Search Results for: The Horse Kill Buyer

Last week I wrote about a conversation and evolving friendship with a man named John, who is a horse kill buyer who lives in the Midwest. Horse kill buyers are not popular in the animal world, they are part of the demons animal lovers seem sometimes to need, high up in the lexicon of villains. I was not surprised to get a lot of very angry and disappointed messages from readers and animal lovers, who believed that John did not deserve to be liked or loved. Or even live long.

I don’t know John well enough to love live him, but in my first exchanges with  him – they were online.  I had one subsequent telephone conversation with him, and I did like him. We are different, he is much younger, we come from different worlds. We both love dogs, especially Labs,  and we both have an appreciation for border collies.

Since we first talked, John went out and got a couple of my books and is reading them, and he is interested in them. I asked him if he had read any of the scores of comments about him and his work, and he said they had, these sentiments are the reason that even his two young children don’t really know what he does – he goes to horse auctions and buys horse that are sent to slaughter in Mexico or Canada.

The slaughterhouses pay him a fee for each one he buys and sends to them.

John is afraid of what the other kids in school would do to them if they knew. People in America, he says, seem to have lost any understanding of what the  real lives of animals are like.

Some of the comments about John were especially ugly. “He should be slaughtered in the same way, the horses are slaughtered,” messaged Jane. “People like that are not human, they don’t deserve any more mercy than they give the animals. What kind of a monster would do that for a living, said Shelley.”

Those were some of the nicer ones, people did not appreciate my writing about him sympathetically either. “For shame,” said one message.

This interaction between John and me came about abruptly, I was writing about a rescued draft horse named Asher – we raised money on the blog to help get him away from a horse kill buyer in Omaha – and I started to write something unkind about the horse kill buyer there, and I had this sudden insight, this awakening: the buyer there was just doing his job, just trying to pay his mortgage and feed his family.

What right did I have to condemn him or dislike him, I thought?  This seemed an unthinking response to me, part of the now epidemic American disease of hating the other, the people we don’t understand or agree with or come from different places or who do things we might not do.

Looking back on this intense exchange between me and John and me and my readers, and yet another angry mob on social media, I felt grateful for the opportunity to think about John and to try to see and understand him as a human being, rather like me in many ways, trying to make his way in the world and care for his family. There is a toxic strain in the animal world that causes people to be frightened and angry. It is polluting our relationship with one another and with the animals.

John works hard at his job, traveling all over the Midwest, spending much time away from home, living somewhat of a secret life, since has been shouted at, harassed, spit upon, had his tires slashed and care windows broken and defaced. He had me thinking when he said had spent some summers working in an Amazon warehouse, and being a kill buyer was easier and more humane.

My view of John does not come from the Christic idea of turning the other cheek, I am not yet so noble or generous, although I am great admirer of the true and largely unknown beliefs of Christ. I sometimes think Pope Francis is the only person in public life who knows much about Jesus, or what he truly believed. Can any person of faith believe he would sent 12 million Mexican people away?

My feeling comes from a different place.

I am learning not to judge other people, but to try and walk in their shoes, even when I disagree with them or can’t accept their views. How else can I learn and grow, as a writer, as a human being?

John is not a politician running for office and seeking power. I think that the Johns of the world often end up cleaning up after the messes the rest of us make – good police officers and honest politicians sometimes come to mind – but never own up to. The lure of judging other people is that you never have to look at yourself. That is the pull of the gavel.

We have created a world in which the natural lives and habitats of horses have almost been completely destroyed. We have created a culture in which the very people who say they speak for the horses are removing them from the world and harassing the people who live and work with them unjustly. We live in a country that is sending more than 150,000 horses a year to cruel slaughter in foreign countries because the people who say they speak for animals have managed to shut down our own slaughterhouses in the name of loving the horses.

We live in a world where greedy and oblivious humans forgotten the worked animals have done for us, or how they have lived with us, and we no longer know them or understand what they need.

Is any of this John’s fault? I did not find a single person among the hundreds attacking him who took any responsibility for the world we have created for the horses to try to live in. Or who suggested one single thing we might do with the hundreds of thousands of horses no one wants or can afford to take care of? Or who have donated any of the millions of dollars that go to fund-raising, lobbyists and politicians  to outbidding the horse kill buyers like John.

The animal rights groups in New York have spent between $3 and $ 6 million dollars on lobbyists and marketers and try and ban the New York Carriage Horses. John said that money would have saved every horse he has ever seen in an auction. And it’s okay to judge  him?

Is John supposed to quit his job and let the horses roam the streets? If he does quit his job in outrage, who wiill take the horses? I’ve seen this again and again now. We ban the ponies from giving rides to children, we drive the elephants out of the circuses, we ban the working horses from working. The ponies vanish, are sent to slaughter. The elephants have nowhere left to go in our world, they will follow the ponies. The big draft horses have no work and languish and struggle or die. None of the armies of the righteous seems to know or care where these animals will go or who will take responsibility for their care?

No one can tell us. No one. The ghosts and spirits of the animals will haunt us for this, we have betrayed them.

I don’t blame John for this.

I can tell you with some confidence that John is a nice and plain-spoken man. He is a family man, an ordinary man. High school sports, community college, different, often crummy jobs. He gets no joy from sending horses to slaughter, neither does he sit up nights in agony about it. It’s a job, he has to pay his bills. His pleasure comes from taking care of his family, loving his wife, going to soccer and baseball games, doing some bird-watching with his mother, puttering in the yard and the garage, hoping this is the year for the Chicago Cubs.

It is hard for John to be spit on, or hated in Facebook messages. He would love to tell his kids what he does for a living, he hates lying to them. That’s the thing about righteousness, it is a particularly one-sided disease, it kills generosity, empathy and community.

Increasingly, I find judging others distasteful.  I think I will let others do the judging and raging online. It is not who I wish to be.  I need to see John as a human being, not a one-dimensional villain swept up in the outrage and hatred and righteousness of our world. I mean to stay in touch with him, and keep our little dialogue going. I think it has meaning for both of us.

 

I have made friends with a horse kill buyer, we are talking online and perhaps soon on the phone. He is a nice and thoughtful man, an animal lover himself. He wrote me to thank me for writing yesterday that I wasn’t going to judge the kill buyer in Oklahoma who bought Asher and other work horses to send them to slaughter.

The rescue of Asher by my friend Nancy Gallimore was a good time, I wrote, to stop using animals to hate and batter people.

At first, John sent me an e-mail message with his IP address obscured. When I said I wouldn’t communicate with an anonymous person, he relented and sent me e-mail with his full address and we have been talking daily ever since.  I was eager to get his perspective.I’ll call him John, that is not his real name, he lives outside of Chicago.

I’ve never seen a photo of a kill buyer, spoken with one, saw one described or interviewed. That is not an accident.

John lives like a secret agent, he has taught his wife and two children to lie about what he does, they all say he sells industrial insurance for a company on the West Coast. He never discusses his work, he is not sure his kids even know any longer what he really does. He goes to horse auctions throughout the Mid-West and buys horses, some old, some young and healthy, some sick and pays anywhere fro $500 to $850 for them.

He gets a commission from the slaughterhouses, he makes more than $40,000 a year, he said, he didn’t wish to say more. He owns his own home, a small three bedroom Colonial in a working-class suburb in Northern Illinois. He lives far from the horse auctions, it is safer, he says.

Like so many farmers and others in the animal world, he suffers at the hands of people who call themselves animal rights activists. They hate him, as they hate so many others, and harass him when they can. He has been called a murderer and a Nazi many times. He has been called a killer and a scourge. He is also smart enough to be aware of the great irony of that,  so many of the horses they ban and the animals they take away from people like farmers and carriage drivers have horses that end up in the hands of people like him. “Among other things,” he says, “the animal rights people have made it so difficult to have animals like horses that many people are giving them up. They come right to me.”

He know better than anyone, he says, how broke and overwhelmed the horse rescue farms are. They come to the auctions all the time to compete with him, and they almost never can.

The animal rights groups lobbied for years to shut down the horse slaughterhouses in America, they were, he said, much closer and more humane than the ones in Mexico. Now, the last ride of the horses is very often a hellish one.

John keeps a close eye on the effort to ban carriage horses in Chicago – they even set fire to one of the stables, say the police – healthy draft horses bring good prices, he said, the bidding for them will be high. And where else, he says,  will they go?

When John buys the horses, they go to feedlots where they are given poor food for sustenance for a few days or hours, then are shipped on trains or trailers to Canada – sometimes to Mexico. The rides are long, hot, crowded and frightening. Then they are killed, usually by having nails drilled into their heads. The journeys are rough, he admits, he cannot bear to see the horses once he buys them.

Business is generally good, horse meat is used in many products, including cat and dog food and other kinds of meal.  It is often shipped overseas. He would rather do something else, but his last job was in an Amazon warehouse, and he said many of the horses are treated more humanely than he was. He needs to feed his family and cannot bear the life of the unhappy corporate worker, one quarterly report away from being laid off and dumped out on the street.

“I feel bad about the horses sometimes,” he said, “but they have to go somewhere, there is no place for them to live, they are being abandoned all over the place, so that’s what I do.” I suppose we don’t like to think of horse kill buyers as ordinary human beings, but they are. John loves to take his kids to see the Chicago Cubs.

John has two dogs and two rescue cats, he and his family love them dearly, dote on them endlessly. People come to the auctions and scream at him, shout insults, spit at him, curse him, follow him outside, sometimes slash his car tires, threaten to hunt his family down and do to them what the kill buyers do to the horses. He is  obsessed with a security, he shreds his bills, puts no personal information on his cellphone, does not allow his children to bring anyone home.

In his career, he has had to move twice and he and his wife understand he may have to move again. I was very comfortable talking to John online, I liked him. I hope to talk with him on the phone later this week, voice-to-voice. I said it was not for me to judge him, we all had to work and pay our bills, he has two kids to take care of – one with a chronic muscle disease – and a marriage to sustain. His wife works in a part-time job at a knitting factory.  His loves his life and his family, he says, he likes the freedom, mobility and independence associated with his work.

It is wrenching sometimes, he says, to outbid animal lovers who desperately try to save horses but do not have the money to save them. He tries not to look at their faces. Sometimes, he says, he will look into the eyes of a horse and see a spark or some kind of light, he will drop his hand or his numbered card and pass over him. He feels sometimes, he says, like the Angel Of Death. He doesn’t want to play God, he wishes we lived in a world where every horse could live a full and natural life.

But we don’t, he says. Somebody has to do what he does.

I appreciated the conversation with John. I have written – and believe – that compassion isn’t only for people we like who do things we like. I did like John, he seems very nice and quite sensitive. I like him more than most of the political leaders I see spewing rage and hatred to gain power.

I believe it is a travesty to use animals as an excuse to hate or judge people. There are people I dislike, but I don’t feel that way about John. He is just an ordinary man, doing his work. He is not the problem, hating or judging him is not a solution for me.

This hatred is the cancer infecting much of the modern-day animal rights movement. Hatred and rage have despoiled the very idea of rights for animals.

Hatred and righteousness is also the cancer of some parts of social media. We sometimes seem to be a nation of haters and mobs and self-appointed judges and juries. When Dr. Palmer was accused of killing Cecil the Lion in the cruelest of ways, millions of people online thought it was find to threaten his wife and children and patients and employees and disrupt their lives.

I believe in a different way of understanding animals than using them to hate people, I believe in a wiser and more mystical one. We will either live together in harmony, or fall together in anger and confusion.

It was good to talk to John, I learned a few things from him, he is an ordinary man trying to do the best he can in a complex world. Just like me.

I am no better than him, and he is no better than me.

Nancy Gallimore has great news, in one day she has already raised about one third of the money she needs to pay for rescuing a draft  horse named Asher from the slaughterhouse. And now that she owns him, she is changing her name to Big Paul in honor of Paul Moshimer, the co-director of Blue Star Equiculture. A good name for him.

Paul committed suicide several months ago, he was the husband of Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach, friend of many, a great animal lover and champion of the big horses.

Pamela said she was deeply honored that Asher would be getting Paul’s name.

Nancy (her blog is here) has decided to accept some help paying for Asher’s rescue and recovery. She purchased directly out of the feedlot where he was awaiting shipment to slaughter after being sold to a kill buyer.  He was a couple of hours away from being gone. Big Paul is in quarantine for 30 days and will likely have some substantial medical bills after he gets to Nancy’s farm outside of Tulsa in 30 days. Nancy says he will never be in danger again.

Nancy Gallimore is a writer, friend and animal lover, she is seeking about $2,000 to help pay for Asher and his new life.

If there is any extra money left over from the contributions she receives, she will account for the money and turn it over to Blue Star Equiculture. You can contribute to the Asher (Big Paul)  Fund using Nancy’s Paypal account, which is [email protected]. Or you can e-mail her at [email protected] if you would like to ask how to contribute to the Asher fund in a different way. You can also contact her through her blog.

I have been urging Nancy to start an e-magazine about animals and animal love, she is considering it. The animal rescue culture is overwhelming, there are countless animals in need everywhere. In New York City, the animal rights movement has spent millions of dollars trying to ban the New York Carriage Horses, who are, by all accounts, healthy, safe and extremely well cared for. Beautiful and relatively young horses like  Big Paul are slaughter by the tens of thousands while the groups that claim to speak for animals spend their money on salaries, fund-raising, lobbyists and marketers.

They are a disgrace to the notion of animal rights. Nancy Gallimore and Blue Star speak to the future of animals, and to their most elemental right: the right to survive in our world. To save the animals, we must come to a new and wiser understanding of them. They are not piteous and dependent beings to be hidden away from human life, they are our partners in the joys and travails of the world. They cannot lead perfect lives any more than we can, we owe them this:  to do the best for them for as long as we can.

They must never be used as yet another way to hate or harm people, we must not permit them to be sent away from our everyday lives and into slaughter, invisibility or extinction. This is the message of Nancy Gallimore, and of Blue Star, a mythical place that I believe is the future of animals and of their rights.

More than any other entity or place I have seen, Blue Star fights to save animals, keep them in our world, respect their dignity and people, and support the people who wish to live, love and work with them. Through it’s extremism and  hostility, many of the major elements of the animal rights movement have squandered the moral responsibility and opportunity to do this work. They are much more about  removing animals from the world than saving them, they exploit animals ruthlessly to frighten, intimidate and persecute people, many of them innocents.

And this new understanding is also the message of Pope Francis, who speaks of the need to save animals more reasonably and eloquently than any other public figure.

“If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”

Big Paul is our brother, not our ward, our way to unite, we are not his master or exploiter, he is one small step to a bigger idea: saving the world one step at a time, by taking care of animals, taking care of the people who live with them and love them. I hope you can help Nancy Gallimore keep Paul and take care of him. Her paypal account is [email protected]. Five dollars is appreciated just as much as $100. She is well on her way, and thanks. You can also e-mail her at [email protected] if you wish to contribute to Paul’s fund offline. Thanks for thinking about it.

 

 

I am wary of the mushrooming movement to rescue animals sometimes, it can be an emotional tar pit that sucks people like me right in. There are many animals and people in need of saving. I believe the world will be truly be saved when people like me – and you – care for one person at a time, one animal at a time. And for Mother Earth in every way.

We do need to begin changing the situation in our world, where hostility and cruelty to animals and people is so widespread and unchallenged. Asher, a working horse in desperate need,  can help lead the way. So can Nancy Gallimore, who seeks to rescue Asher from the kill buyers who bought him and who needs some help.

“We must regain our 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. We have had enough of immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty,” wrote Pope Francis in Laudato Si, his stirring encyclical.

I hear this call in my own life, so does Maria, we have been waiting for it for a long time.

Asher seems to be the start of something like that for me, hopefully for you.

There is so much need, it is very simple to simply shake my head and say I can’t handle it all, I will simply live my own life as best as I can. But like Pope Francis, I believe the world will be saved and our lives will be saved and our children’s futures will be saved in small steps, not just big ones.

And what else can we do?

Taken together, that could be a powerful revolution, one step at a time, one animal at a time, one person at a time. I have seen it happen several times on this blog with people and animals in need – with our farrier Ken Norman, with Joshua Rockwood and his farm, with George Forss and his book of photographs, with the Blue Star Equiculture sanctuary and the great work they do on behalf of animals and people.

People are good when given the chance. Here is another chance.

So today, and on a smaller scale, I’d like to use the blog for good another time and ask your help, this time for Asher, a beautiful old draft horse with a cloudy past. We know he has worked and had a collar on his neck, we don’t know much more than that. He is believed to be between 15 and 20 years of age. Nancy Gallimore lives in Oklahoma, she is a friend and a gifted writer and a beloved member of the Creative Group at Bedlam Farm. She is a passionate animal lover and occasional rescuer and notorious sucker for animals in need. (Check out her great blog for this and other stories) She has much integrity and a great heart.

It’s a familiar story to many of you, Asher has been plucked from the jaws of death, one hour a way from being loaded onto a  trailer from which there is no return. Nancy can’t walk away, she won’t let him get on that trailer. “I just couldn’t let him die,” she told me this afternoon, “I won’t.”

Nancy wrote on Facebook this morning about Asher, who was purchased by a kill buyer at a horse auction in Oklahoma, some people sent out an SOS to try and save him and she saw it. She found out where he was, called the feedlot, made an offer and has saved him, at least temporarily,  from being butchered. She is going through her own money quickly. As many of you know, more than 155,000 horses a year in America are loaded onto trailers and sent to Mexico or Canada, they are killed there by an awful process that involves nails being drilled into their heads.

It cost Nancy $850 to buy him from the kill buyers, he will need to be quarantined for 30 days at a cost of $370, he may need his teeth floated and will likely need several hundred dollars in veterinary  care. After his quarantine, she plans to bring him to her farm, if there are any issues she can’t handle Blue Star has offered to help.

We owe the horses a great deal, they helped build our world, and although many have forgotten them, they are calling out to us to honor their history and great work with us.

Horses in feedlots are almost always sick. Nancy needs between $1,500 and $2,000 to save Asher. I have no doubt there will be additional expenses, there always are with complex rescues. I’m glad that Nancy is working closely with Pamela Rickenbach of Blue Star. It is a blessed animal to have two such remarkable people watching over them, and they have connected with one another.

I know Nancy well, I have met her in Oklahoma and talked to her often. I am happy to vouch for her, she honest and good. She is concerned that every dollar goes either to Asher or to Blue Star to help them save other animals. The money cannot possibly end up in better hands. The people at Blue Star would starve themselves – and have –  before giving any animal less than what they need and deserve.

Nancy has decided to accept some help. It’s a lot of money for her. If there is any extra money left over from the contributions she receives, she will account for the money and turn it over to Blue Star. You can contribute to the Asher Fund using Nancy’s Paypal account, which is [email protected]. Or you can e-mail her at [email protected] if you would like to ask how to contribute to the Asher fund in a different way. Or you can contact her through her blog.

“I will want him to have a new name,” Nancy told me. “Asher is his feedlot name and that is his past. I will make sure he is never in danger again.” If you know Nancy, you know that is the way it will be.

This feels like a very good thing for me to do and be a part of. I do not care for my blog to be an animal rescue site, that is not the purpose or function of it. But sometimes we have to step outside of ourselves and the big and beautiful draft horses call out to us to be citizens of the world together, caring for one another and living in harmony.

I do not care to criticize the kill buyers or denounce the work they do, they are doing their jobs just as we all are. It is not work that I can do, but it is not for me to judge anyone who does it.  It is past time we started to learn how to love animals without hating people or judging them. You cannot, I believe, love animals and hate people. If  you are so inclined to help Nancy save Asher, that would be a meaningful thing to do.

Love is, for me, a civic and political act in our world, it overflows with small gestures of mutual care and concern. It makes itself felt in every single generous or caring word or deed on behalf of an animal, a person, on behalf of the earth. If you watch the news, or the rage and hostility that passes for political leadership in our world, then you know that love in social life – political, economic, cultural, environmental, animal – must be given value anew, must have value for us.

So I’m happy to take one of those small gestures of mutual care and help Nancy save Asher and bring him to his new and safe and loving home. Thanks for thinking about it.

The war against the carriage horses in New York has faltered, for now, it is far from over.  Everywhere, the animals are under siege, they are trying to take them away from us, they are persecuting us for loving and working with them. We see in the long and brutal campaign to ban the horses that money does not innoculate anyone against ignorance and cruelty,  and that people who say they love animals can be inexcusably abusive to people.

The mayor of New York has not retracted his vow to banish the horses,  or his claim that the people who ride with them are immoral, nor have the real estate developers stopped drooling and plotting over their stables. The people in the carriage trade continue to live in fear and persecution, the horses remain in peril from the people who would destroy them to save them.

A compassionate and progressive city could easily find a way to keep them safe and healthy in New York – that would be a minor achieivement compared to the building of Central Park –   but the so-called progressives there have not yet figured out that preserving the horses and the environment in the city’s fabled park, it’s soul,  is, in fact, the most progressive thing they could possibly do.

Despite staggering odds, the horses triumphed, they triggered a great social awakening across the country: we see the need a new kind of animal rights movement, one that keeps animals among us and treats animals and people with love, respect and dignity.

One of the great ironies of this unnecessary controversy is that few places need the big horses more than New York City, a crowded, overwhelming, distracted, expensive and grinding universe. Nobody needs them more than the beleaguered residents of New York. The horses have a spiritual message of inner peace  to deliver – the Native Peoples have known it for centuries – that is spreading from this conflict and so many others like it all across the country.

Speaking for myself, I know I cannot maintain a peaceful and meaningful spiritual life without coming to peace with myself. Spirituality is not, in fact, a gift  that the outside world can bestow on me. In his writings, Pope Francis says an  adequate understanding of spirituality consists of thinking through what we mean by peace, which is much more than the absence of war. Inner peace, he says, is closely tied to the ecology of the world around us, to the animals that share the earth with us. It is reflected in a life in balance together with a capacity for wonder and compassion that takes us to a deeper consciousness and understanding of life, of nature, of animals.

Can New Yorkers live in balance with their ecology if the last domesticated animals in their city are taken a way to slaughterhouses and rescue farms, replaced with enormous expensive cars, and never again seen by the millions of adults and children who live there?

“Nature is filled with words of love,” Francis writes, “but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances?”

And what place, I wonder, is more affected by constant noise and nerve-wracking distractions than New York City? Our biggest stage has many lessons for us to learn.

Two months ago, Ariel Fitzi, a New York carriage driver, great animal lover, mystic,  and friend to the poor, the disabled and the homeless, took Maria and I on a magical midnight ride through Central Park. It was a profoundly spiritual experience, there, alone in the park, the spiritual message of the horses, of the animals, could be heard and felt in a clear and powerful way. I felt close to the ecology of the world, I had a great sense of inner peace, a sense of balance of life that is possible for me. The horses caressed us with their calm and dignity. How is it that so many people are blind and deaf to them? Perhaps it is because we have lost faith with Mother Earth, broken our bond with the animals.

There, in the achingly beautiful park of the night, without the crowds and noise and hawkers and literal and political distractions of the great city, I felt closer than ever to a spiritual life, to the beauty of Mother Earth, to the need for me to help her heal and recover from our deprivations.  And from my own.

We are so quick to judge and accuse others, to batter and criticize and resent, we are so slow to take responsibility for what we have done to the animals. We have destroyed their natural world and left them no refuge but to live and work with us. And here, in a place that so desperately needs them, the rich and the powerful spend millions of dollars to drive them away and replace them with more cars and condominiums. Here, in a place where hard-working people, often from other places, have found a way to keep the horses safe and loved and healthy, and to earn a living from working with them, we vilify and harass them and seek to take their freedom and property away.

That, in a microcosm, is what is killing our world, our own spirituality, our own sense of peace. We have lost touch with the animals, we have lost touch with the earth.

This is what the horses and the dogs and the ponies and the elephants can teach us, have taught us, if we stop taking them away. We are talking about an attitude of the heart, a way of approaching life with a sense of awakening and attentiveness, a way of being fully present to someone without looking over their shoulders, or at our smart phones, or to the news, or to our bills and alarms, which accepts each moment as a gift to be lived to the fullest.

In the park, riding with Ariel, watching the shadows dance across the empty paths and roads, over the gardens and walkways, I remembered the message of Jesus Christ, his beliefs forgotten and exploited by hollow and angry men and women. He urged us to contemplate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, and the horses in the field, and the animals in the forests. To not forget them.

So I see we must not forget the horses, or be deaf to their message. The beautiful horses in the park are present in the moment, there for everyone and everything, disinterested in the greed and fear and technology of the modern world, in the anxiety and worry that makes us superficial, aggressive and compulsive consumers of things we don’t need and buyers of things we and Mother Earth cannot afford.

You can see and feel this for yourself. The horses are there, standing by the carriages every day, not just in New York, but almost everywhere.

They can take us to that healing and magical place. They have taken me there.