“The more one judges, the less one loves.” – Honore de Balzac
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I ought to say that I think it’s a sin to judge other people, and I don’t speak from a religious perspective, but a human one. Judging other people – perhaps the leading social impulse in our culture – is poison, it consumes those who are judged and those who judge. The more one judges, the less one loves, the more one hates. Judgment corrodes the soul and orphans truth and compassion. Judging other people is now an epidemic disease in the world of people and animals, it is harming and frightening people who love animals, and it is driving animals our of our every day lives and out of our world. I sometimes stumble, but always return to the idea that I do not tell other people what to do, or judge them for what they do.
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I was standing on 59th St. at the southern end of Central Park taking photos of the New York Carriage Horses when a woman walked up to me, and shook her head in disgust. “Shame on those people!” she said, “look at those poor horses, standing with their heads down, looking so sad, and a rear leg that is obviously lame. It’s disgusting, and all for money. These people should be ashamed of themselves.”
I was startled, she didn’t know that horses put their heads down and cock a leg when they are relaxed, not when they are sad. Or that working horses love to work, and pulling a carriage in Central Park is about the lightest work working horses have ever done. I was surprised that a person expressing such a strong and cruel judgement seemed to know nothing about people, animals or the circumstances she was judging.
How can you judge something you know nothing about?
Shame on me for being surprised, judging others has become the most elemental tool and ethic of the movement that claims to speak for the rights of animals. It is easy to judge others, hard to give it up. And that is the worst possible news for animals and the people who love them.
If the people walking by the carriage horses were horse people, or veterinarians, or behaviorists or trainers, they would have patted the horses, perhaps given them a carrot, remarked on how relaxed and healthy they appeared. But they were not. In our culture, you don’t need any qualifications to judge other people. A computer or smart phone is the primary tool for judging.
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I had a sick lamb, he was shaking his head in pain, staggering to the ground, shaking, discharging bloody fluid from his mouth and anus. I called the vet, he said he was busy, he couldn’t come, and if he did, it would cost several hundred dollars. If you have a rifle and can use it, shoot him, he said, that would be the most humane way for him to go, somebody he knows, no IV’s, injections, where he is familiar.
I did shoot him, the first message came into Facebook in a couple of minutes. “You are a murderer, shooting a lamb, a killer, someone like you should never be allowed to have animals.” When my border collie Red was attacked by another dog and his eyelid was torn, someone messaged me right away and accused me of negligence and abuse, his injury, she said, was evidence that someone like me should never have a dog. I accept the idea that she cared as little for him, as she did for me, she was taking care of herself.
My neighbor, a farmer, came bye and I told him what happened and he patted me on the back and said, “I’m sorry, son, you are learning what it is like to live with animals, I suppose. Call me if I can help.” He picked up the body, put it in his pickup and said he would dig a hole for the lamb out in the woods. The people on Facebook forget to tell me they were sorry. My neighbor cared about me and my lamb.
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Imagine an animal world where people cared more about compassion than recrimination.
If a group of farmers had gone to visit Joshua Rockwood on his farm in Glenville, N.Y. this winter instead of the police and animal warriors from the humane society, he would never have been arrested. They would probably have gone to the hardware store, bought a heated water bucket, perhaps a generator and brought it back.
They would have hauled water and filled the bucket and left their numbers for him to call if his water frozen again in the frigid temperatures. They might have cautioned him to be better prepared for brutal cold next winter. They might have told him of the new, cheaper plastic frost-free systems. They would have seen, as two vets did, that his animals were healthy and well-fed and hydrated.
As it was, he was judged instead, arrested, charged with 13 counts of animal cruelty and neglect, his horses were seized and the bill from a horse rescue farm – the ones that took them – for getting them back is now way over $21,000, even if he is found innocent of all the charges.
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The old and new Testaments warn against judging thy neighbors, lest you be judged, judging is considered antithetical to religious life. But I know many religious people who love to quote Jesus or the Koran or the Talmud and the Bible who pay little attention to the teachings of any of those works, all of whom preach compassion and empathy and mercy. In the animal world, it sometimes appears that one half of the people are self-appointed informers, judges and juries, the other half all potential victims, abusers and criminals. The judgement mobs are tearing the animal world apart and inflicting great fear and harm on many innocent people and misunderstood animals.
There is a staggering amount of judgement in this world, but the tension around it in the animal world comes from the fact that increasingly, the judges know nothing about animals or how they should be cared for. Unlike real judges, you don’t have to know a single thing to make judgements about animals or farmers or carriage drivers or handlers in the circus. No schools, no classes, no rules, no training, no even rudimentary system of justice and accountability.
That is why many people actually believe it is cruel for working horses to pull light carriages in New York. Or that Joshua Rockwood’s animals could not have waited a few hours for their water.
The mayor of New York City, who is seeking to ban the carriage horses, has never owned a dog or a cat, let alone a horse. He refuses to even speak with the people in the carriage trade, he is busy promoting his new national progressive agenda, but he is certain that horses do not belong in New York, it is, he says, pure common sense. It is immoral, he has said, for a draft horse to pull a carriage in Central Park.
Judging others is the road to arrogance. The author Shannon Adler says when when you think yours is the only true path you forever chain yourself to judging others and, in so doing, narrow the vision of God. The road to righteousness and arrogance, she says, is a parallel road that can intersect each other several times during a person’s life. “What makes them different,” she says, “is the road to righteousness is paved with the love of humanity. The road to arrogance is paved with the love of self.”
Since writing about the carriage horses – or the ponies or elephants or the homeless men’s seized and slaughtered dog – I have had this recurring sense that the great hysteria and inquisition raging over animal abuse is not always, or even often, about the animals. It is a selfish thing, it is about making people feel better about themselves in a disconnected world.
Sitting at one’s computer, logging onto Facebook, there is enormous power and self-love to be had by telling someone else what they should have done, that their horse is sad, that their dog is being abused, how they should kill a lamb. It is so much better to judge than to be judged, to eat lunch rather than be lunch. However disconnected and powerless one feels, there is great power and righteousness from finding someone else to judge and condemn, especially in the name of loving animals or in our ravaged idea of political discourse.
Who, after all, is against animals and in favor of their abusers?
This has turned reality and rationality and justice upside down. The people who best understand animals – farmers, behaviorists, trainers, animal lovers – are now the targets, not the arbiters of animal rights and animal welfare. As in New York City, it seems the people who judge others harshly are not people who love animals or live with them, they often practice the same abuse and cruelty on humans that they claim to be protecting animals from.
If you study the elephants in the circus, or the ponies in the farmer’s markets or the carriage horses in New York, you find again and again that the people who know animals, have studied them and lived with them, who work with them and depend on them, judge their lives very differently from the new culture of informers and self-appointed judges and juries. Social media is the best friend of the righteous, it is, in fact, a significant source of the new armies of judges looking for wrongdoers, judging other people is a profit center all of it’s own. The idea that privacy and freedom are precious and people who live in freedom might mind their own business has become quaint, overwhelmed by the furious and raging mob.
People are regularly assaulted on Facebook and Twitter by raging digital mobs who are beyond reason and accountability. They call it shaming. There is no accountability or justice when any mob forms anywhere.
When, I wonder, did we dismiss and discard the experts, the scientists, the knowledgeable? Why are angry people waving placards persuading the mayor of our greatest city that the horses are abused, when every trainer, behaviorist, veterinarian who has examined them sworn that they are not? How can he argue it is “common sense” to ban them when every single person of authority and common sense says just the opposite?
The people who sometimes accuse farmers, pony ride operators, carriage drivers, circus handlers, me and others of abuse and cruelty and murder are not people who know me or my animals, they are not experts on animal behavior generally, many are addicted to judgement, a free and easy way of making people who feel small larger, people who feel victimized redeemed, people who feel powerless strong. When people judge strangers in this way, they have embraced and absorbed the new culture of arrogance and righteousness. They lose any sense of empathy and compassion.
Scholars of animal abuse will tell you that the leading cause of animal abuse in America is not work for working animals, or a frozen water tank on a farm, or the evil intentions of human beings, it is most often poverty and ignorance and circumstance. A farmer would have known after a frightening cold wave that Joshua Rockwood’s animals can easily go for hours without water – especially with snow on the ground. My donkeys and sheep will often skip a whole day without water, they drink it when they get around to it.
A farmer would have known that Joshua Rockwood did not need or use a heated barn, or that hay is often stored out of sight, especially in the winter, when there is snow and ice on the ground. Any rural vet knows a bullet is sometimes much faster and more human than a stranger hauling an IV stand a couple of huge needles around.
I think a real judge might have met Joshua Rockwood, shaken his hand and spoken with him. If the animal inquisitors were not so busy writing tickets recording his shortcomings, perhaps they might have found that he possessed a lot of redeeming qualities. He knew his animals by name, he spoke with them. He smiled when he talked about his farm, he glowed when he spoke of his children, and his plans for selling healthy food to local people. He is courteous, open about his life and work. He has helped other people, made many friends, is much admired in his community.
He would be the first to have conceded that he is not without fault, but he is also not without courage and good.
But that’s the problem when amateurs and ideologues become judges, the point is almost always the judging, not the truth.