I love my blog and am always thinking of ways to improve it, it is the centerpiece of my creative life. I want to tell you that the blog received more than 350,000 unique visitors last year, about four million page views in 2013. I appreciate your support very much, I want to tell you about three projects for the blog that are underway.
The first is a Times Square style news ticker, a moving stream in color and lights at the top of the blog homepage that will permit me to make announcements and sent messages. I can announce upcoming photos and posts, the sale of notecards, reading dates for book appearances, new of the life of the farm. I want it to be moving and colorful, I want the blog to retain its emphasis on photos and text, but also look lively, we lived in an image driven world, I am an image driven man. I want the blog to be beautiful, colorful, lively and alive.
The second is a new Timeline page, a feature that will enable readers to easily scroll back through all of the photos and posts on the blog in chronological order. You can find your favorite photos and review stories or comments that interest you, people have been asking for this for a long time, but we are just beginning to figure out how to do it.
In addition, I’m going to commission a video that will explain the farm, the animals on it, and bring newcomers up to date on what is happening here. New people are coming into the blog all of the time, it’s hard for them to figure out who’s who and what’s what. I’m putting that off a bit until I can pay for it, the first two are enough for right now. The blog is important to me, and expensive to maintain and write for. I appreciate your subscriptions, they truly make a difference.
Paypal has been a very secure and efficient service for me, the credit card systems are secure and heavily protected – I hired a private tech security system months ago, they have an iron ring about my system. There have been no problems or difficulties of any kind. For those of you resisting computing, I do accept checks at my post office box: P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. People can contribute $60 a year, which is the subscription price, or a smaller amount, or nothing. The blog will remain free to those who cannot afford to subscribe, you stuck with me, I will stick with you.
I decided about a year ago that it is both all right and important for me to be paid for my work, and I work on the blog all of the time, every day. Thanks to all of you for understanding that and supporting it.
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.
I’m thinking more and more that Flo was a house cat, not a barn cat, and that she was left her or made her way here after we moved in. She seems so at ease in the house. Minnie likes to get outside now in the morning, even in the cold. Flo seems to have lost interest in that. In our morning meditation, I thought a lot about my future as a writer. I thought about how much the blog has grown, and how much book publishing has changed.
I am committed to doing books, it is at the heart of my work, I think I am just learning how to write them. I am eager to start my “Talking To Animals” project. I am excited about all of the things I am learning on the Internet: how to blog, how to promote my work, talk to my readers. The book tour for “Second Chance Dog” was an education for me, so are the Kickstarter projects for me, Maria and George Forss.
The writer’s life is not grim and doomed, it is full of opportunities, new ways to connect with my readers, new ways to have conversations. Here I am in upstate New York having a conversation with people all over the country about the Carriage Horses of Central Park. Every day people tell me my pieces should appear in newspapers in New York City, and I shake my head and smile. The newspapers of New York have nothing to do with the fate of the carriage horses, they will not determine the outcome, that is an old way of thinking.
This issue will be decided on blogs and websites, through messages and shares. We talk directly to one another now, we don’t need middle-men and gatekeepers very much. My blog got four million views last year, it is seen all over the country and the world. This is where I need to be, this is where my words need to live, not on some dreary op-ed page filled with the arguments and declarations of politicians.
I often say the the blog is my mother, any people say they want to start blogs and work on them, but I find that very few people really do, even now. I do, the blog is my creative heart, my lifeline. Two new things coming to bedlamfarm.com. A message ticker at the top of the blog where I can communicate Bedlam Farm news, stories and announcements to you in a Broadway-style news ticker that moves across the top of the page. Also a new timeline that will permit you to easily browse past posts and photos in a calendar format for easy browsing. More to come.
Kim has had an interesting winter for a sheep. She came to the farm a few months ago, there is something about her that draws me as a photographer and touches me as an animal lover. It is surely a projection, but she seems a gentle and sensitive creature to me, in this photo I am thinking she needs to be shorn in a couple of months, she is wearing winter all over her wool and in her eyes.
She lost her lamb a week ago, and as sheep do, she has moved on and so, of course, have we. Life on a farm. I can see that my camera loves Kim, this is my favorite portrait of a sheep.
