There are five people who are driving forces behind the move to ban the New York Carriage Horses. One is the mayor of New York City, Bill deBlasio. He has never owned an animal – a horse, a dog or a cat. He has never visited a carriage horse stable and refuses to meet with the carriage drivers or owners. He says he is a proud supporter of animal rights. Another is the City Council President, Melissa Mark-Viverito, she has never owned or ridden a horse, she says, but she has two rescue cats and says she supports animal rights and believes it is cruel for working animals to work. Another is Steven Nislick, a real-estate developer and animal activist and strong supporter of the mayor, he is the very wealthy founder of NYClass, the group spearheading the carriage horse ban. He was the leading financial contributor to Mayor deBlasio’s election campaign, and is widely credited with the mayor’s victory. He has said the carriage horses would be better off dead than pulling carriages in Central Park. Nislick bought some horses in the 1980’s and has occasionally taken part in “eventing,” an equine sport Time Magazine has described as the most dangerous (for animals and people) sport in the Summer Olympics. Another wealthy supporter of the ban is the chief financial officer of the Hugo Neu Corporation, a recycling and industrial real estate company that supports NYClass. Wendy Kelman Neu, who helps run the company, has never ridden or owned a horse, she says, nor has she ever visited a horse stable in New York. She is, she says, currently caring for 48 feral cats and loves all animals. She hopes to alleviate the suffering of animals, and she believes it is abuse for draft horses to pull carriages. Another is Allie Feldman, the executive director of NYClass and a frequent spokesperson for the movement to end the carriage trade. She has told reporters she has never ridden a horse or owned one, but she has a friend who has.
Buck Brannaman, the most respected horse trainer in America, the inspiration for Robert Redford’s movie “The Horse Whisperer,” he has been riding and training horses since he was three. He says the New York Carriages are healthy and content and fortunate. Pulling carriages in Central Park is light work for them, he says, they are busy and need daily exercise. They are not the horses to feel sorry for; the ones in need of rescue, he says, are the ones with nothing to do but stand around all day and drop manure. This is the very fate the mayor and NYClass intend for the horses, they say they belong back in “the wild” or on rescue farms, where they will be prevented from ever working again. That, say the animal rights groups, is a condition of their going anywhere.
The American Association Of Equine Practitioners and North American Veterinary Association, two of the most prestigious and respected animal veterinary organizations in the world, have both stated that the horses are healthy, well-cared for and content. Draft horses were bred to work, and have worked for many hundreds of years. Without work, say behaviorists and veterinarians (and anyone who has ever owned a work horse), their muscles atrophy, they are prone to lung disorders, they become sluggish, unhealthy and disoriented.
Both veterinary groups have stated that draft horses need work in order to be healthy and sound. No reporter in New York City has ever contacted Brannaman, the NAVM or the AAEP and quoted him or asked him or them to share their views or research about the carriage horses.
Jared Diamond, one of the world’s leading biologists, has written that draft horses are the most “domesticable” of all animals, are better suited for life in urban environments than dogs, calm, trainable, tolerant of other species, herd animals. No draft horse in New York has ever harmed a child, not one in more than 150 years of work.
The people above – who demand the horses be banned – are quoted constantly and without challenge. This may help some to understand the particular dynamics of the New York Carriage Horse controversy, a tragically unnecessary and misguided conflict.
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So we are getting down to it. The mayor has introduced legislation into the City Council to ban the carriage trade as of 2016. The City Council – it’s members under intense lobbying and political pressure from the mayor – has several months to decide the fate of the horses. There are enormous consequences in this controversy, they go far beyond the carriage trade and the horses themselves, the future of the carriage horses will affect the future of animals in our world, their very existence in urban areas, everyone who owns, works or lives with an animal. It will shape our understanding of cruelty and abuse, the fate of working animals everywhere and the underlying rationale behind the ban – that it is cruel and abusive for working animals to work.
The controversy pits ideologues who seem to have little connection with animals, and who emotionalize them as helpless human children, against animal lovers and owners, the people who know, live and work with animals. The animal rights movement, consciously or not, is driving many animals away from people, making it more difficult to own, live and work with them. Animals are vanishing at a staggering and unprecedented rate, if the carriage horses leave New York, domesticated animals that are not pets will be largely unknown there.
It also, and not incidentally, threatens the freedom and way of life of people who have broken no laws, committed no crimes, violated none of the hundreds of regulations that govern the carriage trade, one of the most intensely regulated businesses in the history of New York City or the country.
I have devoted most of the past year to researching and writing the story of the New York Carriage Horse controversy. I am an author who has written a dozen books about animals – dogs, donkeys, sheep, cows, goats, chickens, horses – and a former journalist. I believe that facts and truth matter, I was an investigative reporter and a reporter and editor at The Atlantic City Press, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, the Baltimore News-American, the Dallas Times-Herald, and was executive producer of the CBS Morning News. I am also a long-time supporter of the rights of animals.
None of the many pieces I have written this year has been refuted or challenged, I have corrected a number of factual errors – about a dozen – but all of the pieces have stood up without contradiction. I agree with the idea – it came from former New York Senator Daniel Moynihan – that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Sometimes, conscience calls upon us to do right and seek out truth. This is one of those times.
I began writing about the carriage horses in January of 2014, and am at it still. The horses started talking to me last year, they wake me up many mornings, including this one. I am here to tell you from my heart that this effort to ban the horses and take away the sustenance, property, freedom and way of life from hundreds of law-abiding and hard-working people is unjust, and is based on a profoundly distorted view of the true nature of animals in the real world – an extreme and disturbing view of animals based on misconceptions, ignorance and falsehoods.
Here are five truths I have learned in my writing about the horses. I hope they may be helpful to you and others seeking, as I did, to understand this painful issue in good faith.
1. The carriage horses are not abused, a score of independent groups and associations and veterinarians, along with inspectors from the five different city agencies that oversee the carriage trade, have all, unanimously and without dissent, found that the horses are well-cared for, healthy, content and safe, that the stables have heat and air-conditioning, fresh hay and and cleaned regularly. The carriage horses live longer than rescue horses, horses on farms, horses in the so-called “wild,” if there even is such a thing any longer. They have found the pulling of light carriages in Central Park to be well within the range of draft horses, and they have all found no evidence of respiratory disease from breathing New York’s air, the same air it’s children and residents breath.
Unlike most horses, they have access to food, medical care and shelter, every day of the year. They are not permitted to work in extreme cold or heat, they get five weeks of vacation a year, time off they perhaps do not even need.
Abuse is a crime, not an argument on social media. It is about the willful neglect of domesticated animals to the point of grievous injury or death. No carriage driver has ever been accused of real abuse.
2. The Mayor refuses to meet with the carriage trade, it’s owners or representatives, even though he meets regularly with representatives of the animal rights organizations seeking to ban the horses and has taken enormous amounts of money from them.
NYClass, which contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the 2010 mayor campaign and had an enormous impact on the outcome, refuses to provide the name or identity of a single horse or other animal the group has rescued or saved, they have funneled vast amounts of money – mostly donated by people who believe the horses were mistreated – into political campaigns and causes, especially the effort to ban the carriage trade. A carriage driver approached the mayor at a public event with his young son, and he asked the mayor why he pursuing the ban on the carriage trade. “Because your work is immoral,” the mayor said, before turning away.
3. The accusations against the carriage trade are, almost without exception, not true.
In incident after incident, the stories relayed by spokespeople for PETA and NYClass and other groups to the media – horses starved, forced to work while ill, doused with freezing water, beaten and overworked, confined in spaces too small to lie down in, fed bad food and given polluted water, injured in collisions with buses – are simply not true, there is absolutely no evidence to support them. In one intensely publicized case, a veterinarian working for NYClass admitted she lied when she said a carriage horse was knowingly worked while ill.
In another, a “tourist” allegedly witnessed a horse whose carriage tipped over being spooked by a bus, forced to lie down on the ground by a cruel driver seeking to protect his carriage, and then made to work while injured. It seems there was no tourist, no bus, no cruel driver, and the horse was not forced to work but returned to the stables. The media widely reported the allegations, but never mentioned the truth. A true leader would not associate himself with cruelty and lies, there is nothing idealistic about that.
In my research, I found more than a score of “incidents” that were either unchallenged, demonstrably false, or distorted and exaggerated beyond recognition. The mayor and various animal rights spokespeople claim the horses do not belong in New York City, that they are dangerous. In 150 years, no person has ever been killed by a carriage horse – hundreds of New Yorkers die every year in motor vehicle accidents. Three horses have been killed in accidents in the past 30 years out of more than three million rides. Horses are the safest means of transportation in New York City – by far.
4. The mayor and the animal rights groups lobbying for the ban claim that every single one of the nearly 300 carriage horses will go to a safe home on one of many rescue farms that have agreed to take them if the ban goes into affect.
Almost no one in the equine industry, rescue or otherwise, believes this is true. The mayor and the animal rights organizations will not release the names of any of the rescue facilities that will supposedly take in these large draft horses. Equine associations estimate it will cost $24 million to feed this many large horses for the rest of their lives, this at a time when equine rescue facilities are overwhelmed and seriously underfunded. More than 150,000 horses are sent to brutal slaughter in Mexico and Canada every year, forced onto trailers for long rides and then killed with nails drilled into their head.
Does it really make sense to send these horses out into the diaspora when they are needed, loved, well-cared for and much beloved by the many people who ride them every day? Can we really justify the killing of these animals in the name of saving them?
5. The animal rights campaign against the horses has been marked by cruelty and hatred, not by dialogue, negotiation or research.
The drivers and their families have been targeted, picketed and harassed. Their confidential data has been hacked and put online, they have been ridiculed for their teeth and dress, their customers, including children, have been harassed and intimidated. At demonstrations, the horses are regularly prodded with placards and provoked in the hopes that someone will get injured. For years, they have lived in fear and faced uncertainty for their own work and for their families, who depend on them.
John Locke wrote that the function of government in a free society is to protect freedom and property. In New York City, the government seeks to deprive the people of the carriage trade of both. Jefferson said that freedom is fragile, it can disappear in a moment, or die a death of a thousand cuts. The people in the carriage trade have suffered these cuts for years, there is nothing progressive about such ignorance or brutality.
I live a life with animals, I have dogs, donkeys, sheep and chickens, soon to get a horse. I cherish my life with a working dog, a border collie named Red, and working donkeys, who guard my sheep from predators. Like the people in the carriage trade, I treat them humanely and well, they are my life and my livelihood, why would I not? If New York City decides that it is abuse for working animals to work, and if ideologues inside and outside of government decide can decide without cause to seize my animals and take my way of life from me, then freedom has not died from a thousand cuts, but some brutal and thoughtless ones.
I write this as the City Council decision draws near in the hopes that fair and open-minded people will reach their own conclusions. The mayor says he will pay no mind to the 62 per cent of New Yorkers who oppose the ban on the carriage trade, their opinions, he says, simply do not matter to him. They should matter, and so should facts and truth. These stand squarely behind the New York Carriage trade, and the horses, who have a glorious, even sacred history of working with human beings to build our world. I write this in the hope that horses and other animals will remain in our city, and not be confined to ghettos without purpose or human connection.
If the horses are banned from New York, a terrible injustice will be done to animals that can never be undone, the horses will vanish from our consciousness, the people and children of New York will never see them again. They will disappear like so many other animals have before them, doomed by unthinking and ungrateful human beings. And for no just reason. Working horses have lived among people in cities for thousands of years, it is what they are bred to do.
People who decide the fate of animals ought, at the very least, be required to know something about them. Now, it is clear, people who love them will have to fight for the right to keep them among us.