Search Results for: Then, They Came For The Ponies

Last week, I mentioned that Fate ate a small onion in the Pompanuck Farm gardens. I could not count the number of warnings, alarms, grisly tales and hysterical messages I instantly received from people telling me I should rush her to vet, get her stomach pumped and pray for her survival. Also chastising me for not diving headfirst into the garden to save her from this vegetable, which, I was told, is lethal for dogs.

“You better take this seriously,” said one message, “how will you feel if she is dead in the morning?”

I remember a few months ago taking a photo of a Lab riding along in a car, as he has done for all 15 years of his life, summer and winter, and being inundated by messages urging me to report the owner to the police, to check and make sure he was hydrated and, if there was any doubt, to bust open the window and pull him or call the police and have his owner arrested. I remember that day, it was cloudy and 50 degrees outside at noon.

None of the messengers had any idea just where I lived, when the photo was taken, what the temperature was. I learned then – it was a creepy thing to learn – that there are many people in the world who ride around looking at cars in parking lots in the hopes of finding a dog in them who is suffering. And many who patrol the borders of farms in the hope of finding the same thing.

I get messages regularly about the dangers of my dogs being stolen, of walking without leashes, of running into the woods, of eating prepared or processed dog foods. On the book tour, I met a librarian who proudly told me that she rushed her border collie to the vet to have her stomach pumped for $850 for eating some vegetable I never heard of. I think she expected praise, I told her she needed a new vet.

I met a woman recently whose beagle ran off on a hot day and came home with his tongue dragging off the ground.

Fearing dehydration, she rushed the dog to an emergency clinic. They put an IV into the dog, pumped fluids into him, took various tests and charged her $1,100. My border collies work in heat and I keep fresh water around and make them rest.  Let me be honest with you, I think these people have lost perspective, I have no respect or admiration for the people who are turning animals into objects of fear, loathing and alarm, and who use their concern for them to project all kinds of human junk onto their animals, and inject themselves into other people’s lives, spreading their alarm like a kind of cultural Ebola.

I take very good care of my dogs and have never lost a single one to a vegetable of any kind, never roasted one in a car, never had one stolen, never failed to give water to my dogs when their tongues are hanging out, always make sure in advance that my vet is honest and has true perspective about animals, people, fear and money.

I do not live by the horror stories of other people, I live by my own experience. There is trouble in the animal world, it is rarely as common as we are led to believe. There is no money or righteousness in peace and contentment.

Dogs are a joy to me, I will never turn living with one into a lament or reason to live in fear and panic. Few people get dogs and cats to hurt them, few farmers raise animals to make them suffer. This is how the carriage horses in New York got into so much trouble, the people who believe they are protectors of animals and their rights often seem to only be able to see animals and pets through this prism of hysteria and abuse and victimization. Animals like dogs and horses do not live in a perfect, risk-free world any more than we do.  I reject that way of looking at animals, this will never be my experience of living with animals.

Ever since I wrote “Going Home: Finding Peace When Animals Die,” I have been receiving horrific daily tales of people who can’t let go of their dogs, treat their illnesses with perspective, let them die on peace, let go of grieving for them,  who turn mourning into agony for many months, even years.

I could not count the number people who tell me they could never get another dog or cat because one of theirs died, a process they relate to me in excruciating and eternal detail. I wish I could slap them upside the head, get them to a psychologist, challenge them to understand the meaning of narcissism, to  find perspective about owning animals: they do not live as long as we do, many things can kill them, the miracle is you can always get another one.

We have all lost animals we love, it is part of the universal experience of living with them. No one suffers this pain uniquely or alone.

There, I am happy to say it, there it is, my truth.

How many are the ways we transform the wonderful experience of living with a dog or a cat into a perpetual nightmare of panic and hysteria, fear and worry. I will never succumb to it. Living with dogs is nothing but gift to me, I will never turn it into something else, some part of our new national disease of living in a system of fear and judgment and money and blame.

Corporations and, sadly, many veterinarians and many lawyers are getting fat off the neediness of people, that is, the need to assuage their own terrors of life in the world and it’s dangers by projecting them onto their dogs. Invariably at a great profit to someone. What a shame, for people, for animals.

We live in a culture where people actually believe it is cruel for working horses to pull carriages in parks. Where we accept a growing culture of secret informers who report these often unfounded fears and alarms to the police and ruin lives. Where growing numbers of farmers, animal lovers and people who work with animals are being persecuted and abused in the name of protecting animals. It has gone too far, this panic, it has become a hysteria, not a means of making the lives of dogs and cats and horses and elephants better.

The minute Maria got a pony, the warnings and alarms began pouring in, the horror stories, cautions, tales of Aunt Martha getting kicked in the head of falling to cellulitis. Maria is warned daily about the dangers of riding her pony, of being kicked, of being around small animals, of not wearing a helmet, of getting thrown or bitten. When I ask people what makes them think we don’t know that, they are often outraged.

How dare I reject warnings and advice, isn’t that what I get for writing about my life?

I am puzzled at this social-media fed addiction to minding other people’s business, to transforming the experience of living with an animal into a nightmare of fare and loathing, warnings and alarms, judgements and criticism. I would never do it to another human being, or to an animal, for that matter.

But back to onions.

As it happens, I am well aware of the onion issue which has more in common with the dog-in-car issue than one might think. The American Veterinary association has long reported that onions are toxic to canines because of a substance they contain known as thiosulfate. Dogs do not have the enzyme to digest this substance so onions can be harmful to them in significant quantities. It is rare, says the AVA, for any dog to be harmed consuming a small amount of onions, almost unknown for them to die  or become ill from eating a small scallion in a garden.

I called my vet, told her Fate had eaten a small scallion, asked if she believed she was in danger, related the warnings. “Tell them to get a life,” she said, “I’m busy with animals that are sick.” A good vet.

Every dog I have ever owned has eaten onions in one form or another at one time or another, none has been ill or died from it. Clearly, if dogs are fed onions regularly or as a part of their diet or in vast or continuing quantities they can get sick, even die. Fate was in no danger from eating the small onion in the Pompanuck garden, I would not dream of pumping her stomach for that, or rushing her to a vet, or spending hundreds of dollars to have her tested. I suppose I am, if it comes to that, willing to take some risks with my dogs to avoid a life of fear and loathing and testing and going broke – the new way of loving animals – to live with them.

There are no reliable statistics about just how many dogs are stolen by strangers or die in hot cars. Both things happen and can be dangerous, obviously, I have no need of strangers on Facebook advising me on dog safety. They are also, according to every reputable study, rare things.  I do not choose to live on the basis of dangers that are not likely to occur, I do focus on those that are likely to occur – dogs running in roads, dying of overfeeding, being aggressive to people and dogs, being inbred or poorly trained. Dogs have ridden around in trucks and cars for more than a century, it is good for them, good for people.

I don’t take my dogs out in cars if the temperature is over 70 degrees. I never leave them without shade or fresh air. I am sorry to hear about the emotionally disturbed people who trawl supermarket parking lots breaking windows and calling the police if dogs are left in cars for short periods of time. Any dog can be in peril anywhere, I do not believe it is ever my right or mandate to invade someone’s privacy or break their car windows  unless the conditions are so extreme and obvious – 95 degrees and closed windows – that humane intervention is required.

A woman in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. recently left he dog in an air-conditioned car with the engine running and ran into a shop on a warm day to pick up a package. When she came out, a police officer was waiting, the police had broken her car windows and put her in handcuffs  – they said it is the law there now – and took her to the police station for booking on charges of animal cruelty and neglect. The city has lost perspective.

A number of people there and elsewhere have told me they have stopped taking their dogs along with them when they go out to do chores, they are afraid of having their windows broken or being charged with cruelty. I wonder if the legions of the righteous have considered how beneficial it is to dogs and humans alike when the dogs come along. It socializes dogs, makes them less fearful, often helps people feel less lonely and disconnected. Something very precious is lost to animals and people when we are afraid to bring them along.  Does anyone ever give any though to what is lost when we are made to live in fear over our lives with animals? Carriage drivers in New York afraid to stand with their horses because so many people incorrectly think the horses are depressed when they hand their heads low.

We live in an increasingly fearful and invasive culture. Lawyers seem to be writing the rules of human conduct and interaction, from health care to animal welfare. Farmers are arrested for having frozen water tanks. People spend hundreds of dollars when their dogs eat an onion and feel like heroes for doing it.

Our national motto is live in an abundance of caution or you will be sued or harassed. Social media has provided people with computers with a license to invade the lives of strangers and tell them how to live. The animal world has become a magnet for people seeking to fill holes in their lives with the need to exploit fear and concern over animals. I know many people who no longer want to own a dog because it has become too expensive, too much a magnet for neurotic busybodies, or angry people who claim to speak for the rights of animals or ignorant politicians trying to look good by passing dumb laws, or too many vets who found found that fear and loathing can be turned into gold.

I wonder what we will tell the children, a decade or so from now, when they ask why dogs and cats can never leave their houses or run free,  or why cannot leave the yard or get to sniff in a garden. Or when they ask where the horses and the elephants have gone, and why there are no ponies in the farmer’s markets or left for them to see. Perhaps we can tell them that most of the animals in the world are safe now. They are gone from the world and from the everyday lives of people.

We need a better and wiser understanding of animals than this.

It does not take a shrink or a genius to know that a small onion will not kill or harm my puppy, or that someone like me will not let his dog suffocate in an overheated car or that there is something wrong with us when we can’t let go of our animals or grieve for them in a proportional way or live with them in joy and love rather than fear and alarm.

 

A woman named Judy posted a message on my Facebook page last night  – she was responding to my writing about Joshua Rockwood –  asking me if I was in favor of the use of elephants in circuses to entertain people. I said I was not sure when it became a crime for animals to entertain and uplift human beings, they have been doing it for thousands of years – just watch the children and the horses in Central Park –  and we humans have greatly benefited from it.

Most of us could really use some entertainment now. Just look at the news.

My therapy dog Red entertains dying children in hospitals sometimes, it is a beautiful and precious thing to see. It would be a difficult thing to explain to them that he was being abused by taking him to see them.

Judy answered me right away, she replied that the elephants were fortunate, they would now live in their natural world, as they were meant to live. I was struck by the message, because it speaks to the plight of animals in our world, from the New York Carriage Horses to the elephants in the circus to the animals on Joshua Rockwood’s farm to the dogs in our beds and backyards.

And it speaks to the fact that in our time, the people who speak for animals seem to know nothing about them.

I asked Judy if she knew where this natural world for Asian elephants might be, and who was going to take them there, and care for them when the rains came and the poachers came and the bulldozers came to take their land. She did not reply.

But she said something else. Elephants, she said, were meant to live a natural life. They were not put on the earth to do stupid tricks to entertain us. I said I agreed, they were put on the earth to live their lives, naturally, and in nature.

But we have destroyed their natural world. We are eager to talk about abuse, but we are not so eager to take responsibility for what we have done to them. We have lost touch with them and what they need, we have fantasized their often brutal and cruel lives in the wild, even as we relentlessly destroy it.  And we have found another world for them to inhabit, one with shelter and food and attention and purpose. We cannot offer them their natural life any longer, or even a perfect life. But we can offer them a new world, new work. It seems to be what we do.

And then, we traumatize them and the people who love them, and we destroy their world again.

I asked Judy if she worried about what would become of the carriage horses in New York, and the ponies in farmer’s markets, and the horses in Hollywood movies and the elephants in the circus and the chickens and cows on the farms once we banned their worked and harassed and persecuted and  arrested all of the people who own them.

She did not wish to talk about it, she refused to talk about it. I have yet to meet any of the people who rejoice at the banning of animals who have given much thought or taken much responsibility for what will become of them after we have exploited them once more, this time to help us feel better about our destructive and oblivious selves.

Animals are sadly at our mercy, they pay the price for our shallow and selfish – and very selective – ideas about morality. We live in a culture drunk on judging others, shy about looking in the mirror.

My border collie Red was meant to live in nature, to live outside in caves, to have sex, run free, eat rabbits. He does none of those things. He exists now to keep me company and move my sheep around the pasture and to be photographed. Is he living the natural life he was meant to live? What is sheep-herding with dogs, but another “stupid trick” to entertain us on television and country fairs and trips to Ireland?  And what of the sheep, is it their natural fate to be chased around by dogs so that human beings can hang blue ribbons on their walls?

I suppose they will come after the border collies one day, but to understand the carriage horses and the elephants in the circus, one has to understand that the elephant and the border collie – and the cat sleeping in our lap, and the pig in the pasture – are doing the very same thing.

We tolerate the one because we love it, we ban the other because it is far away and we believe everything we wish and need to believe and we know nothing about it ourselves.

Am I cruel and immoral for permitting Red to live a life that gives me pleasure, that entertains and uplifts me every day? I love Red and my life with him. And I love herding sheep, it greatly entertains and grounds me, I bet Judy loves to see the photos. And I imagine Red is living a better and longer and safer life than his ancestors in nature, safer, healthier and much longer. Much like the elephants and the carriage horses. Why is this an adorably wonderful thing for him, but not for the elephants in the circus, or the carriage horses?

Why is it so much easier to wag our righteous fingers at other people while never taking responsibility for ourselves and what we have done to animals and their natural world? We know animals only through the prism of their occasional abuse – are we forgetting that American dogs lead the best lives of any animal on the earth? –  because that makes us feel good, yet we sit on our hands and look away while the world they lived in is destroyed bit by bit every day and our political leaders hide their heads in the mud.

Are the people who love to ride horses and cuddle puppies abusive because they are allowing animals to entertain them, rather than leaving them to take their chances in the mythical wild, where they die  young of disease, exposure, from predators and starvation?

Like most Americans, Judy knows nothing about horses or elephants.  Our children never go outdoors alone, they spend their lives behind screens, they will know even less than we do about the natural world. They desperately need to see elephants in a circus, and carriage horses in Central Park, and ponies in farmer’s markets. These may be the only animals who are not pets that they ever see.

We live in a world utterly disconnected from nature and animals, yet the more ignorant and distant we are, the more willing we seem to be to tell other people what to do with animals and how they ought to live. Our only idea for animals is to stop often fantasized notions of abuse and trash their few remaining worlds,  and then leave them to the fates. And we know what happens to animals left to the mercy of human experience, they vanish from the world. Judy does not want to talk about that, it makes black and white a bit gray.

She is certain she knows where the elephants ought to go, but does not  know that the place she thinks they ought to go does not exist any longer. Thus, she is not a person who ought to be deciding their future or making moral judgements about the people who own, work and care for them. That is the malignancy that is sadly rotting the soul of the animal rights movement.

I wanted to tell Judy that In the past month,  I’ve received a score of messages from animal trainers  and vets and handlers in the circus, from people who have lived and worked with elephants all of their lives and they paint a very different picture than the one we saw in those videos and interviews and press releases. There are at least two sides to every story, and theirs has never been told.

They offer a very different testimony than the one that comes from the videos on YouTube of elephants being mistreated, the one all of us have seen, the one that has shaped the fate of the Asian elephants. The video is the closest experience most of the righteous have ever come to an elephant’s life. The story of the elephant handlers is one I have  rarely heard, because no one bothered to listen to it.

Abuse is a crime in every state in the country, but if the people driving the elephants from the circus cannot see beyond it, then the domesticated animals of the world who have brought so much entertainment, joy, work and meaning to human lives, are truly doomed. We are destroying their shrinking worlds once more, orphaning them and leaving them to almost certain death and trauma, and once again patting ourselves on the back for having done it. There is a space in between helping animals and banning them when they are mistreated.

There is another path, a middle way: improve their lives, punish their abusers, keep them in our world. Treating animals and people with respect. That is the path of true animal lovers. Finding humane ways to keep them among us, rather than simple-minded solutions that take them away from us.

“I began working with elephants in 1980,” wrote Lynn in a touching and very beautiful message last week. “They have so much to teach us if only we would listen. I worked with and for elephants in the circus. I am so fortunate to have been able to do so and am greatly saddened that others will never have the opportunity.”

Elephant handlers, she says, have been criticized for years, mostly because a few awful people get all of the attention. It takes it’s toll, she said. “All I can say nowadays is, “pick up a shovel. Shovel shit for a year. Then maybe I’ll talk elephants with  you. As cities outlaw the bullhook, she wrote, “I’ve begun to realize they don’t deserve to have elephants in their lives. Elephants are unlike any animal out there. The bull hook is only a tool. It has been demonized by the animal worshipers. Don’t fall for it. Elephants in sanctuaries, worked in protected contact, will forever be behind bars. Circus elephants, worked free of contact with a bull hook, can be walked anywhere, loaded easily and turned loose to go where they care to.”

Another perspective, one I didn’t see expressed even once in all of the rejoicing over Ringling Bros. decision to get rid of their elephants over the next three years. I told Lynn she would never see the people who are happy about the elephants losing their work shoveling shit anywhere. For the righteous, Facebook is their bull hook, computers their tool, anonymous and furious blogs and videos their research and experience.

Jamie has been traveling with the circus for years, he cried for hours when he heard the elephants would be leaving. He has come to love their gentleness and their love of people and attention.  They are much loved in the circus, he said, after every performance the trainers and handlers – and children from the audience – gather in their tent to give them hay and apples. He often sleeps next to them at night, curled up under their big feet in a bale of hay. “It’s horrible that they will be almost surely destroyed,” he said,”there is nowhere for them to go, and they are so much loved here. And these people think they are helping them? What a world.”

So we will soon be saying goodbye to the elephants, the  horses, the ponies in market, the animals on the farms too dangerous to keep, they will live for us and our children only on YouTube, we will destroy their last remaining world and congratulate ourselves on our virtue. The world will not be a better place without them, we have once again diminished our Mother, the earth, and her children.

I asked July once more if she had given any though to where the animals might go.

“They will live in the wild,” she said, “as they were meant to.”

 

This poem is dedicated to Joshua Rockwood, an honest and conscientious farmer and animal lover in Glenville, N.Y., and to the horses and dogs taken from him by the new animal police. You can read his story on his blog here and also another account here, I would rather he tell this story than me. Rockwood understands the true meaning of transparency.

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First, they came for the carriage horses,

then the elephants in the circus,

and the ponies in the farmer’s markets,

and the chickens in their coops,

and the border collies with their sheep,

and the horses in the movies,

and the sled dogs on their paths,

and the homeless man with his dog,

and farmer with his pigs,

and the dogs with no tall fences,

and the people riding horses,

and the cows in the snow and rain,

and then,

they came for the seeing eye dogs,

and the therapy dogs,

and the dogs who sniff for bombs,

and the dogs who track the lost,

and then, they came for

the farmer whose water bowls

froze on a bitter night,

and who didn’t trim his horses

hooves in time,  and took his

dogs and horses away, while he cried,

even thought he loved them

and cared for them well.

When they came for the horses,

we looked away,

they were not our dogs,

not our elephants,

not our ponies,

not our horses,

not our pigs,

not our chickens,

And then, one day,

the family farmers were gone,

all the food in the hands

of the giant farms,

where the feet of animals

never touched the ground,

their souls never warmed by the sun.

The working animals of the world,

who had worked with humans since

the beginning of recorded time were gone,

there were only the furbabies and pets,

who lived on couches and

slept on beds, and walked on leashes,

and went to the vets, and

never worked with people.

They had already come for you,

and for the animals you loved.

___

For a better understanding of animals and animal rights, please consider joining the herd at Blue-Star Equiculture. For the love of animals and the people who love and live with them.

 

Join the herd. First, they came for the horses pulling carriages. Then the ponies giving rides to children. Then, the elephants in the circus, and the homeless man’s dog, and the chickens on the farm, and the horses in Hollywood, and the sled dogs and the border collies herding sheep. Then, they will come for you, as this open-hearted and transparent farmer discovered.  More about the awful troubles of Joshua and Wendy Rockwood here. Ignorance about horses threatens the New York Carriage Horses. Ignorance about animals and farming threatens the life of a farmer.

If you can, join the herd. For their sake. For our sake. For yours. Today, they came for him Next, for all of us.

When I think of the New York Carriage Horse controversy, I am bewildered and frustrated by the apocalyptic victimization literature and language of the animal rights movement. Our noble horses are no longer noble, no longer our precious partners on the earth. They have become our sad slaves.

During my time writing about the New York horses,  I think often about George Washington and his great horse Nelson, a hero of the American Revolution. Although he is largely forgotten, Nelson’s life speaks to the future and fate of the New York Carriage Horses. He reminds us of what we are really in danger of losing.

Nelson was a gorgeous  charger, he was about the size of many working  horses, he stood sixteen hands high, and was a light sorrel or chestnut (reddish-brown) color, with white face and legs. Washington was considered the greatest horsemen of his time, and Nelson was his favorite horse. He was said to have “carried the General almost always during the war.” The sight of the handsome Washington – he was not an eloquent man, but tall and regal –  on his horse, cheered hungry and freezing soldiers, rallied the citizenry, unnerved the British army.

Nelson and Washington were inseparable during the war. Nelson’s work was to ride though danger, year after year. Washington rode Nelson in bitter cold and brutish heat, the horse struggled through mud and ice and snow and brush, up steep hills and through rocky riverbeds,  he suffered thorns and insect bites, rocky paths and steep hills. He was grazed by bullets more than once, twice cut by bayonets.

Washington favored him because the horse did not rattle when cannon shells and bullets were whizzing all around them both.  Nelson, the reserved Washington once wrote his wife Martha, “was my bravest soldier, my closest friend, the rock upon which I stood.”

Before a battle, Washington would parade on Nelson, riding back and forth in front of his men and in open view of the British troops, who fired countless rounds at the imperious Washington. They never could hit their target or his horse, and many on both sides came to believe that Washington and Nelson were invincible.

Nelson did not get to an indoor stable often, he was tethered out doors for months at a time,  he often ate only grass and roots. He was not  ordered out of the battlefield and  to shade when it got hot, the battles were not called off when it got cold. No one in the American colonies suggested he was enslaved or exploited, even though he worked in peril and harsh environments almost every day.  Nelson did not get much vacation during the long and bitter years of the Revolutionary War. There were no veterinarians or police officers to treat him or monitor his care.

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Washington and Nelson. Napoleon and Desiree. Jesus and his donkey, Teddy Roosevelt and Little Texas, Roy Rogers and Trigger. The Indians hunting and living on the plains, the horses pulling huge wagons,  farmers in the fields, soldiers in battle, workmen building cities, pioneers traveling for food, cowboys on their cattle drives, lumber companies hauling logs, the cavalry on their ponies, settlers head West, drivers and drovers pulling carriages, merchants transporting goods, builders pulling bricks for streets and homes.

It has been the same story, all over the world. If humans have ever had a loyal and proud partner on this earth, it has been the horse.

For most of us, this partnership is no longer true, we ride our cars, sit by our computers, our food and necessities brought to us by truck and train and plane.

For the carriage drivers, this partnership is still true.

And you can look at it in two ways, as the miraculous continuation of one of the world’s most wonderful traditions in our greatest city. Or as a new kind of social crime, people harassed, vilified and driven from their work and way of life for working with horses in the modern world. We are so lucky to have the horses still among us, we are so blind not to see it.

This has never been considered controversial,  cruel or explotive  – earning a living with the help of a horse. That was, in so many ways, the heart of the great partnership – and no human being in the world was considered lower than any other because they worked with a horse. For most of American history, horses made our lives possible. That view has changed.

At a 2010 party in Wellington, Florida, attended mostly by wealthy equestrians, animal rights activist Stephen Nislick – a supporter and close friend of the city’s new mayor – referred to the carriage drivers in New York as “totally random guys and bad actors.”  The comments reflect a key element in Nislick’s  highly effective strategy to ban the carriage trade: dehumanize the drivers, make them something less than human, ban their work, take their horses.

The carriage drivers still talk about Nislick’s speech.

“You know what random people means?,”  asks Stable Owner Neil Byrne? “It means a guy you can just push around, not a tough guy who’s gonna fight back, not a guy with political connections. A random guy you just push out of the way. I felt very insulted to be called random. I’m not random.” There is nothing more noble about being a millionaire garage owner funding an animal rights group – or being a professional writer – than working with horses and giving pleasure to people by offering them  rides they want in horse-drawn wagons in Central Park.

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I think of Nelson when I try and understand why it it that horses working with people suddenly became the cruelest form of abuse and enslavement. I was reading a wonderful piece by Jeremiah Moss on the hard times and painful struggles of New York’s last horsemen, and noticed a comment posted by an anonymous animal rights supporter at the end of his piece, it was written in language I now recognize as the familiar litany and dogma of the animal rights movement. It was, when one considers it, a telling  piece of writing,  worthy of deconstruction:

“Animal rights activists and regular folks who love animals–and all of whom have nothing to do with real estate in Manhattan–have been protesting the horse drawn carriage industry for decades. It’s cruel how we allow these people to work these horses in the extreme heat of summer so we can amuse ourselves with rides through the park. These poor animals are slaves to our selfish desires.”

I am an animal lover, and also a supporter of the rights of animals, and I believe the horses belong in New York. The horses do not work in extreme heat, they do not work in temperatures over 89 degrees. My border collie Red works in intense heat all summer, and while he does not get shot at, he works a lot harder than any carriage horse in New York.

Red is kicked and butted often enough, savaged by flies, cut by rocks and stones and bits of glass,  and I suppose he is a slave to my selfish desires to herd sheep. He amuses and entertains many of my friends, and brightens their days, as he does when he does therapy work with veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. I believe him to be, as I and many others believe the horse carriages to be, healthy and contented.

So there it is, I am a random person, a carriage driver with a dog and sheep, or maybe worse. I was struck by the idea that amusing people in the park is selfish and cruel. I do not think so, I may be another bad actor.

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Social movements often spawn their own language, mythology and literature and the writings of the animal rights movement are rich in a new kind of  emotionalized fantasy. It is almost always characterized by anger and harsh judgment, there is always the sense of one point of view condemning another, morally inferior point of view.

In this genre, the working animal is a victim, never a partner.  Earning a living from animals is evil. Enjoying them -being entertained by them is an exploitation. Permitting them to work in any form is slavery. Keeping them contained on mostly small and impoverished rescue farms – or, more likely, sending them to slaughter, keeping them from work – is noble.

In this new view of horses and other animals, the animal is always suffering, living in cells, not stables, in chains, not harness, enslaved by cruel and unfeeling humans forcing the animals to work in brutal conditions for money.  I am not the only one to wince at the racial implications of this thinking. What is most striking about this language is that it is the very language used to describe the lives of African-American slaves held in captivity, almost word for word.  It is demeaning to animals and people, trivializing the very real suffering from abuse and the real experience of slavery.

(Slaves did not get five weeks of vacation, they were not housed in quarters that were cleaned every three hours, they were rarely fed fresh food and water throughout their work day, they could be separated from one another and killed and hunted at will,  their work was limited in time and weather,  not regulated by a host of government agencies bound by law to ensure their health, well-being and humane treatment.)

New ideas are often shocking, and often come to be widely accepted, perhaps this one will also be. There are two sides to every idea and issue.  Change is part of life.

But this movement does not really come out of nowhere. Few New Yorkers or other Americans have any contact with animals like horses any longer, machines have replaced them. Rural America is shrinking rapidly, we are a country of urbanized coastal people.

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I’ve written extensively (“The New Work Of Dogs” and other books) about the new work of animals in America –  providing emotional support and affection to increasingly disconnected and fragmented people whose lives have been changed by divorce, changes in the workplace, the economy,  family mobility, technology, politics and the decline of religion and faith.

As we have become an anxious and stressed – and increasingly angry and polarized – people, we have turned more and more to animals for healing and in an effort to re-connect to the natural world. There, we find unfailing acceptance and unconditional love. The sad trade-off is that we longer understand animals as they really are or need to be. We see them all as different versions of people, as furbabies, children, best friends,  victims, creatures in need of rescue.

Increasingly, because we see them as being neurotic and complex just like us, we project our own emotions, needs and fantasies onto them. Hundreds of thousands of dogs are on Prozac and Valium and other medications for depression and anxiety and humans increasingly define them and their behavior in terms that are familiar to us. The horses are unhappy pulling carriages in New York, breathing toxic air, staggering under the weight of their work.

It follows, then, that horses, who have worked with human beings for thousands of years, most often in much tougher capacities than the carriage horses, suddenly become slaves, victims, dumb and exploited creatures yearning for a different life (one that no longer exists and never existed for work horses.) In the lexicon of the animal rights movement, the horses are sad. They are lonely, pining for the herd. They are dejected and enslaved. Being around other horses all day and night is not enough, the horses yearn to be together, to socialize. They yearn for a life free of work and responsibility.

Reading through some of the arguments about the horses,  substitute the word children children for horses. The animal rights view holds that it is cruel for a horse to do anything that a child ought not to do or be asked to do, that a human being would not like. A human would much rather sit on a rescue farm than pull a horse carriage through Central Park. The reality – a working horse is much happier and healthier working than not – seems unfathomable as we emotionalize one species of animal after another.

The emotionalizing and anthropomorphizing of animals becomes easy to see and understand when sorting through the justifications for rescuing horses that are not in need of rescue, and ignoring the many horses that are. These are the words and the language of human emotions, not of animal emotions. Like most animals, what horses need is to be fed and watered, sheltered and cared for, given medical attention when necessary. They do not seek employment and lifestyle changes out of their own lives.

The goal of the animal rights movement is for the horses to live out personal fantasies of utopian human life, the lives we yearn for ourselves. As animal lovers know, the problem is that horses (and dogs) are not children, they are not adult people either. They are an alien species, and we are so busy exploiting them for our personal need and welfare that we are losing any kind of grasp about what they are truly like.

The goals, language and literature of the animal rights movement are utterly at odds with the view of horses held throughout human history, by so many people, leaders, spiritual leaders and animal lovers. No respected behaviorist or trainer believes the best life for a work horse is to do nothing on a crowded farm for the rest of his or her life but eat hay. The horses cry out for justice and recognition of their true worth and place in our lives, they call to use to keep them with us and to turn away from the angry and disconnected voices that call for them to be taken away.

It is a kind of twisted moral rot – an elitist kind – to suggest it is noble to ride a horse into gunfire but evil to pull very happy families in carriages through a park. George Washington would be the first to say so.

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The work between people and horses has long been celebrated as ennobling and a great gift to human beings, not denigrated as slavery – in the Bible, in the Kabbalah, by Washington,  Chief Avrol Looking Horse of the Sioux Nation, Jesus, by Winston Churchill, so many others.

It was Chief Avrol, the holy leader of the Sioux,  who told me the horses were talking to me, calling to me to speak on their behalf. If they leave, he said, they will take the wind with them. Native Americans know well what happens when the horses go, he said. Jesus loved his donkey, rode him all over Jerusalem in hotter weather than the carriage horses will ever see. In the Kabbalah, God warned his people to love donkeys and horses and cherish and respect them. He created them, he said, to walk with them on the earth and help them build the world.

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory enterprise to be shot. Others took it on as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a sturdy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon,”said Churchill.

In fact, the sturdy horse pulling the healthy wagon – or plowing fields, or pulling carriages –  has long been a symbol of health, prosperity and the wondrously and mutually beneficial relationship between men and horses, celebrated by almost all civilizations, and by Native-Americans for centuries. It is still such a symbol throughout much of the world, where millions of  horses pull sturdy wagons.  It is only very recently that this idea has suddenly become ugly, a symbol of inhumanity. That the horse has become a victim, a slave, when he works with mankind.

Buck Brannaman, the author of “The Faraway Horses” and the inspiration for the hero of Robert Redford’s “Horse Whisperer” wrote that the carriage horses are well-cared for and fortunate. The horses that people should be concerned about, he wrote, are the neglected ones that, after the “newness” of ownership wears off, live in box stalls all day. These horses have no purpose, no jobs to do. All they do is eat and make manure. Even prisoners get to exercise more than these horses, and the horses have never done anything wrong.

“If they had the choice, these horses would choose to be carriage horses rather than stand in their stalls,” writes Brannaman. But they don’t have a choice. If the animal rights groups in New York and the mayor of New York City gets their way, this will be the fate of the New York carriage horses, at least the lucky ones – to eat and make manure, out of sight of human beings.

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The story of the New York Carriage Drivers is a beautiful one and a powerful one, and ought not be lost or distorted in the angry rhetoric of our time. Their industry has always been a personification of the American Dream, a stepping stone for new immigrants coming to America to build new lives for themselves and their children. It should not be disgraced by any mob.

“The job of carriage driver,” Stable Owner Conor McHugh told Jeremiah Moss,  “is often a starting point for immigrants. Like me. I came from a rural place, and working with horses was something I knew how to do.” The horses helped him and his fellow Irishmen get their bearings in the strange, new city. “When we first came here,” said McHugh, ” we were like wild animals. We knew nothing of the culture, of living in cities. But driving the carriage, it connected you in ways you didn’t realize at the time. It was familiar. Like home.”

In 2011,   Nislick, the founder of NYClass, the wealthy and powerful animal rights group spearheading the move to ban the horses, was  taped while gloating about the use of “morally corrupt investment” to  swing the city’s mayoral race and stop the use of carriage horses. “In a certain sense,” Nislick said on the tape, “you’re better off euthanizing them then making them suffer that way.”

If you love animals, you may come to see that this is what turning horses into children does to them. It turns them into pathetic versions of our troubles selves, and it turns them and us into slaves. It is really true that the people in New York who seek to ban the carriage horses would kill the horses in order to save them.

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