Sugar houses are man caves in some ways, steaming, boiling, pungent and sweet spaces filled with sounds of boiling, hissing, bubbling vats and pots, roaring wood stoves, all kinds of pipes and knobs to turn and adjust. Scott is the master of his world in her, rushing from pot to pot, stirring, adjusting, checking temperatures, pouring his sugar into bottles – he gets about $25 a quart for his syrup, it is good stuff. I feel quite manly in there, I am learning how to help, I hate sitting around watching other people work. He will be in the sugar house most of the night, the sap is really running.
Red and I returned to the Sugar House this afternoon to spend a few quiet hours with Scott Carrino as he processes many gallons of sap into maple syrup. Once the nights get warm, the sap will stop running off of the trees, the trees will take it for themselves. I helped Scott pour the syrup into jars and screw the caps on, the bottles were plenty hot. Scott and I have become good friends, we trust each other and talk honestly with one another, it is helpful to me, and I hope helpful to him, he is a very good man, a very rare man.
Friendships with men are tough, they have always been tough for me, I am fortunate to spend this time with Scott in his sugar house, and I have to say I love the toddies he makes, I am not sure it’s so good for a diabetic, but I sure left happy.
Well, this is a first for me, but when farmers think their ewes are about to give birth, they crawl around and look for the udders to drop down and bag up, they say “she’s baggin’ up!” and usually the lambs are a day or two away. Maria texted me this afternoon and said “I think Zelda’s bagging up,” and when I got home, she had gone off to yoga, and I couldn’t leave it there, so Red and I went out to the pasture to take a look.
I have to tell you this photo was quite hard won, Zelda is not interested in being photographed or having me crawl around her butt with a big camera, Red held her in front and I lay down in a bunch of mud and manure (careful to keep the camera dry, but I may have to burn a shirt and a pair of jeans). Anyway, I got the shot, I promised when I started the blog that I would share and be open, and this is about as open as one wants to get.
You can see for yourself that Zelda’s udder and nipples are coming down, good news for her lamb, they will be easy to find. They weren’t down like this a day or so, so I believe we are getting close, by my calculations she is due, we have everything we need, including the heated tail docker. She’s baggin’ up.
I’m heading back to New York on Thursday, going to spend the day with some carriage drivers, hope to get a sense of the people at the heart of this story, this controversy. I’m meeting one of the drivers – Stephen Malone – at the Clinton Stables in the morning, I will ride with him to Central Park and around the park and also meet some of the other drivers waiting in the carriage lines. I have heard from very few of the drivers, this is a story of human beings as well as animals, I want to hear their voices and grasp their perspective. I am eager to ask them if they plan on driving those fake vintage electric cars if the horses are ever banned.
I’ll be getting up around 3 a.m., Maria will drive me to the train station in Albany, and I’ll be hauling my camera and gear around, heading back upstate in the late afternoon or early evening. My writing on the horses has gone to a free-lance editor, she will go over them in the next week or so, my agent will decide when to publish the e-book, tentatively called “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses Of New York?” Today I was invited to read from the book when it comes out at the Manhattan Saddlery, the last equestrian tack store in New York City.
The store invited me to talk about the e-book and also read my poem “First, They Came For The Horses,” I said I would be happy to go and I would not charge a speaking fee. What a cool idea. It’s not exactly the kind of reading or book tour I’m used to, but it is an e-book and it is unusual to do readings for e-books anywhere. Connie Brooks let me do one for “The Story Of Rose” at Battenkill Books, I appreciated it. I am sorry that this e-book will only be available digitally, but it needs to come out soon, not in a year or so. It will be available everywhere books are sold, and I would love to patch together a book tour if it is possible. I’ll surely go to the Manhattan Saddlery, sounds pretty exotic.
I would imagine this trip would be my last to write about the carriage horses, I will have seen pretty much everything I wanted to see first-hand. I will surely be following the story but I’m not sure I have a reason to go back unless I’m invited. Of course, I’ve said that several times and seem to be going back.
It looks like Zelda is “bagging up,” as the farmers say her udder is dropping down along with her belly. Photos to come.
I sometimes think the carriage horses are trapped in myth, the prisoners of the stories human beings choose to tell about them, as they argue over them and exploit them. Joseph Campbell wrote that we need myths to identify individual truth, not with local groups but the planet. I think of the horses when I think of the eternal struggle between fact and myth.
If you look at the warring websites of the carriage trade and the animal rights organizations seeking to put them out of business, it is so easy to lose sight of the truth about the horses, they are shrouded in argument and declaration. Like so many other issues in our country, this one has become intensely polarized, drawing the angry and simple-minded hordes of the “left” and the “right,” each side seeing its own conspiracy, it’s own demons. The horses, as often happens with animals, are caught in the middle.
On the animal rights sites, the carriage trade are relentlessly slandered and demonized – abusers, greedy, callous, murderers of innocent and mistreated animals. It is, of course, necessary to demonize people before you destroy them, this was one of Stalin’s greatest notions of justice and process.
On the carriage sights, there is also rage and fury, attacks on progressives, assaults on President Obama, cheers for the return of Rudy Guiliani, now a warrior for their cause.
You could easily forget the horses and sink into the angry world of cable news and the worst pages of Facebook. On the same day, on three different sites, on both sides, I was called a liar, a whore, a tool, a “s—,” a greedy opportunist, a dog-killer, an exploiter and abuser of animals, an outsider and an idiot. What sane citizen would wish to pay attention to a debate like this? Who does speak for the horses, how does one find out the truth about them in this maelstrom that passes for argument and reason in our world?
I’ve been researching this story for more than two months now, talking to people, reading books and journals, trawling through websites and behavioral journals. I’ve talked with police officers, veterinarians, horse owners and lovers, carriage owners and riders and yes, even some animal rights activists, several of whom are my friends (or were, perhaps.) I have been living with animals for two decades now, I’ve written a dozen books about them, I have a good start sorting through the myths of the carriage horses, trying to identify the horses with their place on the planet, not just as pawns in the ugly game of New York City politics. I don’t know if I’m there yet, I’m working my way through it.
The horses are caught up in some of the worst instincts of human beings. They speak to us of a place for animals in our world, of their disappearance from our cities and towns, of the collapse of journalism as a place of last resort, as an institution seeking truth and perspective, of the dangers of purchasing politicians with pre-existing ideological positions. The horses remind us that animals need to be understood, not simply rescued or exploited, if we are to decide what is best for them. Again and again, I am reminded of the shrinking of the American mind, when the lives of animals are sacrificed to the believe that there are only two ways to look at the world, both filled with hatred anger and self-righteousness.
The story has grown so far beyond the horses now, it has spread to movie stars, TV appearances, trade union politics, polls and surveys, political intrigue, the bizarre introduction of fake antique electric cars. There are reporters, blogs, former mayors, City Council lobbying, real estate intrigue and the ever present narrowing of the world into the suffocating prisms and prejudices of the left and the right. The question is now, and always has been, who speaks for the horses, who can separate myth from the truth?
This is what I know:
– It is a myth that the horses are abused. They are not. It is possible they once were, but since only one person in 150 years has been charged with neglect (that was last year, for driving a horse with a foot infection) or abuse, there is simply no evidence to support the claim. I’ve talked to more than a score of trainers, behaviorists, police inspectors, veterinarians, horse lovers, equine writers and visitors who have seen the horses at work and in their stables. There is not one who has claimed or will state that they have seen a single case of abuse, cruelty or neglect, certainly not in the past 20 years.
The horses appear to be loved and attended to. They have ample room in their cells to move about, they are always in the company of other horses, day and night, they get ample exercise and health care; they eat fresh and plentiful hay, have air-conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, five weeks of vacation a year, regular medical inspection and care, mandated by law, they get almost continuous attention from human beings, have their stables cleaned every few hours, do not work in extreme cold or heat, rain, snow or ice.
There are few animals in the world – none in the natural world – given that kind of care.
The horses do not live for three of four years, as has been claimed, but for eighteen or twenty, far longer than the average horse lives in rural life or in the mythical “wild,” when it existed in America. They do not routinely collapse of overwork or malnutrition, according to the meticulous records kept by the city; they almost never do, but like all living things, they sometimes do, and sometimes will. That is called life. It is a myth that animals never die. The people who call themselves animal rights advocates seem almost imprisoned by myth – the fantasy of the horse that never works, who never dies, that exists on grass, that returns to nature. There is hardly anyone who knows or loves animals that believes this fantasy is the destiny of the New York Carriage Horses. It is a chimera; a vain and idle fancy constructed for the emotional needs of people, not of animals.
How do you poor people out there sort your way through all of this myth and argument, how do I? We just do our best, open our minds, try and think of the horses, not the human beings dumping all of their stuff onto them. I believe facts are the way to reason and reality; the truth wants to be free and given the chance, will find its own way. I keep trying to think of the horses, not the people who speak for them. And I remind myself to remember that the people who own and ride and care for them are human beings, just like me, just like you, some good, some bad, some in the middle. Cardboard cutouts are the passion of our polarized world, not the people seeking truth. I do not wish to live in a cable news world.
– It is a myth that all of the horses will be safe if they are banned, sent to rescue farms where they will spend the rest of their lives grazing peacefully on grass and in nature. Perhaps this is a consequence of living in New York, this failure to see what has happened to the natural world beyond. One animal rights group claims all of the horses will be saved, one says 30 have been saved, another says they will all be returned to the wild. But this claim is the myth: the horses do not belong to the animal rights groups, they are private property. Horse rescue farms generally take old or sick equines, not young and healthy draft horses, very few have the money to feed giant draft horses who consume two or three bales of hay a day. If these horses are banned, some will be sold, others brought to the private farms of the carriage owners, others sent to slaughter, joining the more than 150,000 horses killed last year.
The surprising truth is that the horses do not need to be saved, they are in the safest place for them, right where they are, where they need to be.
– It is a myth that work is cruel for working horses like the carriage horses. These horses were bred to work, they have never lived in the wild, they have always been stabled and lived mostly in cities or on farms. In the 1850’s, write Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr in “The Horse In The City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century,” thousands of horses were stables in centralized buildings as ownership of them passed from individuals to bureaucracies. “An urban hackman probably stabled his horse in a backyard shed, but a street railway had a stable for hundreds, if not thousands of horses.” For most of their history, few, if any New York horses lived like the ones in the current stables of New York City.
“Our main theme,” wrote the authors,”is that the urban horse can be viewed primarily as an animal who was regarded and utilized by a wide variety of urbanites – teamsters, merchants, factory and workshop owners and managers, house movers, street car drivers and company officials, and even veterinarians – as a living machine. In addition, write McShane and Tarr, the horse played a variety of other roles in urban society, such as companion, an esthetic object and a heroic figure for literature.
– Then, the myth of the electric car. People can draw their own conclusions about whether society is better or worse off by replacing the horses with real machines like tractors and trucks and automobiles. But it is difficult to accept the claim that pulling light carriages with rubber-rimmed wheels on flat ground is more work than a large draft or working horse can comfortably handle.
I am no longer surprised by distortion or manipulation when it comes to the horses, but nothing has surprised or puzzled me more than the nearly half-a-million dollars spent by NYClass, the leading animal rights group seeking to ban the horses, to develop prototypes for the hideously ugly and universally disliked fake vintage antique cars that are supposed to give all of the carriage horse riders jobs, whether they want them or not. Another myth, I think.
When I first heard of them, I thought it was a satire, an Onion magazine spoof. I’m still not sure it isn’t a spoof, I can’t think of a more powerful metaphor or rationale for keeping the horses in Central Park, which was, in large part, designed just for them by Frederick Law Olmstead.
I just read two books about him, and I can only imagine his response to being told of a plan to replace horses in the park with more automobiles, and fake ones at that. Nothing speaks more powerfully to the myopic bubble in which this assault on the horses was conceived. You only have to be around the carriage trade people for a minute or two to know they will never agree to ride electric cars around Central Park.
Why doesn’t the mayor know it? Why does he think his mandate gives him the right to force people into work they don’t want?
Perhaps because he refuses to visit the stables or speak with the drivers or carriage horse owners, and the animal rights organizations would rather shout at the horses and owners and drivers than talk to them.
And speaking of truth, I wonder: why didn’t some of the passionate horse lovers at NYClass figure out how many horses could have been saved from slaughter with the money from the clearly doomed $450,000 electric car project, if it is really the welfare of horses they have in mind?
As these myths and arguments for banning the horses seem to collapse, one after another, we are left mostly with the watery idea that the horses are less safe than they used to be, and New York a much more dangerous place for them than it used to be.
If truth matters at all, this argument is also a myth. At the height of the working horse presence in New York City in the late 1900’s, up to 9,000 horses a week perished in fires, from epidemics and diseases, overwork or from injuries. Many more died in accidents that occurred in the thousands of spills, collisions and other mishaps that occurred in the city’s crowded, mostly upaved, potholed water-logged, bug-infested, manure-filled and un-policed streets.
In the past 30 years, three carriage horses have died as the result of traffic accidents in New York City, those in more than 300,000 trips to and from their stables. In the past 20 years, there have been no horse deaths resulting from traffic.
In 2012, there were more than 68,000 car crashes in New York City involving 128,000 vehicles and 170,000 humans with 271 fatalities, including ll,000 vehicle-pedestrian accidents, 3,639 bikes-car accidents, and 1,619 motorcycle crashes. It seems the horse are among the healthiest and safest living things in New York City. Yet the power of myth is strong, a survey of New York City residents early last year found that more than 75 per cent of the city’s residents believed that New York was more dangerous for horses than for people. It may take Liam Neeson to get them to figure out that they are wrong, but I believe they will. They are paying attention now.
In his inaugural speech, the new mayor embraced the mantle of progressivism and said banning the horses would be his major priority, the first thing he would do in his first week in office. This proved another myth, another surrender to individual truth.
Statistically, according to figures provided me by the New York Police Department, New Yorkers are more likely to be killed by falling trees while walking in Central Park (two children died that way last year alone) than they are either to be injured or killed by a carriage horse. Veterinarians report no evidence of respiratory disease in the carriage horses from the city’s fumes.
So where does that leave the horse when we sort through the enraged rhetoric of the left and the right, the angry arguments, the emotionally manipulative and distorted imagery. This rhetoric is quite popular and so easy to put up on websites and social media, and the failure of journalism or politics to find the truth and speak for it is striking.
It leaves us with the biggest horse myth of all, and perhaps the most widely-held and enduring: that the horses are too fragile and weak and dependent to live or work in cities. That they wish or need to be returned to the “natural” world, sometimes called the “wild,” which has never existed in their lives and no longer exists in our world. That they can no longer live in urban areas with human beings. That their lives are more dangerous and difficult than they used to be. That they are not well-treated or cared for.
As Joseph Campbell did, I love the power of myth, I am equally drawn to the power of truth. I was a reporter, I believe in journalism’s great power to separate truth from myth. In our polarized world, facts do not lie, they still speak for themselves, they speak for the horses.
The horses stand today – sometimes quite alone – on a great battlefield, caught between the two passions of human beings – myth and truth – but their message to us seems clear enough, at least to me. We seek to remain among people, our survival, perhaps yours, depends on it. We have important work to do, to be seen and to be considered. We seek to continue to work to serve human beings and fulfill our purpose and our destiny, we are the last representatives of the animal world to live and work in the great city. We are the representatives of Mother Earth, we have the right to share the world with people, to not be banished to make room for more machines, to not be hidden from sight, where we will vanish from the earth as have so many other animals before us.
The true myth of the horses will identify the truth, not the truth of the local groups, of the warring humans who claim to speak for them, but the truth of the planet, source of the greatest truth of all.
