We run from death, hide from it. Death does not exist in the Corporate Nation, it is the great taboo, no one wants to see it, think about it, read about it. There’s no money in talking about it. We hide the dying out of sight and drug them until they pass, we hate them for hanging on so long, for costing too much, needing so many pills and surgeries, we keep them alive longer and longer because it does cost so much and makes so many rich.
On the farm, I learn that life and death are not two different things, but the two sides of one thing. There is an awful beauty to death because it sanctifies life and helps us to appreciate every day that is given to us. Each morning, I wake up before the sun and I give thanks for my day of life. I have death to thank for that, without the one, the other would have little meaning. The farm and the animals here teach me that, all the time.
“Winter lies too long in country towns,” wrote the novelist Willa Cather, “hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
I thought of Willa Cather this morning, as Maria and I set out in – 23 temperatures to bring hay and water to our sluggish and stunned animals. They are hanging on, but all of their instincts are struggling with this winter, they cannot graze, move freely, step far from the Pole Barn, be warm, eat anything but the hay we give them twice a day.
I keep getting messages from our utility warming me that people with certain issues – age, heart, bronchial – should stay indoors in such cold, I refuse to accept that. Yet, for the first time I thought I needed to consider it.
Taking food to the animals, shoveling the walks, starting up the cards, filling the buckets and tubs with water, I felt my face burn, I felt a shortness of breath, my lungs hurt and so did the metal bars the put into my chest last July to hold me together. It feels as if my chest has gone hollow. It felt as if they were freezing, the bitter cold was reaching deep inside of me, an intrusion, an invasion. The weather is the great fact, we are all mostly just trying to survive it. My eyes teared in the cold, the drops froze to my glasses, my camera froze and the shutter would not work. I have twice had frostbite living upstate, and in such cold the fingers and toes scream for mercy. There is none in this winter.
I was exhausted, just a few minutes in the cold, I had to sit down. I will never give into the utility, it is not their business whether I go outside or what I can do, I detest the corporate pretense to caring about people when they do not. But it never occurred to me that they might be right before. Should I be outside? That is the thing about getting older, you fight every day to keep other people from defining you, but it is not easy to define yourself. I asked a friend, a farmer if I should be outside. “Nobody should be outside in this,” he said, “you look good, you’ll be fine.”
I’ll take that advice.
Maria’s fingers ached after a few minutes, we took the chickens’ frozen water – the heated bowl will not work now – and took it inside to thaw it out and replace it. They have just a few minutes to drink the fresh water before it freezes, and they know it, they hop right down. They have not been out of the roost in days.
When I take photos of Maria, in her colorful skirts and leggings, I think of Willa Cather, out in the plains, in the prairie, in her small town. I thought of her this morning, struggling to get through the snow, struggling from the cold.
In my town, the farmers shake their heads, they remember nothing like it, everything takes longer and is harder. We all feel for our poor animals, there is not we can do for them, they will have to hang on.
I miss Simon but am grateful he has been spared the worst of this winter. His poor legs would have left him in agony. Red has nowhere to run and today it was too cold for him to put his feet on the ground. The donkeys and sheep seem weary and dazed, not themselves, but hanging on, accepting and enduring. There are few pleasantries, no brushing or chatting or communicating. We can’t survive in the cold that long.
So Spring soon enough, I imagine. Winter lies too long in this town, weather is the great fact, here, human life is shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk, covered in mountains of snow.
This weekend, a chance to speak up for the carriage horses and the people in the carriage trade, to try and save the horses and stop the cruel treatment of the people own and ride them. Also a chance to call attention to the animals in the world who are truly abused and who suffer greatly. In New York City, many millions of dollars are being spent in the name of animal rights to endanger the carriage horses, animals who are safe, loved, well cared for. Not a penny is going to the many animals in need. The carriage horses, the last domesticated animals in our greatest city, are in peril.
So I am going to New York Saturday to stand with the carriage horses and their owners and drivers. There is a pro-carriage horse rally in Central Park (Grand Army Plaza) from 1:30 to 4 p.m. Saturday. I plan to be there.
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Compassion is the very basis of morality. Politics without humanity is immoral. Ideologues who can’t listen become fanatics. It is not possible to love animals and hate people. The suffering animals of the world call out to us to speak the truth, to recognize the reality and horror and truth about abuse and cruelty and think of them.
This is the weekend of the carriage horses, the stables are open to visitors and supporters, the horses are marching in a parade in Queens on Sunday. There will be a benefit for retired carriage horses Saturday night. Good reasons to leave the farm and head to the big city. This is the weekend of Clip-Clop, the annual celebration of the horses, who have graced Central Park for 300 years, much longer than the buses, trucks, bicyclists, skate-boarders, joggers, pedicabs, cars, carts and pedicabs that flood the park today.
There will be meetings, tours, events and dinners devoted to supporting Blue-Star Equiculture, a draft and work horse rescue and organic farming center, and the New York Carriage Horses. You can find the schedule of events here.
There will also be many demonstrators on the other side making a lot of noise.
The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that true morality is not possible without empathy and compassion, and the assault on these people and their way of life is anything but ethical or humane.
It is the people in this controversy who are suffering terribly, not the horses. It is the people who are hurting from cruelty and neglect and elitism.
At stake is the future of animals in our world. New York City is a big stage, if domesticated and healthy and safe and beloved animal cannot survive here, then where in our culture can they survive? Can they live and work and remain with us – their most basic and essential right – or will they be removed from our sight and consciousness and vanish from the earth as so many animals have in modern times?
The carriage owners and drivers have been battered by a system that dehumanizes people in order to persecute and destroy them. It is wrong, I am happy to stand with them.
This controversy is a great moral inversion, a derailment of the democratic process, an upside-down, viscerally unknowing view of animals. Sometimes it seems that the whole point of the campaign is to diminish and batter people. The carriage horses are safe where they are, safer than almost any horse in America. they need to be protected mostly from the people who would save them.
The carriage horse owners and drivers have broken no laws, committed no crimes, violated none of the many regulations that govern them. The horses are among the most supervised, monitored and regulated animals in the world. By all accounts, well-cared for, that ought to be the end of this story. In America, law-abiding people who work hard and hurt no one are entitled to their freedom and sustenance.
But it is not the end of the story. American politics and civics has become a tribal affair, bands of angry and righteous people drawn into endlessly warring camps, talking only to one another, reading each other’s blogs, raging on one another’s Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, fueling each other’s rage and fanaticism and blindness. Our political leaders, corrupted by staggering amounts of money and sworn to protect freedom and property, simply join the mob. Since the people seeking to ban the horses can no longer talk with anyone beyond their circle or listen to them, there is nothing for people of conscience to do but go and be present, stand by the horses and the humans who care for them, love them, work with them.
