This morning, I dug up my two blueberry bushes – they looked strong and healthy – and dropped them off at the Miller’s food sales shed.
The Amish never work on Sundays, and the shed is closed.
I see my life in terms of passages and chapters; last year was the Amish Chapter, and the blueberries were the first part.
Our friendship continues still but in a very different way.
My friendship with Moise Miller and his family was one of my adult life’s most fascinating and educational chapters.
I am fortunate to know them and have gotten close to them. As I’ve written, our relationship has changed, and nothing is a better symbol of this chapter than my two blueberry bushes.
It was last year at this time that Moise asked me for help in finding inexpensive but healthy blueberry bushes to plant on his farm.
I worked hard at it, spent many hours online, and located 40 young bushes, for which he paid me. I bought two for our gardens.
Moise sought my advice on caring for the bushes, and I thought I ought to know what I was talking about if I was giving advice.
Driving by his farm, I see most of the plants I sent him are doing well.
My two here at the farm were thriving.
But this year is different from last, and I am no longer buying things for the Millers online, ordering food supplies and packaging, driving them around, or helping them locate fruit and vegetable plants to grow and sell.
I felt at the time that Moise and I could become close friends – I think for a time, we were. We went on long rides together and talked openly and honestly. I learned a lot from him.
I admire him greatly for his energy, love of the land, family, and community, and almost otherworldly appetite for hard work. I know him to be a decent and honest man.
But I was to learn that a writer and photographer is not the right friend for conservative and traditionalist Amish leaders and families.
I also learned that a small town could be…well, small.
But I loved my year getting to know this family, their children, their farm, and their great dog Tina. I learned a lot, got to write a lot, and took many pictures. I loved every bit of it.
Ultimately, I was uncomfortable being a driver, buyer, and telephone and computer station for the family. I drove people to bus and train stations, picked them up, took telephone calls and messages, printed out receipts and documents, and brought soda and snacks while working.
Amish friendships with outsiders are, by nature, transactional. They are necessary for them keep their way of life, but I’m not sure they would exist at all if it wasn’t so necessary for them. For me, there had to be more to it than that, and I couldn’t find more.
I wasn’t cut out for that kind of work, and the things I am cut out for – writing, blogging, and taking photographs – are all alien and threatening to Moise and his sect.
He is a bishop, a leader, and strictly conservative. They do what they have done for 500 years, it is how they have survived.
Moise is opposed to change, contemptuous of technology, and determined to keep the American way of child-rearing away from his family. He is patriarch in every sense of the world but also a loving and fair person.
I tend to put too much on friendships and have often been disappointed in them.
I was never indispensable to the Millers, and a week or so after we parted ways, they had found eager and willing people to do all the things I did, and just as well, even better.
I never took payment for driving or running errands, and I think it is healthier when it is done for money. They always offered, but I always declined. That was my problem. I didn’t want to take money from friends.
I came to see that the Amish lifestyle – in its most conservative sects – cannot accommodate a friendship like ours, it’s really as simple as that.
Work, family, and church are everything to Moise. Our kind of friendship, the one I hoped for and thought I had, was limited, perhaps doomed from the start.
Fair enough, no hard feelings. I see Moise almost every day; we wave across roads and see each other in town. Our friendship was a great gift to me. We are good neighbors to one another, I have greater respect and affection for him.
I can’t really say what he thinks about me, I don’t know. He showed up a couple of times here, not to talk, but to visit, his way of saying I am important to him.
People tell me they miss my writing about our friendship, but I don’t. It was a chapter, not a whole book. The blog is the story of my life, when my life changes, so do I.
There are many chapters in my book of life, I hope that never ends. Someone sent me a snide message once accusing me of being a person of many passions.
It was, to me, the greatest of compliments. I am a person of many passions, and I hope I am that way until I die.
Moise and I are connected now, we are still in each other’s lives.
I plan on supplying Barbara and the girls with fresh flowers, gummy bears, potato chips, and soda. I like to think that one day we will sit down together and go over our friendship.
It’s just a feeling, it will most likely never happen. We are, after all, both men.
I know the ice cream they love, and when I see some at the convenience store, I’ll drop some off.
But I understand that someone like me can only make him uncomfortable over time.
And as many people reading my work and blog know, I can’t tolerate being told what to do and what not to do or cutting openness, writing, and photography out of my life, even on my property.
I could see trouble ahead. I pulled back before it got painful or difficult.
In several important ways, I was the embodiment of much that the Amish traditionalists fear about the English or the outside world. They keep a distance to protect their children from what we have become.
I empathize with that. They would never tolerate disturbed people killing their children with weapons of war.
I carry an Iphone, have a camera around my neck, use computers, know nothing about carpentry or plowing, I am not a Churchgoer, and use all kinds of modern gadgets and utensils.
The children always wanted to look at the photos on my Iphone, and photos are a sin in the Amish world.
I am always writing about my life and taking pictures.
That is not the formula for a close friendship with the Amish. I learned much about tolerance, love, and respect for people who differ from me.
I think that was a precious experience for both of us, Moise and me.
I also learned not to judge a whole people by the activities of a few. The Millers treat their horses and dog very well. They are not abusive to their animals.
We always listened to one another and tolerated one another. We still do. We’re just not going to be Besties.
I was sad to return my blueberry bushes; I dropped them off with a note. They couldn’t have gone to a better home. It was the end of something, for sure.
They marked the end of this unique chapter in my life. But they belong with the Millers, who will find a place for them in gardens, and treat them with love.
The photo above shows the rich pasture the Miller family rent to give their horses fresh grass to graze on when they are not working. It says a great deal about how they treat their horses.
Ever since I began writing about the Amish, a curious thing has happened; three or four times a week, I get a link or an e-mail telling me about an Amish family accused of running a puppy mill or an Amish family believed to be abusing or overworking their horses.
Some stories say the Amish work their horses to death or kill them when they tie or fail to trim their hooves or feed them properly. Anytime an Amish horse is spotted with ribs, someone sends me a photo of it and s suggests the horse is being starved so the Amish can make more money. At first, animal rights activists sent me stories like this to write about the Amish and describe them as being cruel to animals.
Then, they were written to persuade me not to trust the Miller’s and accept that they treat their animals well.
I do not doubt that some Amish families have operated puppy mills, or that some Amish horses have been overworked, or that some Amish horses have been killed when they can’t work hard any longer. Another meme is that the Amish starve, beat their dogs, and have puppy mills in their back yards.
This is familiar to me. Memes are deadly and move rapidly. It is almost impossible to answer them once they get rolling.
Years ago, when I was writing for Wired Magazine, I began studying memetics, or what we call memes. A meme is a virally transmitted idea or image, often sharing commentary about cultural symbols, or social beliefs. Memetics studies how a concept is transmitted virally through the digital network, the Web, and the Internet, or more recently, on what we call social media.
Corporations love memetics, they help spread new products, sales, and public awareness.
Memes are valuable. If we choose the right one, the idea can go viral, and people can make a lot of money or get a lot of votes or followers. I love the study of memes and have been watching them sail out in the world for years. An advanced meme is that the Amish abuse their horses and their dogs.
For some years now, the animal rights movement has used images and stories about animal abuse to raise money and awareness. The New York Carriages have suffered from the use of memes to attack them for years. These memes failed to drive the horses out of the city, but they have raised millions of dollars for the animal rights movement.
I’ve had the opportunity to check these stories.
Some of them are true; many – most – are not. Almost invariably, these accusations offer nothing in the way of specific details. Even fewer result in police or judicial action, even though animal abuse is illegal in every state in America and thousands of people are prosecuted under these laws every year. In more than a century, one carriage horse driver was convicted of abusing carriage horses by working one longer than was permitted.
(I’ve visited the carriage horses a dozen times, they were clean and the horses had plenty of room.)
If you read the animal rights websites, it would be simple to believe every carriage horse was starved, beaten, fed rotten grain, or abandoned to freezing or brutally hot weather. Buyer beware.
Very few national reports of animal abuse are Amish. While these accusations are frequent, I rarely have, if ever, gotten links or allegations that mention non-Amish people who commit the vast majority of abusive acts against animals.
I know many of my neighbors in this town who mistrust or neglect their horses or dogs; I know of no Amish resident here who has.
These messages puzzled me, as I live just a few yards down the road from the Millers, my relatively new Amish neighbors. From the first, and before getting these messages, I made it a point to watch how they treated their animals. I saw them with their dogs, their dogs Tina, their eleven horses, and two goats.
When I get these messages about the “abusive” Amish (almost every day someone posted such a message on my Facebook Page), I ask why my neighbors have been targeted in this cruel and dishonest way since there is no evidence of them mistreating any of their animals.
Most of the time, the people run away when challenged. The few people who do reply talk about seeing puppy mills in Ohio or Pennsylvania (no details), but no one here has seen any mistreatment of the animals on the Miller Farm; I’m there almost every day.
Tina, their Heeler/Collie mix, lost part of a leg in a saw. Moise Miller treated her wound, nursed her back to health, feeds her regularly. She is happy, healthy and much loved. She has a shiny coat and sleeps inside every night. She watches and guards the small children in the family conscientiously and faithfully. I admit to loving that dog.
The Amish do not see their dogs as pets or furbabies; they see them as having work, like everyone in the family.
They are not hugged, fussed over, or called baby names. They are in good health and are well cared for by the family. The millers have never run a puppy mill or done any dog breeding, nor do they plan to. I do not understand why people keep trying to post messages on Facebook suggesting that since some Amish families have mistreated their animals, all of them must.
They are fortunate the Amish are forbidden to sue anyone.
That is just a familiar form of bigotry, and I delight in running those people off of my page. I ask the messengers if they have any specific information about the Millers being abusive. I tell them if they care about animals; then they are morally obliged to contact the police, not me or my blog readers. Animal abuse is illegal in my state and my county, and my town.
No one has ever offered a shred of evidence to support those vague accusations, and when challenged, the messengers turn cowardly and flee. Some Amish people may or may not have run puppy mills, but that does not mean the Millers have, or that they are animal abusers. I must have written that on my social media platforms a couple of hundred times, and I’ll challenge this kind of mob thinking for as long as it lasts.
Memes are easy to lunch, but once they catch, very hard to stop or reverse.
Today I was visiting the Miller Farm, and I looked up at the rich grass and growth on the side of the hill across from the farm. Moise went to the owner of that land – it’s right across the road – and offered monthly cash payments so that the horses could graze for hours every day on fresh grass and growth.
Their horses are healthy with tails and heads up. I’ve seen Amish farriers come to trim the horse’s hooves, and they seem careful and thorough and humane. Their trims are professional and thorough.
The Amish work their horses hard, and I imagine they either slaughter them or sell them when they get too to work. So does every other farmer with horses on a working farm. No real farmer can afford to feed horses that can’t work. That is not abuse; that is real life and the fantasy of rich city people who know nothing about how animals live on a farm..
The horses work hard, but not as hard as the Amish themselves.
Horses are life and death tools of survival for them, and there is a lot of work for them to do. Moise has eleven horses and two giant draft horses; he distributes the job, and horses get to graze during the day and are sheltered with hay and grain in a barn every night and during bad weather. From what I see around here, they are the luckiest horses, not the abused horses.
Memes can spread rapidly and be both cruel and lethal.
Slanderous or libelous memes ought to be illegal and one day will be.
An example of a corrosive meme and how it is spread is the one Donald Trump started: that the 2020 election was rigged.
It was the perfect meme for a divided country. Trump used social media platforms to spread the meme and keep it going. He repeated the lie and the meme countless times, and has happened with pointed emotional memes, they take on a life of their own. This is disgusting for most of us, devastating to a national political figure with a large following. Memes are the demagogue’s best friend.
Even though there is still no evidence to suggested any fraud was perpetrated, more than half of the members of the Republican Party believe it, and so millions of Americans. This meme is damaging the country’s faith in democracy, even though faith int the system was what kept our country together all these years.
The idea of all Amish being animal abusers because some might be is a similar kind of meme. Some of the most powerful ones are just lies, but the digital highway is too fast for the existing system to catch up with. Even Facebook seems to have no way to control it’s own site, which has run away from them.
This photo says a lot. These are the luckiest horses on the earth. Most horses never get to see life outside of their fences and yards.
The cement work is finished on the new barn; Moise and his sons spent the day cleaning up, using the horses to haul the debris away. They were all covered in mud and cement and soaked with sweat.
Moise does take several breaks a day and goes inside to get out of the sun. He is faithful in this.
He walked me through the foundations and explained what was coming next.
The next task is to hammer finished wood over the cement walls to attach posts and other things and cover the cement as best as I can understand.
This weekend, the clean-up will end, and Sunday is a worship day.
After that, and starting next Friday, they’ll start building the middle part of the walls around the barn.
Then, the roof – the big “raising” on the 28th.
Moise and I had a disagreement over ethics today. It’s not an argument in the sense that I know it, just a different way of seeing things.
I made a mistake in ordering two boxes of pie pans; I got the wrong ones.
I insisted on paying for them and taking responsibility for them.
It was my mistake, not theirs, and I would figure out how to handle it – give them away, find other buyers.
This company makes it difficult and expensive to return things, one reason their prices are so low.
Moise objected to this; he said he would be glad to pay the cost of the pie pan boxes; he was sure they would find a way to use them.
I order many things for the Millers, and this is the second mistake I have made, although it was the biggest.
There were scores of pie pans for sale with dozens of different measurements; I got confused.
It was curious, for sure; I was arguing about spending more of my money, he was arguing about spending more of his.
I have strong ideas about mistakes.
I believe I learn from them; they shape my life.
Many people laugh at me when I make mistakes; there is this idea in our culture that people should be perfect, make no mistakes, and admit none.
Modern media devour politicians if they admit mistakes, yet those who make mistakes and admit them are the ones I want to vote for.
When I make a mistake, which is often as Maria and others can testify, I admit it right away before I am tempted to hide it and see what I can learn.
In this case, I learn a lot about checking the specs on the things I order. I need the orders in writing.
And then recheck them.
Mistakes have shaped my life and been my greatest teacher.
Moise and Barbara have entrusted me to shop for them, which is a big deal for them, and if I take on that responsibility, I should pay for the mistakes I make and then figure out how to deal with them.
That is how I learn things. I think it is an ethical way to see it. I didn’t learn this lesson until middle-aged, but it really stuck with me.
Almost all of the big lessons in my life have come from mistakes. Acknowledging them has been healing and strengthening. I have no secrets anymore.
My whole being feels lighter.
Moise’s ethics were different in this case, and he is perhaps the most ethical human being that I know of; he is worth listening to.
He never lies, cheats, equivocates, exaggerates, or hustles. He is open, straightforward, and honest. He felt my helping him should not cost me money, period.
I dug in a bit, and he dug in perhaps more than a bit.
Moise doesn’t fight; he takes positions and holds them quietly and with few words. His wife says we are like two bulls in an open field sometimes.
Back home, I meditated on this a bit and thought about it. The Amish like compromises, and so do I.
So I came up with one.
I talked to Maria, who is wise and fair, and I drove up to the farmhouse and first ran it by Barbara. She’s a pretty good measure of how Moise will react.
We’d split the cost of my mistake, they would pay half, and I would pay half. Barbara liked it; she said it was fair.
She didn’t like the idea of me absorbing that cost; mistakes would happen, she said, and I spent a lot of time buying things that they needed.
The cost of my time should be considered.
They said they couldn’t be happier with the way I bought their donut and pie and other supplies; they didn’t want me to suffer in any way.
She said 99 percent of the things I had purchased these past few months were exactly right.
I went down to find Moise at the barn raising sight and told him of my idea. “Perfect,” he said, “that’s fair, that’s right.” He made won more shot at paying the whole cost, and I just shook my head and said, “I’m good, this is fine.”
I’ve always been prone to arguing; I like this different approach. We say how we feel honestly and openly, and if there is a difference, we look for the middle ground.
No drama, no grievance, no anger. No winners or losers.
Then it’s over.
Moise dropped it and started showing me how his gravity water irrigation system was working. He held up the house in the heat, and it spouted a heavy stream of water.
I asked him how he learned about building a foundation so cleanly and efficiently; he seemed to have the skills of an engineer, and he said his father taught him, he grew up building things and plowing fields.
“It’s just what we did,” he said. Moise is proud of his work but quite humble. He doesn’t ever acknowledge the extraordinary nature of what he and his family do.
I don’t think he sees himself in that way; the Amish are very big on humility.
Two years ago, while taking photographs, I met a 30-year- old horse named Arthur who belonged to an 88-year-old widower named James who was diagnosed with dementia and had to go live in a nursing home. James adored Arthur while he could, he gave him a wonderful life, and lived with the sweet old horse for 25 years. James always planned, when the time came, to euthanize Arthur or, if that proved impossible, to send him to a nearby slaughterhouse. The local slaughterhouse was close by, and was well-known for being humane. Slaughter was quick and painless, the horse and animal owners were always invited to come and watch if they wished, for their own peace of mind and to accompany their animals on their final passage.
In James world, this was considered the ethical way for animals to die.
James’s mind failed before he resolved Arthur’s fate. He had to leave his farm and could not bury Arthur there, as he hoped. The horse was too old to give away. James was not aware that the people who claim to speak for the rights of animals had lobbied Congress and state legislators to make the slaughterhouses of America illegal. Many functioned in rural communities close to the people in their communities. The animal rights groups were successful, there are no longer any horse slaughterhouses left in the United States.
But the number of horses without homes increased. The horses had to go somewhere. As often happens with issues relating to animals, no one had considered that the results of these good intentions would make the lives of the horses much, much worse.
When James left his farm, Arthur was seized by local authorities, given to a rescue farm that could not afford to care for him and did not have room for him. In a story now familiar to horse rescuers, Arthur was brought to an auction house and bought by a horse kill buyer (who worked for a slaughterhouse in Canada and Mexico, where horses are now sent to be killed.) Arthur, an old draft horse, was purchased for $200, taken to a feedlot where he was given little to eat, according to a relative of James who tracked his journey and tried to save him, put on a trailer and driven for 11 days through summer heat without ever once being allowed to move around or walk outside.
It is common knowledge in the horse world that these horses are treated harshly, the Mexican slaughterhouses in particular are not inclined to spend much money on fresh hay or water for horses that are about to be killed and sold as pet food, or even human food in some countries.
Arthur was jammed into a trailer with a dozen other horses, given little food or water, and transported in a way that evoked World War II concentration camps much more than the good life he had led. The relative still has nightmares thinking of what Arthur’s last days were like, how terrified he must have been, and how lonely. When Arthur got to Mexico, he was released into a crowded corral, given little to eat, and stood out in the heat for days. He was finally killed by having a three-inch nail driven into his head.
Arthur deserved a better fate than this, especially at the hands of human beings who claim to love animals so much that we owe them perfect lives but must be taken far away to die harshly. We need a better and wiser understanding of animal ethics than making emotional decisions without considering their consequences:
And horses will have to die for some time, there are far too many to care for and far too few resources. There are hundreds of thousands of unwanted horses in the United States with no one to care for them – 150,000 will go to slaughter this year; there are millions of dogs and cats leading cruel and unnatural lives languishing in crates in no-kill shelters all over the county. Yet we are constantly rescuing more, there is no natural limit to the number of animals in need.
In America, we are hobbled by an animal rights movement and political lobby that has lost any sense of empathy or common sense when it comes to even discussing the welfare of animals.
Good breeders who promote the best traits in animals being harassed and persecuted and driven from business; people are made to feel guilty for choosing their pets wisely and well. Dog lovers are afraid to ride with their pets in their cars. Farmers fear to have livestock visible from the road. Ponies are going to slaughter because it is now considered abuse for children to ride them; hundreds of elephants are being sentenced to almost certain death, driven from the circuses by people who claim to love them and insist they are being horribly mistreated, and people are so drawn to rescuing things that they scour the country, even other countries, looking for dogs and other animals for people to rescue.
This notion of animal ethics is not sustainable nor humane, nor ethical. We need a better understanding of animal ethics:
__ We need to understand that is not cruel for working animals to work, but essential to their health and future survival. Working animals ought never to be put in danger by being forcibly driven from caring and responsible homes with no clear sense of where they might go.
__ It is ethical to know fate of the animals we “save” from abuse when we take their work and security away from them. Too often, we simply pat ourselves on the back for being virtuous while the animals we supposedly have helped go off to slaughter. We need to require the advocates of horse and animal and pony and other bans to know – and document – precisely where banished animals like horses and elephants and ponies will go, who will care for them and how their care will be funded.
__It is unethical to dislocate and endanger safe and healthy animals while more than 9 billion animals suffer daily in sometimes horrendous conditions in giant industrial animal farms set up by corporations who never seem to get harassed or raided, ticketed, shut down , or have their animals seized and re-homed. Meanwhile, farmers, animal lovers and private citizens are subjected to the raids and intrusions of the growing cadres of secret animal informers who patrol the country’s farms, and the cities and suburbs and parking lots where people ride with their dogs.
An ethical animal rights or welfare system would target the people who truly abuse animals, and the animals who are truly abused, not those who do not. The New York carriage drivers, for example, are not the people who abuse animals, and the carriage horses are not the animals who are abused.
__We need a system of rescue that keeps animals in the lives and consciousness of everyday people and does not consistently send them off to isolation, lives of idleness at great costs, and almost certain extinction. Animals have the right to survive in our everyday lives, our people and children have the right to see them and know them. Domesticated animals with no work or connection with people vanish from the earth, that is their story and their history.
__ An ethical animal welfare movement must understand that there is no nature, no wild, for animals to return to any longer. There is no greater abuse of animals than the destruction of animal habitats all over the world, and we are all responsible for it. We need to acknowledge our own individual role in destroying the natural world rather than simply hating and harassing the people we blame for it, the people who work with animals, live with them, and yes, are the ones who kill them and take them to slaughter.
There is no place for domesticated animals to go when we drive them away and claim work with humans is cruel and abusive. Climate change challenges us to re-think our animals about where and how animals can remain in our world, there is mythical space out there for the carriage horses, the ponies, or the elephants to go when they are driven from their work, increasingly condemned as “abuse” or “stupid tricks.” Such tricks have uplifted and entertained human beings for thousands of years, a debt that can never be repaid.
We are condemning these animals – the ponies, the carriage horses, the elephants – to a death much like Arthur’s. That is not an ethical solution to their dilemma.
__We need to make good and hard decisions about which animals can be saved, and which cannot. Asian elephants and draft horses are not killer whales, who have never been domesticated or worked for long periods with people. Animals are different, they require different solutions and support. It is humane and ethical to free killer whales and return them to the ocean, it is merciful and possible. It is the cruelest kind of abuse to take carriage horses away from their human beings and force them onto rescue farms, where they will have no human contact, no work and nothing to do but eat hay and drop manure.
__Adoptable, healthy dogs with good temperaments are vanishing from many public shelters while rescue groups guickly take in adoptable dogs, often for people who can afford them, and leave others to pick from dogs that are often unhealthy, traumatized or troubled. Is this really humane or ethical? Our system of animal rescue, shelter and adoption routinely separate the poor the elderly and working people from animals, even though millions desperately need homes.
(A Cleveland man was denied the right to adopt a dog because he said he wanted to walk it off leash in the country sometimes, an elderly woman denied a cat because she wanted it to spend time in her garden, a carpenter denied a dog because worked six or seven days a week, a New York carriage driver and his family were denied a dog because the shelter thought it was abuse for a horse to pull carriages.)
__It is unethical to force countless or damaged dogs into society that hurt people, especially children. According to the CDC, dog bites are now epidemic, increasing at the rate of 47 per cent a year. Most of these bites are on the faces and necks of small children, who are low to the ground. Many require treatment for trauma and extensive and expensive facial surgery reconstruction. Some dogs cry out for rescue, some do not. Dogs do not make moral decisions, it is never their fault when they harm someone. That does not mean they have to flood our crowded society while carriage horses – who never harm anyone – are sent away.
__It is unethical to manipulate people by claiming the only way to get a dog is to rescue one. There are many good ways to get a dog or cat, including rescuing one. It is ethical to acquire a dog in a careful and thoughtful way. It is ethical to get an animal in a way that is a wise and rational – and safe – choice for people and their families. It is ethical to get a dog or cat that will be content and make his or her new family happy.
__We need an ethical understanding of the fact that good breeders – like good rescue organizations – promote the best traits in dogs: good temperament, healthy bodies and immune systems, loyalty and affection to people. It is not ethical to promote the adoption or purchase of dogs that hurt people or other animals. Try to remember where those photogenic and appealing herding dogs actually come from.
—It is unethical to fail to regulate breeders or rescue organizations. They breed and sell and place living beings. They should be supervised and overseen in the same way that the New York Carriage Horses are regulated, subject to inspections and the adoption of healthy breeding and living conditions. The best gift that many dogs and cats can be given – millions are abandoned, returned, imprisoned in shelters for years, or lifetimes – may be to not come into the world at all. If there are millions in shelters, then there are too many animals.
__The goal of any animal rights movement ought to be the promotion of health and safety for animals in our every day world, not their removal from society. It is unethical to make it ever more difficult for ordinary people – the poor, the working, the elderly – to adopt, purchase, or keep animals. It is unethical to seek to remove animals that are healthy and well cared for.
__It is unethical to use the love of animals as a pretext for hating and harming people. The people who live and live with animals are entitled to the same dignity and respect as dogs and cats and horses.
Ethics are important, they are the moral principles that govern a person’s or group’s or a society’s behavior.
The animal rescue impulse is noble, and has saved the lives of many animals. But like all social movements, it requires balance, thoughtfulness and nuance and perspective.
Our deep love for animals makes rational argument about the right and wrong way to treat them difficult.
And as of now, there is little rational argument about animal ethics, the current ethos argues that the lives of all animals are precious, animals have equal, even superior rights than human beings, and animals must be given perfect lives and kept alive at all costs by any means. This widespread and fiercely defended ideology is not, to me, ethical or merciful, it is actually causing much suffering to people and to animals, and greatly accelerating the disappearance of animals from their habitats and from ours, and thus from the world.
For me, the ethical standard for caring for animals is simple: We must do the best we can for each animal for as long as we can. And then, we must recognize our own limits and the limits of society, and act accordingly, according to individual circumstance and conscience. There is no single ethical standard for animal life. We cannot say every horse in the world needs to work or every horse in the world does not, this is part of an almost sacred contract between society and the animal world, and the individual and his animal.
Arthur the horse was a victim of our muddled notion of animal ethics. Our notions of animal rights and welfare failed him in the cruelest possible way. He was ultimately doomed and abandoned by a system of animal care that often exists to make people feel better, but that leaves animals to an awful fate.
Lately and with some surprise and confusion and intensity, I’ve been exploring the boundaries of a new idea, the idea of civic and political love. Our leaders seem to currently define political interaction as something that is angry, outraged, judgmental. Empathy and civility and understanding are now unacceptable in our public system.
There are no mistakes or disagreements, just unforgiveable outrages, conspiracies and lies. Every misstep is an indictment, a crime, an investigation, a bitter argument. Our precious media too often spawns hatred and argument, not light and truth. This reminds me of the conflicts in the animal world, where every injured, dead, sick animal is a testament to cruelty and abuse.
Hundreds of New Yorkers are run down or killed in collisions every month of every year, but if a New York Carriage Horse trips and falls, or a dog is left alone in a car, or a water tank freezes in a cold winter day on a farm, it is a scandal that rages on with great consequence. Sometimes, with animals, with people, it seems to me we are losing the ability to accept life as a journey of suffering, surprises, joys and troubles – and defeats. Life is not always easy and painless, grace is our ability to live with troubles as well as the triumphs.
In recent months, and mostly through my quite surprising blog, I am discovering a new reality for myself. I am seeing a better and wiser and less angry and cynical way to look at the world. This has brought me some peace and much praise – the blog is growing very rapidly. It has also brought me much criticism. Some people greatly resent the idea that they ought not judge other people and bruise them so harshly from afar. Outrage is an addiction, not a belief system, the Internet an eager transmitter of the disease. Nobody likes giving up the power of a judge’s robe, online or off.
But the blog has revealed another value system, it has become an occasional, if powerful tool for good, or at least good as I define it. It has become something I never imagined or considered when I started it in 2007 in the midst of great personal turmoil, misery and depression. I think the blog saved my life in many ways, and is now expanding and enriching it, and sometimes enriching the lives of others. An unexpected gift.
In the past year or so, the blog has helped focus national attention on the controversy surrounding the New York Carriage Horses. It brought considerable support, attention and discussion to the story in much of the rest of the country. I would not claim to be in any way responsible for the collapse of the ban – the carriage trade did that for themselves – but the blog and it’s readers helped sustain the morale of the drivers and focus their arguments on the great injustice being done to them. It gave them some words they needed to hear.
And you all brought some considerable pressure on the politicians of New York City, you changed a lot of minds, and you were heard.
Beyond that, the blog helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for our very deserving farrier Ken Norman, who had both knees replaced just before New Years on the eve of a brutally cold winter. It helped George Forss, the brilliant photographer, raise the money necessary to publish a collection of his photographs, “The Way We Were.” It helped Joshua Rockwood, a farmer, raise money for his legal defense fund (he was arrested, unjustly I believe, and charged with animal cruelty during the harsh winter of this year) and for new water tanks and shelters.
It helped Blue Star Equiculture, the draft horse sanctuary in Massachusetts, raise money for a blind horse they were adopting.
All told, the blog has raised more than $125,000 in the past year. The money went directly from you to them, none of it passed through me, a new gift of the same new technology that so often separates us from our common humanity. This isn’t the point or the purpose of my blog, it is not something that ought to be done every day, or even often. It is a gift of the blog, not the point of it.
And this week, the blog raised money to help an Oklahoma animal lover named Nancy Gallimore rescue a work horse named Asher (now Big Paul) from the slaughterhouse.
These were good causes, important things, to me part of a new awakening, a new direction as a writer, and also as a human being. I believe the blog has worked in some cases to support the care for nature and the care for human beings. We have the earth as our common mother and this is what makes us brother and sisters, I realize. This is what makes us family, for all of our differences and quarrels. We rise above ourselves to reach out to one another in ways that have never before been possible.
My blog now receives millions of visits a year, and I wish to thank those of you who helped pay me for the work and for the maintenance of the blog through your voluntary subscriptions. They support my work, they have made all of this possible. I never thought the blog would ever be used in this way.
The love of family is random and gratuitous, and has been difficult and elusive for me. It can never be a means of repaying others for what they have done for us or might do for us. We love the sun, the wind, the clouds, the birds and fields, the animals, even though we cannot control them, even though our contacts are fleeting and sometimes distant.
For me, often cynical, angry and disconnected in my life, this new way of using a blog – this work must be occasional and particular – has helped me to regain, and now, deepen the conviction that we need one another, and that we have a shared responsibility for others and for the earth. I think many of us have grown weary of the argument and anger and righteous judgement that swirls all around us.
I think we have had enough of hatred and conflict and the cynical mockery of goodness, spirituality, and authenticity. Enough of selfish political leaders who fan the awful flames of anger and hatred and journalists who sell anger, not facts. Our sick earth begs us to overcome the fact that our connections to one another are being corroded and trampled when we most need to be together. When we even use our love of animals to batter each other, then violence and brutality and division seem inevitable.
These new uses of the blog are showing me that love can be civic and political as well as personal. A new idea of love for me. It can make itself felt in every action that we take. It means being civil to one another, we live in a common home, we have a shared identity. I hope for a leader who will lift us up in this new way.
I was quite shocked to discover that love and anger are choices for me, not destinies or fated things out of my control. I never knew I had a choice, they are decisions, I make them every day. We can go one way, or we can go the other. When I wrote sympathetically this week about the young and hard-working horse kill buyer – they buy the horses that go to slaughter at auction – I shocked myself and angered many other people.
How dare I empathize with the life of this young father and husband? He is not human, he does not deserve compassion or consideration. Like the carriage drivers, he was not to be considered a human being, but something less than that, something so immoral and without value that he need not be treated with respect or dignity.
But it was my choice, and I did come to see him as a human being, and it was a good choice for me, it feels very good to do good and shed hatred. And it is a big choice, it taught me that I am evolving, embracing this new idea of political love, not as a Pollyanna living in simple-minded fantasy, but as a hard-headed realist who is coming very slowly to understand that we will stand together and learn to live with one another, or we will perish together in a whirlwind of greed and anger and fear and judgement.
