The war against the carriage park horses has the feel of a jihad, a holy war, it is relentless, fanatic, self-righteous, uncompromising. I suppose in many ways this campaign is an inevitable outcome of the emotionalizing of animals, a process that has been accelerating in America as more and more Americans see the lives of animals through the prism of rescue, abuse and dependence. The animal exists to be rescued, to be saved, to make us feel better about ourselves in a disconnected and fragmented society. We know longer know them, only what we need to know about them.
As Henry Beston wrote, animals are not our dependent children, they are our partners in the world, we are obliged to make room for them, to give them purpose and meaning, to keep them in our lives. If they are driven from New York, I feel as if the city will have cut out a piece of its soul.
I believe always believed as an advocate for the rights of animals that we need a new way of understanding them, a new language for them, a wiser and more thoughtful way of putting their true welfare ahead of our neediness and angst. The working animal is perhaps the best metaphor for this need, one reason why the fate of the New York carriage horses is so important to every animal in the world and to every person who loves them. Every day, we have to ask: what is this agonizing debate really about: animal welfare or animal work?
_
I am not really a horse person, although I had a horse until recently, I dearly love my donkeys. I have never taken a ride on a Horse Carriage, although I plan to go in New York City on February 24th and ride with Christina Hansen, see what a carriage ride is like. Working animals are not new to me, I have been living with working animals and writing about them for nearly 20 years, and there is no animal I am more drawn to than the animal who works with human beings, helping us in so many ways, serving us through all of our history to build our country and our cities. I have three donkeys – I got them as guard animals, they have always protected our sheep. I have had four different border collies, several Labrador Retrievers and sheep, goats and some cows. I have a lot of friends who own horses and love them and talk about them in the same wonderfully obsessive way dog people talk about their dogs.
At the center of the widening conflict over the future of the New York Carriage Horses – it is now a full-blown controversy, sadly for the horses – is the idea, advanced by self-described animal rights organizations, the Humane Society, the New York A.S.P.C.A., the mayor and the president of the New York City Council, that work for animals is cruel, a form of abuse, a throwback to other times. NYClass, the organization whose owner is a close friend and major campaign donor to the city’s mayor, is spearheading the movement to ban the horses from New York. The group likens carriage work to child labor or sweat shops and accuses the carriage industry of wisepread thievery, abuse and neglect, although, it should be said, none of these accusations have ever been substantiated or supported by any records or facts.
The mayor likens the work of the carriage horses to the torture of terrorists and prisoners-of-war. I think nothing has shocked the many people across the country who are following this drama and who love working animals and live with them more than this idea, very new in the history of animals and humans – work for animals is cruel. Even a few years ago, the idea would have been considered a joke, in New York City last year it was the centerpiece of a mayoral campaign. The people pushing the horses out of New York are unanimous in their wish that the horses all end up rescued on farms, where they no longer work and can “graze freely on lush grass.”
The idea that owning or driving or riding a carriage horse would be the most controversial job in New York City in 2014 would have stunned human beings at any previous point in the city’s history, or in the long and sometimes painful history of people and animals. It shocks people who live outside of New York City, farmers, working horse and dog owners, people who live with animals and it would surely stun people all over the world, where working animals are prized, even essential to life. Horses and animals have been present at every turn in New York City’s wonderful history, their presence has never been seen as controversial, even when it was much more dangerous, cruel and unhealthy than the horses are today.
An official of the A.S.P.C.A. in New York said recently that the use of carriage horses in 21st-century New York is “unnatural, unnecessary and an undeniable strain on the horses quality of life.” The schism here between people who live with working animals and those who believe any work for animals is cruel could not be wider. For me, this statement not a philosophy that will protect animals, it is a death sentence for animals in urban life, for the dwindling numbers of animals who have actually managed to live among human beings, especially in the crowded urban and suburban settings, there their presence is so much more precious.
It is hard for me, from a distance, to understand how anyone who knows animals could believe the lives of well-treated working animals are cruel or unnatural. Nor it is knowing or supportable to suggest animals living in “nature” live longer or healthier lives than carriage horses. I don’t know how the A.S.P.C.A. could tell me or the people of New York or the city’s many tourists what is “necessary” for them, it seems that is not their decision. I believe – and so do most vets, behaviorists, trainers, breeders and horse owners – that it is a strain on the lives of working animals when they don’t work, not when they do, I have seen it again and again. So have so many other people, if the mayor would deign to speak to anybody about the horses except for people who think their only function in the world is to be rescued.
I see my border collie Red working every day, there are now many dogs working in search and rescue, bomb-sniffing, seeing eye and therapy and nursing home and hospice work (I’ve had two hospice therapy dogs, Izzy and Red) and horses have, of course, worked with human beings for thousands of years, there are many, even in Riverdale and Brooklyn, who are doing therapy work with children now in the city, is this work cruel? These horses live in stables, not in the wild, are healthy and well fed, just as the carriage horses are, fresh clean hay is often much healthier for equines to eat than a lot of grass.
I’ve seen what happens to border collies when they can’t and won’t work – I had to euthanize one who bit three people, including a child. My horse-owning friends tell me the same thing, so do vets, behaviorists, anyone who knows animals.
The working animal is generally bred to work, not conscripted like slave labor. They have no sense of being abused or mistreated, that is a human idea, not an animal idea. Work is in their genes, part of their instincts, their neural system. Animals don’t make career choices, they follow their instincts and breeding, a farm is no better or worse than a stable in New York, if the horses are treated well and are used to it and bred for it. Animals don’t pine for other lives, these are the projections of people. It is not a service to animals to misunderstand or misrepresent them, they need to be understood for what they are, not what makes us feel good about ourselves. It is both arrogant and ignorant to put our thoughts and values into their heads, they are vastly more adaptable than us. We ought to be celebrating their evolution into the modern world, not turning it into a social crime. Animals who work with people first and foremost need people and work, grass is nice, it is not the point of life.
Animals like draft horses and border collies have been bred to work for centuries, it is both dangerous and unhealthy for them not to work. Pulling a light carriage is no more onerous for a huge Percheron horse than jogging is for an athlete or herding sheep is for a border collie. It is much lighter work than farm horses have done for centuries, or many working horses elsewhere in the world. It is much easier work than New York City sanitation workers have, hauling bags of garbage around all day.
There are, sadly, many border collies now living in New York, there could hardly be a less “natural” life for border collies than living in apartments in Manhattan. Dogs, like horses, once roamed freely. Is their life in the city’s small apartments and crowded streets “natural?” They don’t roam the wild any longer, a major reason so many are so healthy and loved. Working animals are different than pets, they are not furbabies, they are not piteous and dependent creatures. When border collies and other working animal species don’t get to work, they deteriorate visibly, they gain weight, they can get neurotic and aggressive. Labrador Retrievers are also bred to work, to hunt, few of them get to any longer, and the breed has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. Labs are increasingly overweight, frantic, hyper, even aggressive – Labs are much more likely today to bite people than Pit Bulls.
People who own horses tell me – vets also – that working horses who do not get to work and exercise, who do not get to work with people, deteriorate in a similar fashion. These animals were not bred to roam in the wild (even if there was any wild left), they have never lived that way, they get bored and restless, it is difficult for such large animals to find enough healthy food, it is not healthy for them to do nothing any more than it is for a border collie to be an apartment pet. Animals do not dream of a work-less retirement, as many unhappy human beings do. If most Americans hate their work in modern times, working animals do not, we ought never to project our frustration and resentment onto them, I have never known a working animal who didn’t want to work. Visiting the stables in New York a couple of weeks ago, I saw several different horses being harnessed. Like my border collie when we head for the sheep, the horses were excited, head and ears up, they were eager to go, they were not depressed, lame or reluctant, as so many have suggested. They were not “depressed,” as so many have suggested, another human idea put into an animal’s mind.
For all of human history, the working animal, almost always domesticated, has been kept by humans and trained to perform specific tasks. They might work intimately with humans, as therapy and guide dogs do, or they may be animals trained for individual tasks – draft horses, logging elephants. (Cats are not really working animals, they hunt out of instinct, not training and breeding). Some animals – sheep and goats – work for wool or sheep, they don’t perform tasks. The history of working animals is believed to pre-date agriculture, dogs were the first working animals used for hunting and protection. Working horses are believed to be the second oldest working animal (donkeys soon after), helping people clear fields, haul wood, provide desperately needed transportation. There would not be a New York City if it were not for the animals who helped create it, we owe them a purpose and safe life there, not banishment to mythical farms, or, much more likely, slaughterhouses.
In recent years, people in industrialized societies all over the world – just like New York City – have been finding new uses for animals. Horses, elephants, donkeys and oxen are being used to haul goods and lumber in many parts of Asia and Africa. Dogs have found vital new roles in the lives of Americans, from providing emotional support to disconnected people and therapy work to the elderly, to working with the disabled, to hunting for bombs and explosives and searching for lost hikers. Dogs prove that animals can adapt to modern life, horses have been with humans just as long and know them just as well.
Work is not only natural, it is saving so many animals from extinction and development. Greedy humans have destroyed countless species in their ravenous destruction of habitats all across the world. In banishing the horses, we are saying to them and the world that we can make room for trucks, condos, skyscrapers, massive development projects, subways and trains, but we can’t make room for them? That is a devastating statement about the place of animals in the modern world, especially when it is advanced in the name of animal rights and welfare. Is it cruel to send healthy working animals to the slaughterhouse? Is it more or less cruel than permitting them to live and work? And don’t kid yourself, the idea that all of these animals are heading to safe and cozy farms to munch grass for the rest of their lives is a cynical fantasy, a great deception. The animals are private property, they belong to people who may lose their livelihoods and will be thinking about money, many of these animals are going to slaughter. “If these horses are chased out of New York,” says a writer friend who has written nine books on horses, “they will be dog food in weeks, make no mistake about it.”
The last chance for so many animals – animals like the carriage horses – is to find work among humans that is both safe and valued. Since only one carriage horse has been killed in New York City in two decades, the environment there seems safe for them and could surely be made safer. For working animals, work is the natural environment, as it is for working dogs.
The people driving the proposed horse ban make a distinction between animals working for “noble” purposes and animals working for money, as the carriage horses do. But this is not a concern of animals, it is a concern of people. Working animal are not judged by the commercialism of the people who own them, but the quality of their lives and the way in which they are valued and treated. There is no way for the A.S.P.C.A. to measure the “quality” of a carriage horse as opposed to any other, it is simply another human idea injected into the animal world.
Horses do not think like humans any more than dogs do. What seems like a hard life to us is a natural life to them, and the A.S.P.C.A. ought to know that, even if the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights do not. There is no knowledgeable behaviorist or animal lover or owner I know who believes the carriage park horses are pining for a different kind of life than the ones they have. Animals do not have language and vocabulary, they don’t have human-style narratives of lifestyle, they don’t yearn for other ways to live, they don’t think in terms of cruelty and choice. And they don’t like to be moved, they like what they know. Working animals are our partners in life, and in history. We owe them more than emotionalizing them, politicizing them and projecting all of our neurotic human garbage onto onto them.
Working animals do not attack one another, yell at each other in the streets, set up nasty websites to assault and undermine people, lobby politicians to take people’s work away from them. They accept their lives, and if treated well, do their work, long and well. I have little to learn from the people here who claim to be advocates for animals, I have a lot to learn from the carriage horses. I don’t wish to see them sold off or killed or confined to rescue farms in order to be “saved”, I would hate to see them driven from our greatest city by people who understand nothing about them and what they truly need.
I can never repay Dr. Karen Thompson for insisting that Red ought to be my dog, I don’t know how she did it, but I am ever grateful to her. I love this quite amazing creature another huge storm is bearing down on us, we are scrambling every day to maneuver through ice and snow, get water and hay out, clean out the growing piles of manure in the Pole Barn, where all the animals are trapped most of the day. Red faithfully keeps the sheep in place while we grain the animals, bring out the hay, clean out the pasture and the barn, feed the chickens, haul warm water out to the heated buckets, chip away at the frozen manure piles with shovels and hammers.
Red is ready for the storm, he gives the lie to the strange idea that working animals don’t want to work, or that work is cruel for them. When I posted this photo on Facebook one person said Red looks worried, and I smiled, this is how Red looks when he works, he is the picture of focus and intensity, although he may have been a bit concerned by the fact I was lying in front of him with a big camera in his face. Sometimes he does worry about me.
My “Think Spring” campaign hasn’t gotten off to a whiz-bang start, like many of you, I’m about to experience a big storm, about a foot or more creeping up the coast, I can almost feel it coming. The animals were especially hungry this morning, I had an accidental breakfast with the sheep, I slipped and fell into their hay feeder, my camera with an 8-15 mm lens on my neck (this of course is why I need a new camera, the poor thing rattles when I pick it up). The sheep were not troubled in the least by the intrusion of a big human into their breakfast, they kept on eating, I just hit the shutter and crawled out. At least it wasn’t the manure pile, and I enjoyed the new perspective on sheep and hay.
