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.