This morning, a request. It’s free, but very important. I’m asking the people who are reading this and who care about animals and their future in the world to post a review of Blue Star Equiculture on a site called Great Non-Profits, an important site in the fund-raising world. Blue Star is moving aggressively to stabilizing their finances, looking for long-term security to expand their programs and ensure a safe and good life for the horses there, many of them rescue animal and retired draft and carriage horses.
Blue Star has become critically important in the animal world. I believe the Blue Star idea represents the future of animals, and is a model for keeping them safe and in our everyday lives.
Why is this important? Our civic life has been polluted by polarization and greed and cruelty, the news suggests a world wracked with conflict and violence. I’m sorry to say that the animal world is now no better. The movement so many of us depended on to protect the rights of animals – the animal rights movement – has sadly become a mirror of the outer world. In recent years, it’s focus has been to remove domesticated and other animals from the world and make it more and more difficult for people to own them
Their increasingly rigid and angry ideology holds that it is cruel for working animals to work, from horses to elephants to dogs to ponies, these animals are in great danger without their connection to humans, many have already perished, more are in peril. They work to separate animals from people, and to alienate the very people who are so desperately needed to keep animals in the world.
Time has moved past this movement, they have no answers for the vanishing animals of the world. The often cruel industrial factory animal farms grow unmolested, carriage drivers and pony ride operators and the poor and the elderly are harassed mercilessly.
We have destroyed the natural habitats of animals through our human greed and obliviousness, climate change is ravaging nature, and the there is great conflict and rage in the animal world.
Blue Star has found a better way, a new way. There, the big working horses are honored, they are healed and understood, good and healthy work is found them and new homes. The people who live and work with them are treated with love and respect, Blue Star understands that it is not possible to love animals and hate the people who live and love and work with them.
Saving animals means something different than it means 20 years ago. Today, it means finding work for them, creating economic rationales to encourage governments and people to keep them among us, treat them well, make whatever sacrifices are necessary to keep them safe and care for them well. It is not enough to think of animals as abused and piteous creatures, it is not enough to persecute the people who own and live with them, to punish and frighten and isolate human beings. Animals are not only our pitiful dependents, they are our partners in the world, and it is our moral responsibility to grant them their most basic right – to survive with us and be with us.
Blue Star is not about accusing or harassing or hating people. It is a place of great spirit, a place of salvation for people, for animals, and quite possibly, for Mother Earth. Pope Francis may well have been thinking of Blue Star when he wrote in his encyclical, Laudato Si, “the social dimensions of global change include the effects of technological innovations on employment, social exclusion, an inequitable distribution and consumption of energy and other services, social breakdown, increased violence and a rise in new forms of social aggression…When media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously.”
Blue Star is about living wisely, thinking deeply, and loving generously – for people, for animals, for Mother Earth.
The big horses are the perfect symbol for this new struggle, this new awakening, this new movement to protect the true rights of animals and their well-being and to show us how to live in harmony with one another. The horses have been with people since the beginning of time, they are living in the greatest peril, slaughtered in growing numbers, driven from their natural and important work, confined to the new animal ghetto – the rescue farm and preserve.
You can check them out Blue Star and/or join their herd here.
Blue Star offers us a better way. They are important. They deserve the support of every person who wishes to keep animals in the world, and who hopes to see the day when we great one another with respect and dignity. The farm, an organic farming center and draft horse sanctuary in Palmer, Mass. is widely revered and respected for their groundbreaking work in animal rescue and organic farming, gardening, composting, and their timely ideology. More and more, we need them and their vision. The Native-Americans believe the horses have come to warn us that we are at a crossroads – we will either learn to live in harmony, or we shall perish together. You can read more about the Blue Star idea here.
Sadly, the animal rights movement has no vision for the future of animals or their rights. We need a new and wiser understanding of animals than this. Blue Star has one.
If you wish, you can post a review of Blue Star here, and help them find the stability they need and deserve. It is free, it is important. This year, they came for the carriage horses, and failed. One day, they may well come for you and the animals you love. That is what is at stake.