One of the central arguments on the gloomy and humorless websites of the New York City animal rights movement – it is not a joy to read them –  is the idea that it is cruel for horses and other animals to work. This very new and radically different animal rights agenda holds that pulling carriages and working is tantamount to abuse and should be forbidden by law. This, as much as any other idea, has troubled, even horrified, vast numbers of people who live with, own working animals.

The idea seems to be that working for money is cruel and abusive, but working for “noble” purposes seems to be okay. Nobody is talking about it. So according to this theory,  it’s okay for us to abuse police horses, bomb-sniffing dogs, border collies herding sheep and all those Labs leading the blind around because it serves our interests (and because they are politically unapproachable.)

This blatant hypocrisy holds that its all right to expect these working animals to give up their lives, to risk the perils of rural or urban life, to get butted and kicked or even blown up, just not for profit. Believe me when I tell you that you will never hear the mayor of New York City promise as an urgent priority of his new administration to ban police horses or the seeing-eye dogs from his crowded and traffic-choked city because they are living unnatural lives working, have no place in New York and ought to be running free out in the wild.

The mayor may know little about animals, but he does not appear to be suicidal.

And what, precisely, is the difference?

I decided to pursue this idea about work for the horses being cruel. I’m trying to look at the issues carefully, one by one. I believe this is a significant issue for all animal owners and lovers, perhaps the most significant one, it speaks to the very existence of animals in our lives and has the potential to shatter the once private partnership between people and animals.

The fate of the New York carriage horses will affect all of us and our animals, it may also decide whether there is any role for animals in our cities any longer, or if working animals of all species become the next target on the animal rights agenda.

I should own up to some personal considerations, I love working animals, I have border collies, Labrador Retrievers and guard donkeys on my farm and in my life, and if I am being honest, I have to confess that none of them have it as easy as the carriage horses in New York. I guess that makes me creepy, even abusive. Just this morning, I sent my border collie out in sub-zero weather to lie down on the snow and hold the sheep in place while we brought the grain out. If the carriage horses are abused, Red is abused much more. I hate to think of Red, my workaholic border collie being banished back to Northern Ireland (where the border collies live in barns).

I believe in the lessons of history.  I’ve ordered a bunch of books on the history of working horses and this week I have been poring over one of the best, The Horse In The City:  Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century, by Clay McShane And Joel A. Tarr. The two are academics, their book is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, they are respected  historians. It is wonderful to read something about horses that is actually researched and substantiated. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who believes pulling a carriage is cruel for a carriage horse or that work is cruel for working horses. This book will help you understand many things about this painful controversy, which threatens the lives of more than 200 horses and the livelihoods of hundreds of people.

Working horses have been in New York City since the 1600’s, but the carriage horses began working in Central Park around 1853. Working horses were as integral a part of New York City then as cars are now. The nineteenth century represented the climax of human exploitation of horse power. Humans could never have built nor lived in the giant, wealth-generating cities that emerged in that century without horses.

“Horses too benefited from the new human ecology,” wrote the authors. “Their populations boomed, and the urban horse, although probably working harder than his rural counterpart, was undoubtedly better fed, better housed, and protected from cruelty,” than horses had ever been.

The urban horse was also larger and longer lived than farm animals. The relationship was symbiotic,  horses could not have survived without human intervention, and increasingly dense human populations relied on horses. The working horses were essential to human life. “Almost every other species of large grazing mammal disappeared during that period, write McShane and Tarr. In fact, they write,  the original, wild North American horse – the ones who ate grass freely and lived in the wild, as many people believe should be the fate of the carriage horses – were unable to defend their territory against smaller predators, including humans,  and almost all of them perished. The European working horses – the ancestors of the work and draft and carriage horses – survived because they found an ecological niche as a partner for humans. This, say the authors, was not domination, but co-evolution.

It is fascinating to apply this history to the present day controversy over the carriage horses, to fit the story of these hard-working animals into the template of our times. We have found other tools and machines to replace much of the work the horses used to do in New York and other cities, but the lessons of the working horse’s history seem eerily relevant today, almost as if the horses are reaching across time to speak to us.

As the book reports, horses in the wild do not fare nearly as well as horses in human care. There are no regulations protecting farm horses, no oversight or supervision. Horses in the wild do much worse.

Then and now, work is essential to the survival of horses, it is not abuse or mistreatment for them. It is life and death, survival or extinction. Horses that do not have work to do in partnership with humans  have gone and will go the way of so many other species in North America.

Work for horses is not dominion and domination, work is a partnership, inextricably linked to health, longevity and survival. People benefit, animals benefit. Animals have always been abused and overworked, but it is harder to overwork or abuse a carriage horse in New York City than any horse or animal living almost anywhere else. They are among the most protected animals anywhere, not the most abused, as has been suggested.  There are numerous regulations governing their welfare, and police assigned to oversee them.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but reading through the chapters on the life and work and conditions under which the horses of New York lived in the 1900’s, another almost irrefutable truth emerges about the carriage horses.

In the 21st century, many years after the helped build New York, the carriage horses are safer, healthier, live longer and work less than any horses in the history of New York have ever worked. Before our time, horses face epidemic disease, cruel whipping and physical abuse, work in intense heat and brutal cold and it was very common for horses to be worked until they dropped dead, and in all kinds of weather. Traffic took a frightful toll on horses, scores were injured and killed every week falling over stones, colliding with one another. Many horses died in fires and industrial accidents as well.

How ironic that this would be the time for them to be banished, when they are safer and better cared for than ever. How sad to destroy their historic and mutually beneficial partnership with humans, and send them on the well-worn path to extinction.