There is nothing more heartbreaking than a border collie who wants to work and can’t. I went out to do some chores and Fate was at the door, looking at me pleadingly to come along. Not this time, sweetie, I said, take a nap. When I came home she was right there in the same spot, still waiting to come along. You have to be tough to train Fate, she knows how to get to people.
Crime and the criminal, wrote the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, confront us with the perplexity of evil, but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
A hypocrite is a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie their stated beliefs. Hypocrisy is also an expression of false virtue, cant, posturing, affectation, speciousness, self-righteousness, falseness, deceit, mendacity, insincerity, pretense and duplicity.
Plato said that hatred was the ultimate hypocrisy because people who hated could not ever be as virtuous as the people they felt superior too, because hatred is worse than almost anything the hypocrite condemns. Hatred, he says, is the ultimate rejection of humanity and compassion.
The carriage horse controversy in New York speaks to many issues and many things, including the future of animals in our world and our willing to sacrifice material wealth to keep animals among us and help the world heal. It is also compelling and disturbing in the moral and philosophical sense because it speaks to our twisted values and also to the fusion of hate and hypocrisy in this very unnecessary controversy.
Hatred and hypocrisy are each awful enough in their own right, but it is particularly toxic when they come together, as they have in the effort to drive the carriage trade out of New York City.
– The people and groups seeking to ban the horses claim they are fighting to stop the abuse of animals, yet they abuse the people in the carriage trade continuously and without regard to empathy, truth, law, rationality, science or fairness.
– The people seeking to ban the carriage horses say they are saving them from torture and mistreatment, yet every veterinarian, horse trainer, horse rescue worker, horse lover in the world knows the horses will be in great peril if they are driven from their safe and regulated homes in New York and out into an equine world rife with slaughter, uncertainty and true abuse.
– The people who seek to ban the horses, including the mayor of New York, claim to be progressive in their politics and worldview, and supportive of the environment, yet they would banish the horses from Central Park, where they have been since it’s inception, and replace them with giant, ugly and expensive vintage electric cars in a park choking to death on motor vehicles.
– The Mayor of New York claims to speak for the poor and working people of the city, yet he seeks to destroy the work and lives of hundreds of working people who have committed no crimes, broken no laws, violated none of the hundreds of pages of regulations that govern their work. He insists he will curb rampant development in his city, yet takes many thousands of dollars from a real estate developer in apparent exchange for agreeing to ban the carriage horses from New York.
– The people seeking to ban the carriage horses claim to speak out of virtue and decency, they are profoundly elitist and contemptuous of their fellow human beings. The carriage drivers have been harassed, excluded, humiliated, persecuted. No one in this controversy will meet with them, speak to them, negotiate with them, visit their stables. Is this a moral position?
– The people seeking to ban the carriage horses claim the people in the carriage trade – especially the drivers – are racists in their speech and thought, yet their persecutors have done far worse things than curse at their tormentors, they are guilty of a distinct kind of social genocide, they stereotype a class of people, demonize them, and exclude them from any kind of due or fair process. This is a virulent form of cultural racism that is familiar to many people who have suffered persecution at the hands of hateful hypocrites.
– The people seeking to ban the carriage horses claim to speak for the rights of animals, yet they repeatedly demonstrate in their stated beliefs and public pronouncements that they know nothing about horses or about their health, history, needs and temperament. They have romanticized and fantasized the lives of animals for their own emotional needs, lied again and again about the working conditions of their horses and their treatment, and have been found to be false many times. In the equine behavioral and veterinary world, their ignorance is an outrageous joke all over the world, a scandal.
-The animal rights groups seeking to remove the horses from the city claim to be morally superior to the people in the carriage trade. They have been convicted of campaign financing violations, frightened and harassed children who approach the horses, vandalized property, stolen data online, deployed secret informers, taunted the horses with shouts and placards in the hope of provoking the animals to panic.
– The people seeking to ban the horses have raised millions of dollars in the name of rescuing and saving animals while channeling enormous amounts of money into political campaigns and administrative and marketing fees.
In their campaign against the carriage trade, the mayor and his allies in some quarters of the animal rights movement pretend to have virtues that they do not actually possess. They are happy to abuse living things in their own interests. They repeatedly lie, exaggerate or distort the truth in their fund-raising campaigns. They are demonstrably guilty of dissemination, false virtue, cant, posturing, affectation, speciousness, insincerity, falseness, deceit, mendacity, pretense and duplicity.
And they are not very nice, as hateful hypocrites tend to be.
Moral people ought to have no quarrel with people who sincerely disagree with. People of good faith can have valid and different notions about the role of animals in our world and their future. It is a shame that this is not the discussion people are having in New York, rather than ugly back-room politicking, name-calling and harassment.
Hannah Arendt was correct. Only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.
The fiber chair is finished, a creation of our long and cold winter. At the first Bedlam Farm, we put our baling string out on the fenceposts, bailing string is the sign of a working farm. Here, Maria had another idea, she gathering the string each morning and re-strung an old rattan chair that was abandoned in the barn. It was finished in late Spring, now it sits in a position of honor outside the barn door, rain or shine. Life with an artist. The world is a gallery, the artist a curator.
