The New York City government, unchastened by the drubbing they took from the New York Carriage Horses, is attempting once again to legislate the rights of animals, while knowing little or nothing about them. After two years, the city has abandoned it’s efforts to ban the carriage horses in the face of overwhelmilng evidence that they are not suffering abuse or neglect.
Now, the City Council is seeking the ban the use of wild animals to be used to entertain people, suggesting once again that this kind of work is cruel and abusive to animals. The bill exempts all institutions but circuses, and seems clearly to be aimed at Ringling Bros, which uses lions and tigers in it’s traveling circuses. It would, in effect, mean that no circus would ever again come to entertain the people of New and their children.
It would probably almost certain mean a lot of dead tigers and lions.
I wonder if there was ever a time when government actually focused on governing, and left biology, zoology and animal welfare to the people who are trained to handle them. Aren’t there poor people in New York City, homeless people, children stuck in bad schools, hundreds of people killed in car accidents, some neighborhoods with horrific crime?
Do we really want urban politicians – few of whom have ever seen a wild animal or know much about them – decide their lives and fates? And how is that working out for the animals of the world, who are vanishing at horrific rates.
Yesterday, I called a former colleague who now works at Ringling Bros. and asked him what has become of the elephants that lost their jobs because animal rights activists decided it was cruel for elephants to work in circuses, just as they claimed it was cruel for the carriage horses to haul light carriages in Central Park.
My friend hemmed and hawed and finally said, “you don’t want to know.” Some of the elephants were hanging out in a Ringling Bros. preserve in Florida, most were being sold to zoos, where they would spend the rest of their lives standing around idly without work or any connection to people. Some went to circuses in countries where it is not considered abuse for animals to entertain people.
Elephant trainers know better than anyone that the lives of the elephants have not been improved upon, the real abuse – the road to hell thing – is just beginning for these domesticated creatures. She said some of the elephants have been sold to work overseas, especially in Asia, where there are few regulations governing their work and care and where, she said, conditions for them are certainly not better.
It is very easy to pass laws taking animals away from their work and people, – it makes people feel good about themselves. But no one seems to want to know or care what happens to them after that. The animal rights movement insists they should all be returned to mythical pastures in the ephemeral “wild,” it doesn’t seem to matter that there is no wild any longer for most animals to live in.
Suddenly, the use of animals to entertain people and generate laughter and wonder, as they have done for all human history countless times, is considered a criminal act of abuse.
Meanwhile, the most elemental rights of animals – to survive in our world – is threatened as never before in modern history. Wildlife experts have said we are approaching a mass extinction of animal species, which are disappearing from the earth at a frightening rate.
The response of the animal rights movement and city governments seems to the true plight of animals seems to be to figure out how to remove even more species – elephants, tigers, lions, carriage horses – from the work and lives of people who offer them the best possible change to survive in a warming and still rapidly developing world.
If the New York City Council wanted to really help animals, perhaps they would be thinking of new ways to bring these endangered species into their city, where children could learn about them and understand the importance of saving them.
How do we define the rights of animals? Ask them, not mayors or city council members. If we listen, they can tell us if they are happy or not, the carriage horses did.
A score of highly trained and respected veterinarians from all over the country repeatedly examined the New York carriage horses and found them to be content, healthy and eager to do their regulated work. They could tell by their legs, diet, feces, their eyes, the positions of their ears and tails, their response to humans and other stimulus.
Animals speak through their coats, their alertness, body posture, appetite and a hundred other ways the trained eye can examine and evaluate.
We don’t have to guess if an animal is stressed or unhappy, we don’t need to just tell them how they are. But we need true animal lovers and experts to do it, not politicians or animal rights activists, who have lost virtual all credibility in recent years through their many ludicrous persecutions of farmers and people who work with animals, and campaigns like the effort to ban the carriage horses. They just seem to know nothing about animals, just at a time when animals desperately need to be known and understood.
Any animal lover can see when a working animal is eager to work – show dogs, working dogs, many elephants, lions, tigers in circuses, carriage horses in the park. Some of the strongest human-animal bonds in our history come from people and animals working together, whether the work is convention or whether it is for the amusement and entertainment of people.
Animal abuse is illegal in every state in the union, and should be. Do we really need more laws and a more intrusive idea of government?
Working with people and entertaining people is not pro forma abuse, it depends on the training, living conditions and nature of the work. Many animals love to do this work, and powerfully attach to their trainers. Many elephants, tigers and lions are much better working in regulated and supervised conditions that they are out in the so-called wild facing predators, hunters, disease, development, climate change, poachers, disease and starvation.
Some of these animals have been clearly mistreated, and if so, their tormentors ought to be punished. Many are not being abused, by all accounts, and should be left in the care of people who care for them and work with them. Having work to do with human beings is quite often the only path to survival for animals in our greedy and insensitive world, the dividing line between survival and extinction.
Working animals also support the lives of many people, there is nothing criminal about that either.
Where, precisely, are the suddenly unemployed elephants, lions and tigers supposed to go in this world? Beyond the passage of righteous laws that make people feel good and legislators popular, no one seems to care.
The first and most elemental right of animals is to survive, our most urgent moral priority regarding animals is to do everything possible to keep them safe, healthy, and among us. Rather than being persecuted, governments ought to recognize the remarkable growth and accomplishment of institutions like the New York Carriage Trade. They have kept big and beautiful work horses in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, they have learned how to keep them healthy and content, to earn money for people and give great pleasure.
The people get to see them and know them, they are among the few animals most New York children will see in their daily lives.
And they have survived, pulled from slaughter and auction houses precisely because they have meaningful work to do, while their comrades in the wild are sent to their deaths in growing numbers because people have no work for then to do.
The new animal rights movement, the next iteration of one, will care where the horses and elephants and lions and tigers go, they will fight for the right of these animals to stay with us, not to be driven away from us to vanish from our consciousness, and then the world.
If we listen, the animals will tell us what rights they really want to have. And we should fight for them, not send them away.
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You can pre-order my next book, Talking To Animals: How We Can Understand Them And They Can Understand Us, from Battenkill books (and Amazon). If you order the book from Battenkill, I will sign and personalize it, you will get a free tote-bag and a chance to win one of Maria’s custom-designed potholders or a Bedlam Farm tote-bag.