When I met him in New York City, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Sioux Nation and a guardian of the horse spirit, told me that the New York Carriage Horses, fighting to survive in their homes, were sparking a new social awakening about animals and people. This idea is also central to the existence of Blue Star Equiculture, a mythic horse and people sanctuary in Palmer, Mass, and the reason I am so drawn to it.
It is a difficult thing for me to comprehend, this idea of the horses speaking to me and others in this way, but I have been living it for several years now, so I know it to be true. The horses have triggered a new understanding, a new way of knowing animals, a new way of living in harmony with people and treating people and animals with dignity and respect. This new way of seeing animals is spreading all over the country, it is entering the consciousness of every person who loves animals and needs them in their lives.
Friday, I saw this, graphically and powerfully in the Dover, Vt., Town Hall, where i was the guest speaker at the library’s annuals dessert social fund-raiser. More than 110 people crowded the beautiful town hall to come and hear me speak, and it was a very different kind of evening than I usually expect at readings and talks.
The people there didn’t want to talk about dog training, or dog breeds, or tell their funny experiences with their puppies. We talked about the New York Carriage Horses, the elephants in the circuses, Joshua Rockwood the farmer awaiting trial on animal cruelty charges, the ponies in the farmer’s markets. We talked about the future of animals in the world, the real meaning of animal rights, the urgency of keeping animals in our every day lives, the true nature and reality of abuse, the loss of perspective, the spiritual bankruptcy of a movement that purports to love animals while hating people, the human disconnection from the real lives of farmers, from the natural world, and the real lives of animals.
These are the only things the people at the town hall wanted to talk about, they are eager for harmony and communication and understanding. They listened intently and had powerful questions. The social awakening Chief Avrol was talking about was right there in front of me, under my nose, eager for ratification and liberation.
I said it is not enough to talk about the abuse of this animal or that, we need to find ways to keep the elephants and the ponies and the carriage horses in our every day lives, where we and our children can learn from them, be healed by them, see them and understand them in a better and more mystical way.
I talked about the death of Cecil Lion, how it had once again shown that we were losing perspective about the sanctity of human life, once again exploiting animals to justify the abuse and hatred of human beings. Everyone of you knows who Cecil is, I said, and speaks ill of Dr. Palmer, but how many of us can name a single one of the innocent people massacred so cruelly and in the Charleston church? How many of us have spoken out against the mob justice on the Internet, the threats and violence and cruelty done to his innocent children?
Animals have taught me to love people, not to hate them, It is, to me, an immoral perversion of the true meaning of animals in the world to exploit them to hate and batter and harass and inform on and persecute people. The people attacking this man and dismantling his life are not showing us they are better than him, they are proving to us that they are just the same as him.
“We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it,” wrote Pope Francis in his encyclical, Laudato Si. This is the new awakening. I understand Chief Avrol’s message, I could see it in the faces of the people in that town hall, they were aroused, awakened, alert to the new to protect the surviving animals of the earth, not simply ban them and send them away.
Did anyone understand, I asked, that the carriage horses will perish in awful slaughter if they are taken from their safe and secure work and homes? That there is no place for the domesticated Asian elephants of the circus to go when the protesters who claim to love them finally ban their “stupid tricks” and drive them from their work and homes. That the ponies who are banished from the farmer’s markets will vanish into preserves and slaughterhouses when they are no longer permitted to give rides to children.
Everywhere in our world, farmers, animal lovers, the poor and the elderly are being persecuted and harassed, sometimes arrested and ruined by the new hysteria over animals and their abuse. While 9 billion animals live in horror in giant industrialized corporate animal farms, activists in New York City have spent more than $6 million trying to banish 200 work horses, most of whom were themselves rescued from slaughter, and who are, by every account, safe, healthy and well cared for.
People are awakening to the need for a true animal rights movement, one that will support and help the people who live with animals and love them and who will advance the most basic right of every domesticated animal in the world: to survive and remain on Mother Earth. We must be good and decent to animals and people, one cannot exist independently of the other. Work for animals is not cruel, it is sacred, the key to survival for so many of them.
If they can come for the carriage horses, I said, they can come for my border collie, your horse, your dog and cat. We cannot only see them as piteous and abused beings, they are our partners in life, not our helpless children.
I saw scores of nodding heads in the Dover Town Hall, the new social awakening was coming to life right before my eyes. I saw and hear it in the questions that came one after the other. What can we do? How can we learn more about this? How can the removal of animals from the lives of people be stopped?
It will happen, I said. It is beginning to happen right here tonight. You have to have faith it in. One person at a time, one day at a time.
So I thought again of Chief Avrol, and of his wisdom and his vision. There is a new social awakening, and our true love of animals is bringing it to life. Those of us who love animals wish them to remain in our lives, we respect and celebrate the glorious history of animals who have worked with us, and done us so much good, and who do us so much good today. They helped us built the world. We owe them more than we can ever repay, we can at least keep them safe and alive with us. Every child in the world deserves to see them and know them, as a living and sentient being, not as am image on computer screen.
The horses have called out to us, awakened us, to the crossroads facing the animals and the people of the world. We come together – in our individual lives, in the Dover Town Hall, in our love of the animals, to take charge of this home which has been entrusted to us, and to them. We survive only in union with one another, and with the animals, our partners in the joy and travail of the world.
We are all at a crossroads, and many things will need to change course if we are to survive. But the animals do not need to change, it is we human beings who need to change. We have forgotten our common origin, our mutual belonging our shared experience of life and suffering and joy and death. The animals can bring us back to our origins, but not if they have gone, vanished from the earth which needs them so desperately.
The new awakening asks us to to build a future that can be shared by every living thing, animal or human. I have faith that this movement is upon us, I saw it Friday night, it was looking right at me.