A great day for working animals, for the idea of animals remaining in our world. I confess to being near tears as the mayor of New York City tucked his tail between his arrogant and elitist legs and ran from the New York Carriage Horses. I got a bunch of very lovely messages from carriage drivers, thanking me for writing about them.

I will be honest, and I am not being falsely modest, I have very little to do with this victory. The people in the carriage trade have been courageously – and very much alone – fighting for their lives for years. They remained steadfast, calm, civil and savvy. They overcame a media and literal onslaught against them, hired good lawyers – Norman Siegel and Ron Kuby and listened to them. The  Teamsters Union stepped up and saved several hundred jobs and 200 horses from what almost surely would have been an awful fate. The people seeking to save them make it clear they were happy to kill them to do it.

As one political analyst wrote, the New York Daily News attached itself to the mayor’s leg and hung on, exposing one lie after another about the carriage horses. Journalism, very slow to awaken to the true meaning of this story, finally came alive, at least in one corner.

What was my role?  My reporting instincts kicked in and I very much enjoyed digging out some facts and truth about this story, I think I did make a lot of people think about it who were not really thinking much about it. I was one of them. As to the impact of that, it was not very big in New York City. The mayor and the City Council are not readers of my blog, as far as I know.

When I entered the story, the carriage trade was embattled and discouraged. Nobody gave them a chance, the mayor and his millionaire buddies – this is a strange kind of populist – had made destroying them their number one priority. Liam Neeson began their comeback, using  his celebrity to focus attention on the very big lie behind the mayor’s efforts to ban the horses – they were not being abused, they were content and well treated. I think just about every New Yorker understands this now.

Today, they were celebrating in their carriages. I urged each one who wrote me to plan a party. I will come. The mayor ought to be ashamed of himself, this was a low point in his tenure. He lied and lied, and never had the guts to meet with a single carriage driver and give them the dignity and decency of a face-to-face-talk.

Do not expect any wisdom or humility to infect the animal rights activists in New York City, their power is also their downfall – they can’t learn, quit, listen, or change. That is a fatal combination of flaws in cultural and civic history.

I am very proud of my role in this, but I also have no illusions about it, I was not a deciding factor in this campaign, the drivers and their representatives did an astounding job for themselves. You can speak truth to power, and you can win. They have suffered greatly, they deserve every bit of credit and glory there is in this moment.

A lot of you supported the carriage drivers and horses and I thank you. You did make a difference, your letters to the mayor were read and considered, you made hundreds, if not thousands of visits to New York to ride the carriages, I heard from so many drivers about how those visits boosted their morale and gave them strength and support.

You mattered. You are mattering again for Joshua Rockwood. I think we are in the vanguard of a new movement, a new way of understanding animals and thinking about them, a new and more humane way of keeping them in the every day world. We don’t have to ban them to give them good and safe lives, we don’t have to banish animals from the world and from their work because some have been mistreated.

And most importantly, we don’t  have to use animals as a screen for battering and abusing people. That is the awful moral failing of the animal rights movement, a supposedly moral movement. It is not moral to harass innocent people, to bribe politicians to do them harm, to take away their jobs, to push animals our of our lives and into oblivion. We need a better way than that, a better understanding of animals.

The horses have sparked something larger than them, and i am proud to be writing about that.