It was thought by some of the carriage drivers that the mayor, Bill de Blasio, had decided to leave them alone, he had been silent about the horses for months after his somewhat humiliating public trouncing on the issue earlier this year. This week he said he would try and move the carriage horse ban through the City Council, as he had pledged in January, when he vowed in his inaugural speech that removing the horses was the first and most urgent priority of his administration.
By now it is clear that removing the horses is the urgent priority of no one but the mayor and his supporters among the animal rights movement in New York City, for whom it has become a cultural jihad utterly devoid of truth, reason or rationality. This unnecessary controversy is not worth a minute of the mayor’s time, a single City Council Meeting, or one more taxpayer dollar.
Mayor de Blasio’s war against the carriage trade has been puzzling, he speaks of the horses cryptically and rarely and refuses to explain his position or discuss it with journalists or the carriage owners or drivers, whose lives, livelihood and way of life are very much on the line. He is clearly not an animal person, he has lived in Brooklyn his whole life and never owned a dog or cat.
It is difficult to find another case when a mayor pursued an intensely regulated industry and threatened hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars so blindingly and aggressively without any evidence of a crime, regulatory violation or serious wrongdoing, and in the face of enormous and nearly universal opposition from the city’s residents and almost every equine behaviorist, trainer or veterinarian in the country.
It is believed the mayor is acting in response to campaign contributions from the animal rights group NYClass, whose millionaire founder is credited with turning deBlasio’s mayoral campaign around with generous contributions and support.
There are many sad, even tragic things about the New York Carriage Horse controversy. One is that it has caused so much anxiety, suffering and hurt to the hard-working people who have been in this trade in New York for 150 years. People deserve better at the hands of their government. The second is that this controversy is almost completely fabricated and unnecessary, a reality that the media in New York City almost myopically refuses to explore or consider.
I have written a dozen books about animals, I have lived with cows, sheep, donkeys, dogs,barn cats, chickens and goats for two decades, I have talked to vets, behaviorists, rescue workers, attachment theorists, animal writers and lovers all over the country. I have talked to many of them about the carriage horse drama and every one says the same thing. There is no crisis here, no controversy, no need of rescue for the carriage horses. The horses are content, well cared for and healthy. There are so many, they all say, who are not.
Everyone who loves animals knows that there are many in need of rescue – dogs, horses, donkeys, sheep goats, cats. Anyone who knows anything about animals knows that the carriage horses are not in need of rescue. They are intensely supervised and regulated. They live longer than horses in the wild or on rescue farms, they are fed healthy and nutritious food every day, their stables are cleaned every three hours, they get five weeks of vacation, and are covered by hundreds of pages of regulations overseen by five separate city agencies.
If you pore through the statistics on alleged horse abuse in New York City, there is one documented case in the past 150 years, that was a driver who let his horse work with an infected leg last January. He’s lost his license. There are no pending charges of abuse against any carriage driver or owner. No human being has ever been killed by a carriage horse, not in millions of rides. Several horses have died in traffic incidents in the city over the past three decades, a radically safer ratio of rides to injuries than is true of city residents. (More than 200 New Yorkers died in traffic accidents last year alone.)
It is ludicrous to argue that healthy, cared for and generally loved animals need to be arbitrarily rescued by outside groups and individuals that have never seen the stables, examined the horses, talked to the owners or drivers or in most cases, even been near a horse or other domesticated animal besides a dog or a cat. On the pages of NYClass, the organization that has devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to banning the horses, there are promises that every single carriage horse banned from the city has a home to go to, will be rescued.
But these horses are not their horses, they are the private property of law-abiding people with generations, even centuries of experience working and living with horses. They are not in need of rescue – a score of independent veterinarians have examined the horses in their stables and found their care excellent. These are among the most fortunate horses in the world.
If you live in the country as I do, you can see many small and struggling farms where animals are desperately in need of food, shelter and medical care. There are three horses not far from me that would dearly love to be in New York City, get that fresh hay, exercise and shelter and attention. It is hard to see them huddled under their tin roof in the snow and cold. I know of no respected animal trainer or behaviorists who believes it is abuse for working animals to work, from my border collie to seeing-eye dogs to the carriage horses to the bomb-sniffing dogs of Amtrak, who live at vastly greater risk than any carriage horse.
How tragic that the enormous resources being poured into banishing horses who are in good health and with a vital purpose are not going where they belong. We have lost our grounding and perspective when it comes to understanding the true nature of animals. NYClass has spent more than a half-million dollars developing a prototype “cruelty-free” electric car to replace the horses. I didn’t know cars could be cruel or free of nastiness. Perhaps the group might consider a cruelty-free animal rights organization, they might have more credibility.
Politically, it is tragic that the mayor of the country’s largest and most influential city would condone the long and brutal harassment of people who are mostly just doing their jobs and have done no wrong. This story is a landmark episode in the complex and generally sorry history of animals in America. In a rational world, the horses ought to be celebrated as an example of animals who have been given meaning and purpose in our complex world, who have found a place. We ought to be grateful to an industry that has found a way to keep these animals among us, they remind us that it is possible for animals to remain in our world.
They horses are wildly popular in New York City, an iconic symbol of grace, beauty and history in Central Park. There are many things New York City could do to make the horses good lives even better, if the city government was truly interested in their welfare – special traffic lanes, new stables built by hovering developers, banning cars and trucks from carriage lanes.
To grasp the real importance and impact of the mayor’s proposed ban, I make it a point to stand next to the carriages when I am in New York City and watch the faces of children as they walk past and encounter the horses for the first time. I see the magic and mystery and connection of the animal world in their faces. We need animals in our lives, I asked the mother of a little girl who was kissing one of the horses on the nose how she might feel if the horses are banned.
“It would be horrible,” she told me,”she would never see one of these horses again.”
We live in a world with real problems, crises and challenges. How sad that we have to conjure them up when they are not even real. Are we really going to put hundreds of people out of work and put hundreds of horses at risk because a millionaire real estate developer believes it is cruel for horses to pull carriages – which they have been doing for thousands of years – and because he gave the mayor a lot of money? It seems to come down to that.
As this absurdly unnecessary ban goes forward, we will see months, even years of conflict, confrontation, millions of dollars in legal fees, accusations, counter charges. The people in the carriage trade will live in limbo for years, an enormous amount of money and attention will go to perhaps the least urgent and pressing social issue in a great and complicated city. If you walk through almost any neighborhood of New York, you can find all sorts of people, as well as animals, who need more and deserve better. The horses remind us every day that we have lost our moral bearing.
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My new e-book, “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World,” will be published online everywhere digital books are sold this coming week.