“The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision.” – Helen Keller
I got a hand-written letter in my Post Office Box this morning (P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816) from a long-time reader named Martha Erickson, who lives in Oceanside, California.
“I’ve been reading your blog for years,” she wrote. “Your thoughtful pieces about the value of keeping working animals in the public eye have really made me re-think my own ideas and positions on the whole “rescue” movement and what “animal rights” really means – thank you for that…”
Thank you back Martha, I am touched by your letter and moved by your understanding of this vision of the true rights and well-being of animals. If we cannot see them, we cannot know them, help them, love them or save them.
I read your letter and it inspired me to re-read the ending of the seminal inspiration for the animal rights movement, Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic Of The Animal Rights Movement, first published in 1975. Professor Singer’s book – he taught at Princeton – was and is the definitive classic of the animal rights movement.
The animal rights movement was shaped and inspired by political academics much like Singer, not farmers or people who work with animals or know them well. Perhaps that planted the seeds for the failed vision of the animal rights movement, something evident in recent years across much of the country.
Martha Erickson saw instantly what the movement has failed to see: the greatest danger to animals in our world is not from cruel and evil people, the great danger comes when they are taken from us and their habitats and out of our consciousness and sight and hidden away on reserves, rescue farms and industrial factory farms.
There, they too often suffer, languish, or perish. They begin their inevitable disappearance from our world, the story of many of the animals on our planet. The animal rights movement is no longer a movement to save animals, it has become a movement to remove them.
People can worry all they want about the carriage horses or elephants int the circus or ponies in farmer’s markets, they are easy and available targets, but if the gates of those giant factory farms were opened to public view, the animal world would be turned upside down overnight and the true measure of animal rights would become a burning national political issue. Nobody would be bothering carriage horse drivers or farmers with unheated barns.
Animal rights protesters are familiar in New York’s Central Park, they are rarely seen in the places nine billion animals suffer in horrible conditions.
Just about every horse lover knows that the danger to the New York Carriage Horses does not come from riding people around Manhattan and Central Park, it comes from being removed from their safe and regulated stables and sent out into a world afflicted with slaughter, cruelty, development and danger. The horses sit at the edge of Central Park all day, for all of the hysteria and misinformation, in full view of many thousands of people. There is no safer place for them to be, right in front of us, where we can touch them, understand them, love them and protect them. That is their greatest opportunity for survival, to stay where they are.
The cruelty to Joshua Rockwood’s increasingly famous impounded horses didn’t come from their hooves being a couple of months too long for trimming. It came from their being hauled away to a strange rescue farm, taken away suddenly from the environment they understood and were safe in, stressed and isolated for months in a new place, away from the life they know and the people they had come to love. Nothing is more traumatic to a working animal that.
Anyone who knew or cared a thing about horses could and would have told the police that. The politicized animal rights veterinarians who sanctioned their removal – small animal vets in suburban practices – didn’t seem to know it.
Peter Singer never foresaw that the urgent danger to animals in our world comes from over-development and climate change, human greed and Mother Earth’s rage. And now, to this distorted idea of animal rights. There is no place for these animals to go if they can’t be with us.
If the carriage horses are banned, few children in New York City will ever see a work horse, touch one, or have any understanding of what such a magnificent animal really needs to be safe.
Almost all of those “safe” and lush rescue farms and preserves are, it seems, fantasies of the animal rights movement. No one knows who they are or where they are or where the money will come from to fund the horses care for many years. No one has offered to name a single one. On these mythical preserves supposedly set aside for the horses, these proud working animals have no purpose but to eat and drop manure. And those are the lucky ones.
Everyone in the equine and rescue world knows that the New York Carriage Horses are most likely headed for cruel slaughter if taken from their jobs, and almost all of the elephants in the circuses will be killed when they are removed from the homes they have lived in for generations. There is no place for hundreds of Asian elephants to go, not in the wild, not in preserves. A true animal rights movement would demand that the people who demand the removal of animals from our and their lives specify where they will go.
—-
Peter Singer wrote at the end of his book that “Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of human beings than any other liberation movement. The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or boycotts. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for loving beings.”
Will our tyranny over animals continue, he wrote, “proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with self-interest?”
Will we rise to the challenge, he asks, “and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?”
Singer’s words are prescient, they speak in many ways to help us understand the failed moral vision of the animal rights movement.
It is not true that animal liberation requires greater altruism on our part than any other movement.
The New York Carriage Horses have far better lives than too many African-American and other minority children in our struggling cities. Many suffer violent deaths at young ages, poor nutrition and educational opportunities, struggles with the police, drugs and gangs, little chance of employment, and likely incarceration in our prisons. The horses live longer, are healthier, and are often better protected.
Do the safe and content horses really require greater consideration than our children?
The animal rights movement has advanced and even codified the idea that animals are as, or more important, than people and are entitled to the same rights as humans. More, if you accept Singer’s reasoning. Think of how many poor children might have been saved or sent to good schools with all that energy and money and lobbying, if we argued that children are as or more important than horses.
It is true that animals cannot speak for themselves, thus we ought to take great care about who we choose to speak for them. The animal rights movement does not believe in science, behavioral science, biology, veterinarians, trainers or the wisdom of animal lovers.
The movement is characterized by a stunning ignorance of the real lives and needs of animals. Animal rights theologians do not believe animals should be owned by people or live with them, or entertain them in any way, thus depriving countless working animals of their best means of survival. Because animals are voiceless, doesn’t it make sense to make sure the people who speak for them know what they are talking about?
Singer predicts that we will have to care deeply for animals, but not at the hands of rebels or terrorists. Yet the secret informers and shock troops of the animal rights movement have become rebels and terrorists in a growing number of troubling cases. Their abuse and cruelty to human beings is legend, and is well documented. They often function as a rogue, Orwellian militia, breaking into laboratories, targeting agricultural students and farmers, harassing people who own and live and work with animals in the most abusive ways.
They have alienated legions of animal lovers and farmers and people who live with animals, sometimes unfairly accusing them of abuse, making it ever more difficult and expensive to keep working animals in the public eye. These extreme political positions deprive animals of the advocates and supporters they so desperately need if they are to stay in our world. As a result, they are disappearing from the world in vast numbers.
What rights are really protecting? The animal rights movement has failed in the most profound ways to save animals. They are out of touch with the mainstream, in savvy New York City their rationale for banning the horses was resoundingly rejected by every segment of the city’s population.
Since Peter Singer’s book came out, the World Wildlife Fund reports that half the animal species in the world have vanished. Singer never foresaw that the real threat to animals would be our ravaging of the earth, not abuse and exploitation by people. They have chosen the wrong targets in the wrong places at the wrong time. A movement that speaks for animals must know and understand that. Animals are at the crossroads, they will either live in harmony with us or vanish from the world.
There is much to learn from the New York Carriage Horses, I believe they have called to me and others to tell their story and to fight to keep them where we can see them and know them, as Martha has come to understand. There is much to learn from Joshua Rockwood’s struggle to survive this new idea of animal rights and abuse and keep his farm.
The horses speak to us of the failed vision of the movement that claims to have come to save the animals. They call to us to do what Peter Singer’s vision has failed to do – work to keep them in our everyday lives and prove that morality counts for something, even when it clashes with self-interest.