run free, and many are abused and killed in traffic, yet I doubt animal rights groups in the city – surely not the mayor or City Council President – would advocate their being banned from the city and set free in the wild. And where, exactly, would this “wild” world be? Wal-Mart aims to build a store every 30 miles across America, no one is stopping them to make room for wild animals.

I have no doubt  – nor do most people who know equines – that most of these working horses would end up dead or dispirited on the so-called “animal rescue” preserves supposedly waiting for them, for a working animal, it just sounds like a different kind of prison. I’ve seen these horses many times, I just do not accept they live cruel lives of abuse and mistreatment, they are much-loved and admired every day of their lives.

Some of the horses have been overworked or neglected, just as many pets are mistreated,  but the New York City police monitors department monitors their treatment daily, and only one in the past several years has been found to be abused, the handler arrested.  I suspect many more children are mistreated in New York than horses, I wonder why the city government isn’t making their treatment an urgent priority?I like the idea of arresting abusers rather than banning animals from our midst, in some ways it reminds me of the great Pit Bull debate – perhaps ban the people who abuse Pit Bulls instead of the dogs they mistreat and misuse?

There are two sides to everything, of course, I find the rhetoric of the people banning the horses to be off, it seems strident, narrow, ideological rather than grounded in the real lives and truth of real animals.

It doesn’t seem thoughtful to me, or considered, it seems knee-jerk and reflexive. I believe in animal rights, I believe animals working with people have purpose, meaning and great health in their lives, I live with working animals every day.  They need to work, the fortunate ones get to work with people. Stalls are not cruel, the wild is not paradise, animals do not live in a no-kill world any more than people and pets do. Anybody who lives in New York accepts a certain  measure of confinement and restriction, the Central Park horses get exercise, attention, food and supervision. We can’t say as much for most of the horses in the world, there are very few countries where the treatment of these horses would be considered cruel.

The Central Park horses are a fascinating metaphor for me, I do wonder who gets to speak for them, I wonder why political leaders take such absolute positions without any acknowledgement or recognition that the rights of animals, like the rights of people, are not simple things to define, understand or advance. They are not like us, their needs are not ours, their conscientiousness is not ours.  I wonder at almost anyone who sees the world only in black or white, right or life. The world is filled with hues of gray for me, I know of no idea that lives within the boundaries of black or white, I feel for the poor Central Park Horses caught in the middle, it seems so clear to me they are mostly being given the right to disappear from our midst and perish, yet more animals exploited so that people can find ways to feel better about themselves.

New York got into my head last time, on so many different levels. As I sort through my photos, I see it’s still there.

It was cold out in the pasture this morning, around 0, Maria was better prepared than I was, she had this great scarf to keep her face warm that a friend sent her.

I am back in the world, eating solid food, full of myself, on fire to write and work, driving Maria nuts. She was quite astounded this morning when I showed up downstairs, ready to hit the farm chores, announcing how happy I am in my new clothes: – denim shirt, new jeans, new suspenders, new socks. She looked at me in astonishment, they are exactly the same clothes you were wearing yesterday and every day this winter, they are just new. And she looked at me quietly, and then said, “it’s a good thing I love you, you are definitely cute.” This is not a word normally applied to me, but then, Maria thinks Frieda is cute and I often tell Frieda we are both lucky that Maria is an artist, and has her own idea of cute.

I re-enter the world in another bitter cold and arctic wave, it used to be called a cold spell, and by upstate New York standards, not all that much of a one, but our market-savvy media is presenting it as an assault from the arctic wasteland and as I expected, my utility sent me an e-mail warning the elderly to stay indoors and keep warm and call for help if necessary. I did not know they cared so much about me, it is sort of sweet. Two conversations helped me think about handling the weather in our world, where every single thing is both politicized and a profit center. Karl Marx had a point about capitalism.

First, a farmer friend up the road came by in his truck to save while I was doing chores.  I hear it’s going to be cold tonight, I said, he shrugged, I wouldn’t know, he said, I don’t listen to the weather any more, just gets everybody all stirred up, for mid-January, it isn’t too bad, the cows are still nosing around for grass, he said. Feels like January to me, and he looked up at the sky. “My knee doesn’t hurt too bad,” he said, “nothing to fuss over.”

Then my friend George Forss called for our morning catch-up, we talked about names for our photo show (we like “Looking At Our World”) and then he said, “hey, Jon, I heard on the TV we are getting some seriously cold weather, it sounds pretty bad.” George told me they named the new system – Janus – and the weather people said it was going to be bad, winds, snow, bitter cold. What did I think?, he asked.

Well, I sort of shrugged on the phone, I don’t know, I said, I don’t listen to the weather much anymore, just gets me all stirred up, for mid-January it doesn’t feel too bad, the donkeys and the sheep are our nosing around in the pasture for grass, they don’t seem concerned. Feels like January in upstate New York to me, my back doesn’t hurt, I think it’s nothing to get upset about, I said.

My own words sort of surprised me, yet this is where I have come to be, my farmer friend said it for both of us. I told George to try skipping the weather for a few days and see if he thought much about the cold at all, I understand weather is a serious story in the world now, rational people see that the weather is changing radically, but I also don’t need to accept all of the manipulative tricks the corporate weather people are employing to get George and me and you to get anxious – warnings, alerts, storm names, arctic invasions. I live in upstate New York, and you know what? It gets cold in January, every single year, for about a million years.

The farmers and the donkeys and the cows have wisdom to share, the more you listen to it, talk about it, think about it, the more you will feel it. I’m devoting the day to writing interesting things for people to read, and then trying to get some photos that capture the winter pasture. Our media culture is not really about information, they are not concerned about our comfort or safety, they are simply marketing Mother Earth the same way they market cereal. I think I’m not buying.