Day: March 27, 2014

Today was a record day for my being called names on Facebook. Within two hours, I was called a liar, a whore, a “shit,” an anti-semite, greedy, stupid and venal, and oh yes, a phony.  I was accused of hating Jews, of exploiting the carriage park horses to revive my flagging career, and of seeking to benefit from their troubles to make money. And that was from the people who agreed with me and love the carriage horses!

I couldn’t  even repeat what the people trying to ban the horses have said to me (and about me.) After lunch, I went out to Scott Carrino’s sugar house and had a drink (a toddy), and I said I think I had been called more names in one day than in a number of years. Scott went white – he is very nice and is disturbed by anger and hostility. How are you, he asked? I am good, I said, like John Updike wrote, if you are a writer and are not being attacked, you are just not alive.

The carriage horse drama is a difficult, sometimes ugly thing, and some people on both sides seem equally angry, sometimes so much so they are not even clear about what they are angry about, the subject is radioactive. I expected when I started writing about this that there would be some angry people yelling at me, I am not surprised. I have been writing on the Internet for nearly three decades, and have sadly come to understand hostility as being one of the unintended horrors of this form of communicating, it is just so easy to be hostile there, people are not accountable for their words.

I generally don’t argue my beliefs online, that is a sinkhole if ever there was one, but I couldn’t resist a couple of the barrages, sometimes I think it is fun to poke the bear a bit. I am usually wrong about that, but I did have fun putting up a photo of Red and Zelda on one site where someone was shrieking at me with capital letters and many exclamation points (when words are not angry enough), and it did quiet things down a bit, I think she was just shocked.  On balance, I think it is cruel to provoke angry people, it just feeds the broken parts of them and accomplishes little else. This was new, though, in my six decades of living, no one has called me an anti-semite, that is a tough charge to make stick with me, a Jewish boy from Providence turned Quaker.

The accusation came because I referred to the slaughter of horses as a “holocaust” for them, and I wrote that some corporate farms were concentration camps for animals. Sadly, holocausts are not defined by one people or limited to them, there are many kinds throughout history, even today, and surely many animals – 155,000 horses were slaughtered in the last year alone – have experienced theirs.  Several people accused me of seeking to exploit the carriage horses for profit and fame, and that would be good news,  I hope they are right. I am curious to see how defending these horses will translate into riches, it’s not looking good so far. I doubt my e-book will do it, as that will only cost a couple of dollars.

Liam Neeson must have been looking over his shoulder at my sudden rise to fame, but I suspect he is safe for now, the big bucks and movie deals have not yet appeared.

The truth about being a public person in America is that almost everything you write offends, upsets or angers someone, this is the toll, the price to pay for thinking freely for a living. It is just the way it is, the way it has always been, especially since the Internet. It used to take some thought and time to be hostile, now it takes a micro-second and requires no thought at all.

But I never regret being a writer, I love my blog and I cannot count the thousands of messages thanking me for writing about the horses, it is important that I mention those good people. Writing is a good thing for me to do, what I have always wanted to do,  and the carriage horse story has stirred my heart, I think is important and I very much love writing about it and am drawn to it. I will follow it to the end, it speaks to me in so many ways.

I get little hostility compared to many, I honestly don’t know how the carriage horse people have survived with their psyches intact the last few years. It takes a strong person to deal with that every day. I think the Irish are strong people.

As Scott and I sipped our toddies in his sugar house, I could see this gentle man was still disturbed that his friend was being called names, he didn’t quite believe that it didn’t bother me.  He said that would bother him a great deal.  He asked me how I manage dealing with so much hostility, and I said, no, I don’t want to give the wrong impression, mostly what I deal with is thought, love, support and connection, writing is my dream and my passion, I will never speak poorly of it.Sure, it bothers me sometimes, but not for long, and not very deep.

We must never forget, I said,  that the angry people of the Internet are very few, the good and interesting people are legion. It’s like winter and spring, light and dark, that is the nature of life, the crisis and mystery, the sunlight after the storm. Without both, the yin and the yang, neither would have any real meaning.

I love my life and am grateful for it. Tomorrow morning, I will meditate with Flo and Maria. It’s curious, but few people call me names on Fridays and weekends for some reason, I think they are too busy preparing for the weekend. I hope they have some fun. Or perhaps they are just worn out.

I admire Spring, she is emerging at her own pace, I imagine her polishing her nails, looking at herself in the mirror, chuckling over the grand entrance she is about to make. She showed up this morning, hovering above the ice pack that is our back yard, I saw her in the reflections of the donkeys, in the power of the sun, and in it’s beauty. She is the Grand Marshal of the parade, we are lining up to wait for her.

I was talking to one of the carriage horse owners in New York, he is a passionate animal lover and has been around horses all of his life and has always had a dog. When his Lab died recently he went to a local animal shelter and applied to adopt a dog. His application was denied, he said, because he was on a list of animal abusers because he drove a carriage horse. The shelter, an affiliate of the A.S.P.C.A. told him it is abuse to work animals like carriage horses, so he, his wife and three children were deemed unfit to adopt a dog.

Writing about the New York carriage horses,  I have frequently wondered why it is that someone like me, a lifelong lover of animals and a passionate believer in their having rights and protections, has become so uncomfortable with many – not all – of the people and organizations in the so-called animal rights movement. I have learned there is a great deal of difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Ironically, it was the working horses of New York City that first triggered the idea of rights and protections for animals against cruelty and overwork more than a century ago.

The author and naturalist Henry Beston – I am a great lover and follower of his work – helped spark the broader idea of animal rights when he wrote Outermost House in 1928 and called for a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals so they might continue to exist in the world with people.

Beston believed that animals were neither our brethren or dependents, they were citizens of a different nation, yet we shared the splendor and travail of the earth with them. They are are fellow travelers in life, we work together with them.

Beston’s notion of animal rights was gentle, never dogmatic or angry. He wanted us to recognize and respect the right of the animal’s to survive. He wanted us to listen to them and understand their mystical and ancient nature. They could not be measured by man, he said, they are older and more finished and complete. He never saw them as helpless creatures dependent on our pity for survival.

I believe Beston would be  horrified by the evoluton – or devolution – of the animal rights movement that he envisioned, and in some ways, fathered. He did not imagine an ideology that frightened or demeaned people, that invaded their personal lives and threatened their sense of partnership with animals, whom they have relentlessly politicized. Beston never saw animal rights as an idea that embraced the tactics of abuse and intimidation and cruelty against people, or was so disconnected from the real lives of real animals.

If you look at the websites of the carriage horse defenders, there are increasing references to the scourge of progressivism, to a puzzlement over why people on the “left”  seem – the new mayor of New York describes himself as a progressive – to be so involved in animal rights, such impassioned proponents of the idea that it is cruel for animals to work.  “Why do progressives hate horses?,” asked one poster on Facebook.

I don’t care for labels, but  most people who know me would label me a progressive, I  suppose I am closer to that than other labels. But the poster was incorrect, I believe. The animals rights movement as it is practiced today – especially in the campaign against the carriage horses –  is not a progressive social movement. It’s ideology, tactics and authoritarianism are  much closer to neo-fascism that progressivism. The movement seems brutish and cruel, it practices the big lie, it demonizes and stereotypes its sometimes hapless opponents, it seems to have no real understanding of animals, their history or an interest in their true welfare and rights.

Fascism, which reached its zenith in Europe in the years before World War II, was a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator with a rigid and fixed ideology controls the lives of the people, and people are not permitted to negotiate or disagree. If they do, they are brutalized and often falsely accused of crimes. Opposite ideologies are ruthlessly, and often inaccurately attacked  in order to discredit them, there is no real due process of law,  no commitment to truth, facts, or fairness. Fascist governments thought nothing of seizing private property and wiping out whole categories of employment, reassigning workers at will.

The movement to ban the horses has failed to consider the lives of the human beings who own and ride them, or the many experts, behaviorists, veterinarians and horse owners who have been excluded from consideration of their fate, and whose opinions are simply overlooked or disregarded. An overwhelming number of these authorities – veterinary schools, trainers – do not believe the horses are being mistreated, they advocate work as healthy and necessary for animals like working horses, and they have found the horses to be healthy and well-cared for. There is simply no evidence they are in need of saving, yet they have somehow become the most controversial animals in the country.

There are  no facts or statistics to support the idea that the horses are in danger living in New York, or that they are a danger to New Yorkers. In fact, if one studies the traffic and mortality statistics for New York, the horses may be the healthiest living things there. The forces seeking to ban the carriage horses have found a close and powerful ally in the city’s new mayor, who calls himself a progressive, but who has, in the case of the carriage horses, acted much more like a dictator than a leader. He has a rigid and fixed ideology, he refuses to communicate with the people most affected – the carriage owners and drivers – negotiate, or even speak with them.

When the sorry history of the New York Carriage Horses is finally written, I believe it will show that these tactics – distortion, demonization, a rigid and unyielding ideology and the use of fear and personal attacks – were the  hallmarks of the campaign to ban the horses from New York.

Beston never imagined an animal rights movement that would show so little compassion for people. He never considered an animal rights movement that animal people would hate and fear, or that would intrude so wantonly and fiercely into the private relationships people have with animals.

The devolution of the animal rights movement is a tragedy for animals, it does not in any way advance our understanding of them. Animals like the carriage horses have never needed rights more desperately than they do now.  This movement is amassing enormous financial and political strength to remove the horses from their owners, their good care, and their historic role and life in a great city. It means to send them out into the horrific maelstrom that is slaughtering 155,000 horses a year. It seems the rights they are being given are to be exiled, vanish or die.

In the process, the hundreds of people who own, drive, care for the horses will be thrown of work and the horses would be replaced by a fleet of electric cars. This seems a way of organizing a society in which people in power seek to control the lives of people who are not permitted to negotiate or disagree – or even make their case to their own elected representatives.

What is painfully clear – New York is a big stage, the whole world watches –  is that we do not yet have an animal rights movement in America, only an increasingly disconnected and authoritarian fringe movement that has stolen the name with the help of an ever manipulable media.The many millions of ordinary people who want to keep animals in their lives and are finding it increasingly expensive and difficult do not seem to be represented.

The carriage horse controversy is a perfect metaphor for the death of Beston’s dream. All over American, millions of animals – cows, sheep, chickens – suffer terribly in corporate animal concentration camps, confined in small spaces, on concrete all of their lives, slaughtered at the slightest illness – and animal rights organizations in New York City are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to replace horses with cars, buying the support of politicians,  holding gala fund-raising dinners in fancy hotels,  take out misleading and false advertising to drive 200 healthy and well cared for horses – the last undomesticated animals in New York City – off to rescue farms and slaughterhouses.

Animal rights cannot be won in an angry bubble or a societal civil war. The future of animals will not be determined by one idea, but by many. Like it or not, we live in partnership with animals – the animals, the people who own and love them, the people who know and understand them, the leaders who can protect them. We need a wiser and more mystical understanding of animal rights.

The carriage horses – perhaps this is their message – have helped us see that there is no real animal rights movement in America today, its failed promise visible everywhere in the catastrophe that the move to ban the carriage horses has revealed.

 

Perhaps it was what I wanted to her, but when we had to decide about amputating Minnie’s injured rear leg, I remember hearing over and over again that three-legged cats lead completely normal lives, that we would hardly notice Minnie’s lost leg, that she would hardly notice it either after awhile. That has not turned out to be true for Minnie, her  recovery has been long, slow and hard, and she will never return to her life as a barn cat. She is fearful of being out in the open, wary of being in the barn, reluctant to explore the pastures and fields that she used to prowl.

We put her out for a bit every morning, she finds a place to sit in the sun and then hangs by the back door, waiting to come in. I am glad Minnie is still around, but I don’t know if I would make the same decision about her amputation today, given her struggles since. She cannot  hop up on chairs and cushions, as she used to, she still seems disoriented and uncertain to me.

A new and regular feature on my Facebook Page. Fromm Family Food nutritionists will be on my Facebook Page all day today – usually Wednesdays – to answer your questions about your pet’s nutritional needs and concerns. Fromm is the food my dogs have eaten and thrived on for two years now – the food has had an enormous and immediate impact on dryness, coat, weight, stool  and allergies. I was so impressed I agreed to let Fromm become the first and only sponsor of bedlamfarm.com. In coming months, Fromm’s veterinary specialists will also be coming here to answer questions about animal health care.

Fromm is the oldest family-owned holistic pet food company in America, they do not outsource any of their food products and they have never had a recall (recalls are epidemic now among corporate pet food companies). I am proud and pleased to have Fromm as a sponsor. I strongly recommend you check out their website, they have important nutritional information there and their customer service is remarkable. Please take advantage of this opportunity to get honest nutritional information about your pets.  My dogs are the healthiest they have ever been since they went on Fromm Food, Lenore has kept trim, Frieda active and without allergies, Red’s coat is shiny and he has plenty of energy.

You can ask any question you want about proper nutrition for your dogs or cats. At the end of the day we will choose one of the questions and the poster will receive a coupon for a free bag of Fromm dog or cat food. Fromm’s nutritionists will be on the site beginning at 9 a.m. but I wanted to post this a bit earlier so you could get your questions in, last week there were quite a few. Fromm will try and answer all of them. I appreciate this opportunity to offer this kind of information to animal lovers, and I thank you for your questions and participation. Please post your questions here.