One of my favorite community things is Open Mike Night at the Round House Cafe, a monthly gathering for musicians, poets, writers and singers to come and share their work. Tonight, some of Scott Carrino’s staff were sick, he asked if Maria and I could help, so we rushed over and helped set up the tables. Maria worked the cash register, I served the food from the kitchen and then read from my new book “Saving Simon,” and also read a poem from the blog, “To Scott and those who hurt: You don’t have to be good.” This was the first Open Mike Night of the season, so things were a bit chaotic, but some fine singers and musicians turned out to perform, it was a beautiful example of community happening. My small town, Cambridge, N.Y., is much about community, something I often resisted in my life.
Scott was amazed at how quickly Maria adapted to his new computer/inventory/cash register, she is not intimidated by much these days.
It is cow corn cutting time where we love, time to rake in the vast corn fields used for sileage to feed the cows throughout the winter. Time for people corn to come to a close shortly, when the first deep frost comes. It is a comforting thing to see, another sign of the rush of fall.
Does anyone really know what a dog thinks and feels? I don’t. Red projects great empathy and compassion, but I know those are not really dog traits, they are human projections of what we want to think dogs feel. It doesn’t really matter, as Red is able to touch the hearts and spirits of people, and do great good. There is a sweetness about him, for sure, and the ability to connect with his eyes and body. It is a powerful thing, a beautiful thing.
Maria and the cat she calls “Minnie Cat.” It has been just about one year since Minnie lost a rear leg in a confrontation with an animal we never saw. People told us it was no big deal to amputate a cat’s leg, they didn’t seem to notice it. People who tell you that are not telling you the truth, it was a very big deal, expensive, painful and with a longer healing time than open heart surgery. But we are glad we did it, Minnie has largely recovered and she and Maria have the most beautiful bond. She can get around pretty well now, and has made herself a cozy nest in the hay pile in the big barn. Soon, she will be spending her nights inside the house, along with Flo. Yesterday, Minnie caught a big rat and ate all of it but the tail. Lenore got that.
So here is what the New York Carriage Drivers have done, what they mean, what their resurrection has accomplished:
In a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin, people calling themselves supporters of animal rights targeted a farmer’s wife, a widow with four children, who brought her pony to a farmer’s market on weekends to offer rides to children (the locations have been changed at the request of the pony owner. She has seen the videos from New York City). She charged $2 a ride. The money helped her keep the pony and feed him, she had rescued him from an impoverished farm, he was due to go to slaughter. Protesters had shown up at the market, calling the woman a “torturer” and harassing the children who lined up for the rides. Susan Blakely, a resident of the town, says she would once have instantly signed the petition to ban the pony – she is a long-time supporter of animal rights – but she has been following the New York Carriage Horse controversy closely, and she decided to go and see for herself if Sparky, the pony, was being abused or suffering in his work.
She found Sparky to be loved and well-cared for. Children loved to ride him, and he loved to work. She understand that if Sparky lost this work, the farmer’s wife would not be able to keep him and he would almost certainly go to slaughter. The farmer’s wife is devastated by the attacks and frightened, Susan says. “It is an awful thing to see.” She found that the animal rights protesters lied in their public statements about Sparky, exaggerated an incident where he stumbled, claimed the farmer’s wife was torturing him and abusing him, was greedy and cruel. Susan met the farmer’s wife and she found these arguments to be both outrageous and false, but this time they were familiar to her. The same words were used over and over again to describe the carriage drivers in New York. Susan has begun a campaign to protect Sparky’s true rights and his life, and to protect the rights and property of the farmer’s wife as well. “I would never have done this if not for the New York Carriage Drivers,” she wrote me, “they are the heroes here, they are the ones protecting the lives and rights of animals. I see the world differently now, I will fight for the real rights of animals, people who abuse people can never love animals or speak for them.”
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It has been said – by Che Guevera, who should know – that a revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe, you have to make it fall. The New York Carriage Drivers have resurrected themselves, rejected the fate chosen for them by politicians, journalists, TV stars, real estate developers and cultural racists. Successful revolutions require more than anger and hatred, they require a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights. They have started a revolution, they have knocked the apple off of the tree.
Who could have imagined that the Working People’s Party and the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce would both come together in support of the carriage drivers and their horses? That the compliant New York City Council, dependent on the mayor and his allies for support and patronage, would refuse en masse to support his promise to make the banning of the horses the major priority of his new administration? Or that more than 60 per cent of the city’s residents would reject the lies and distortions they have been fed for so long about the treatment of the horses? No one – surely not me – predicted that the carriage drivers, reviled for years as thieves and thugs and animal abusers, would refuse to be further dehumanized and save themselves and their horses from extinction in the greatest city in the world.
The issue of the horses has brought together left and right right, liberal and conservative, business and labor, disparate newspaper editorial boards and the vast majority of residents of New York City, all age and gender groups, every borough. The horses and their drivers have sparked a new social awakening, the realization that the cause of animal rights needs to be reclaimed by people who love animals and wish to save them from extinction, not banish them to ghettos and preserves.
The carriage drivers have taught us that their horses are among the luckiest and safest horses in the world, that it is morally inexcusable to put them at risk, even slaughter them, for the sake of the very twisted idea that they should be killed and banished in order to be saved. The head of NYClass, the group pushing the ban, was recorded on tape saying the horses would be better off being euthanized than pulling carriages in New York. I have never known an animal lover to euthanize a healthy animal living in a safe and secure home.
The carriage drivers have suffered through this campaign, living in fear, anger and uncertainty. They waited a long time to speak, they had no experience with media and conflict, were caught off guard at the ferocity of the assault, dispirited by it. But they have begun to speak out – calmly and movingly – of their lives, their dreams, their traditions, their families, their love of animals. They have learned that conflict can destroy us or make us stronger. They have chosen to be stronger.
It has not often worked out this way, consider the recent fate of the pony rides at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market near Los Angeles.
The calm and thoughtfulness of the drivers stands in jarring contrast to the fury and rage directed towards them. Their words have stirred many people, in New York and throughout the world. Their images and words have become the most powerful – and most effective – weapons in this wrenching and troubling conflict.
And this is one of the great gifts of the carriage drivers, they have helped all of us to understand what animal and horse lovers know – horses are not people. They are not like us. The carriage drivers know this because they live with horses day and night every day, many of their families have worked with horses for a thousand years.
It is not abuse for working animals to work, or for ponies to give rides to children. It is not hard or miserable work to pull a light carriage in Central Park for six to eight hours a day. The horses are not sad, they could not survive in the wild, it is unhealthy and truly sad for working horses to be condemned to doing nothing but eating and dropping manure their entire lives.
They are well cared for, they live a long time, they show no signs of respiratory disease or infection, they are in constant contact with other horses, they get the best medical care, excellent food. The horses are not dangerous to New Yorkers, the drivers are not abusing or mistreating them in any way. The horses do not work in extreme temperatures, hot or cold, their stables are heated and air-conditioned, cleaned every three hours.
The campaign against the carriage drivers is one enormous lie, built on anger, air and sand.
And as much as the drivers are hated by some animal rights protestors, they and the horses are much loved by others. Millions of people, tourists, lovers, children from New York and all over the world are touched and warmed by them, by their mystery, history and magic. These are voices that cry out to be heard.
“The biggest thing I have learned,” said Blakely, “is that some of these people in the animal rights world are just not very nice. They lie and they don’t seem to know a thing about animals. We can’t leave the fate of animals to people who hate people and seem to want nothing to do with animals or learn anything about what is really good for them.”
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So that is the wind that is carrying the carriage horses and their drivers in the great confrontation over the real rights of animals and people occurring in New York City. The carriage drivers have accomplished the impossible. They have resurrected themselves and challenged the rest of us to save the remaining animals in our world, to learn about them, love them, understand them. They have challenged us as well to be human, to respect animals and the people who live with them. To understand that it is impossible to love animals and hate people. The drivers have survived a vicious, years-long assault on their dignity, reputations and freedom against a powerful mayor, an enraged and fanatic millionaire, a lazy and manipulable media and a civic community fed lie after lie without any balance or truth.
They are beginning to turn their suffering to good, to speak up for their freedom, dignity, and humanity, inspiring us to support them and do the same. They have reminded us that it is not progressive in any sense of the term to put honest and law-abiding people out of work for no reason and without due process or any kind of negotiation.
The drivers have revealed some elements of the movement that calls itself supporters of animal rights to be ideologically bankrupt, cruel and dishonest. The animal rights movement in New York, founded by many well-meaning people with the best of intentions, is riddled with a social malignancy. They are cruel, abusive to people, and false to their own ideals. They do not support the lives of animals or make them better, they mostly campaign to separate animals from people, make it ever more difficult to own, live or work with them, and force them out of our world, from carriage horses to dogs and cats in shelters, elephants in circuses, ponies in farmer’s markets, chickens on farms, horses in Hollywood movies.
Instead of making it easier for people to own and live with animals, the movement that calls itself supporters of animal rights is making is more difficult, more expensive, more controversial to have them. The greatest shock for me in researching this story has been to learn how many animals have lost their lives in sacrifice to this fringe movement of lavishly-funded ideologues. “We just sent a dozen horses to die,” said one California rancher, “because none of the movie producers want to use real animals anymore, it is just too painful to deal with the animal rights extremists.” A circus outside of Detroit euthanized two baby elephants because animal rights groups had targeted their circus and they could not afford the legal fees. They could not find a home for the elephants.
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The New York Carriage horses are in great peril if they are banned, something no true animal rights organization would countenance. More than 160,000 horses were slaughtered in America last year, the animal rights groups in New York claim they have homes for every one of the 200 carriage horses, but they will not say where they are, how they are funded, or how they will be able to pay for the millions of dollars in hay it will take to keep the horses alive for the rest of their lives. No one in the animal world believes their claims are even remotely possible, especially against the backdrop of the financial struggles of so many overwhelmed horse rescue facilities. Sadly, there are so many animals in the world in need of rescue, the horses are not among them.
If the campaign against the carriage drivers were launched against African-Americans, Jews or gay men and women, it melt Twitter down, it would be denounced as the ugly, culturally and socially racist campaign that it is. Even if the animal rights groups were correct in claiming the horses do not belong in New York, the ugly nature of their campaign – one leader called the drivers “random people,” another said when the horses were banned, their supporters would soon be back working at “McDonald’s” – would cause an uproar by good people everywhere.
There are many diverse groups represented in the carriage trade, but the heart and soul of the trade is the Irish, who fled their troubles to find freedom and were drawn to work with horses. If you examine the nature of the words and attacks on the drivers – the mayor refuses even to speak to them or meet with them – it suggests a kind of cultural racism to me. It is ugly and disturbing that a mayor would so closely associate himself with it. Of course, the mayor, who has never owned a dog or cat, seems to lack the magic touch when it comes to animals. Consider the fate of Chuck (or Charlotte), the groundhog from the Staten Island Zoo.
The carriage drivers have forced the spotlight on a movement that often resembles hate groups more than animal welfare organizations and that does not in any way advance the rights or welfare of animals, it simply takes them away from us and hastens their disappearance from the world.
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So this is the challenge that the carriage drivers and the horses have called us to. To fight for the survival of animals on a struggling Mother Earth. To move beyond the endless arguments and railing against PETA and liberals and the animal rights groups and awaken to a new social order, a new way of seeing animals and defining their rights. To follow the lead of the carriage drives and turn the pain to good. To find ways of keeping animals like the horses safely and comfortably in urban communities, where most of Americans now live. To commit ourselves to keeping them among us, rather than keeping them away from us.
To speak to and for the people who struggle to keep animals in their lives – poor people, working people, farmers, the farmer’s wife in her market. To speak for the people who would keep and love a dog if they were not shut out of the increasingly restrictive and elitist system of adoption. At the core, this conflict has always been about freedom as well as animals.
The carriage drivers are heroes, patriots to me. They are standing in their truth, yes, they make a living from the horses, but they are all that stands between the removal of domesticated animals from our world and the angry people who have stolen the very idea of animal rights from the people who most love animals.
I think sometimes we have come to take freedom and it’s meaning for granted. Freedom is not a liberal or conservative idea. It is a very American idea. Not too long ago, the idea that government could enter and ruin the private lives of good and hard-working people without cause would have outraged the country, now, we are too busy reading our Facebook pages to even notice. I have long loved and followed Thomas Paine, the author who helped spark the American revolution with his pamphlet “Common Sense.”
At the bleakest time, when all seemed lost, Paine went to the starving soldiers of the revolution and gave them a speech that inspired them and helped save the revolution. I think of the carriage drivers when I think of Paine, they are in a different kind of war, and for different reasons, but the issues are, curiously and somewhat surprisingly, similar.
For the carriage drivers, these have been the times that try men’s souls. You can see it in their faces, hear it in their voices. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in the face of such an ugly and enduring crisis, shrink from the service of their cause. But he or she that stands by it now deserves the thanks of every man and woman, no matter where they are, where they work. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet there is this consolation:
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives every thing it’s value. The carriage drivers are resurrected, they now, willingly or not, have begun their revolution. So do we.
