Search Results for: cart horses

I received many messages about the carriage horses this week, three touched me, I want to share them. They are important.

Marsha Himler is the President of the New York State Horse Council , she wrote me yesterday to thank me for writing about the carriage horses. I had written that the controversy had become a campaign of rage and would continue in one form or another, but that the people in the carriage trade have nonetheless won a great victory, support for them is growing every day.

“I do not feel this fight is over, unfortunately,” Himler wrote. “The ‘campaign of rage’ as you so rightly termed it, by the animal rights activists, will go on and so the good people who own the carriage horses will probably never have the luxury to completely relax and go about conducting their business as those of us who work in less public occupations do.”

__

Pamela Rickenbach is the very peace-loving co-manager of the Blue-Star Equiculture farm, a rescue home, retirement farm, organic farming center and educational center for working and draft horses. She wrote a column – “Sense And Sensibility For Our Own Kind” – on her Facebook page, it was a wrenching chronicle of fury and cruelty:

“Have you ever been absolutely hated by an animal rights activist? I mean HATED so much that they wish to obliterate your very existence. HATED so much that they vow to destroy you and your kind no matter what it costs, monetarily or in decency? HATED so much that your very humaneness and your families identity and legacy and traditions and whatever else you hold sacred and dear are threatened with a campaign to destroy any trace of your existence? What is it about this kind of activism done in the name of loving animals, that loathes humankind to the point of what appears to be utter insanity?”

___

Lena Pilarski is a 22-year-old college student and mother of two girls from the Midwest, she loves horses and hopes one day to own a herd of Gypsies and Shires. Night after night she dreams the same dream.  “it’s the image of carriage, wagon, plough and cart horses from around the country flooding into New York City, bringing the flow of cars in the streets to a halt as they take them over.” In her dream, she sees a huge line of carts and horses lined up before the mayor’s office. The crowd of horses and people are so overwhelming that the protesters who gather to shout their chants are drowned out.

Lena hears the horse’s voices in the night, they are talking to her, she imagines in her dream that the mayor, sitting in his office, feels the pressure of the horses and the many animal lovers watching. “Will he still insist on this unfounded prejudice?,” she wonders, “or will he finally do what is right and visit these people, the stables, the horses, and see for himself that the animals are happy and give up this ridiculous pursuit?”

__

I am happy to share these voices. They are very human, in such stark contrast to the angry voices standing behind microphones, screaming cruel taunts in the streets to feed the ravenous cameras and enraged blogs.

I know these voices will never be heard in the jarring din that is the New York carriage horse controversy.  Reporters will never ask them their opinion,  nobody would attend their press conferences, their messages are all powerful and yet said in different ways.

And we know that the mayor – he describes himself as a progressive – will hide from them, he will never talk to them or listen to what they have to say. When one of the gentlest and quietest of the carriage drivers approached the mayor with his young son at a public event earlier this year and asked him why he was pursuing the horse ban so relentlessly, the mayor said “because your work is immoral,” turned his back and walked  away.

Martha Himler gently  reminds us that the people in the carriage trade have had their right to safe and free lives taken from them, they will almost certainly never have the luxury granted to free people everywhere to feel safe, to feel peaceful, to conduct their business as free people everywhere assume they have the right to do. They have become targets for rage, they will be hounded, shouted at, insulted, dehumanized, and live in fear of the kind of mistake or accident that happens every day to all kinds of people, but that can never happen to them or their horses.

That is an awful price to pay for doing honest work in a law-abiding and conscientious way.

Pamela Rickenbach’s message is a wrenching plea, she reminds us that hatred is a form of violence, a kind of abuse, a battering of the soul and of the spirit.  George Orwell wrote that all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

I would once have thought such a statement harsh and cynical, but it is the story of the carriage horse controversy, the cancerous swirl in which the drivers and horses must live.  Pamela Rickenbach’s message reminds us of how much hatred can hurt, how abusive it can be. These people must never get to speak for the rights of animals as they trample on the rights of people.

And then, Lena, a young and innocent voice. How very sad that she must dream of a world in which a mayor actually listens to the people he is supposed to serve, and who have elected him to public office. This is how the real world of democracy is supposed to work. The carriage drivers are citizen’s of the city also, as are the people who claim to support animal rights. The stable owners and drivers are the new refugees a broken system,  betrayed every day by a broken promise – the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The philosopher Liu Xiaobo wrote that hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience. The mentality of hatred, he wrote, can poison a community’s spirit, spark brutality, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block our progress to freedom and democracy.

Hatred hurts, even kills, you can ask the carriage trade people, their messages are perhaps the most powerful of all. Theirs are the voices I hear every day.

“The families, many of whom I would call very close friends at this point, are ordinary folks,” wrote Rickenbach in her essay, “trying to care for their families, their horses, their business. I have seen the depression and sadness and extreme stress in their faces. A couple have died of heart attacks, one was one of the sweetest most loving human beings I have ever met, creative and funny and determined to help show the world the beauty of his love for his horses and city.”

__

So hate, I think, is really the message of Marsha Himler, Pamela Rickenbach, Lena Pilarski. Their messages are not cruel and angry, they are calling to us, as the horses are, to remember what it means to be human beings living together in community.

Their story is, in fact, about hatred, cruelty and abuse. But the horses are not the ones in need of rescue. We are.

I thank Marsha, Pamela, and Lena for writing me, I am proud to receive and share their very powerful messages. They all wrote me to thank me for my writing, they are all far more eloquent than I will ever be.

Greg, a horse lover from Oklahoma messaged me and asked me why I thought it was that the mayor of New York would not speak to the carriage horse drivers, negotiate or communicate with them in any way, meet with their members, lobbyists, or lawyers, invite them to his office or visit their stables. It seemed like he hated them, he said, as if it were personal.

I told him I didn’t really know what the mayor felt, lots of people speculate about it, but I am certain that if he did talk to them, he might find it difficult to hate them, he might lose heart in the blind and disturbing righteousness of his cause.

A carriage driver accompanied by his very young son approached the mayor recently at a public event and asked him why he was so determined to banish the horses. The mayor did not hesitate. He answered: “because your work is immoral.” He then turned away, not waiting for a reply. He did not explain why driving horses through Central Park  – something that has been done for 150 years – or working with horses, something that has been done for thousands of years, is immoral work in New York City in 2014.

The mayor has run from the carriage drivers again and again, he will  not  talk with them or visit the horses. But his brief declaration to the driver and his son is perhaps his most revealing comment yet, because the mayor is correct. This is an issue of morality, it has been from the beginning.

If you know your history, it is a troubling thing for a political leader to dehumanize people, it leads almost invariably to injustice and persecution. It begins in small ways, and once people succeed in doing it, it evolves into much bigger things. History is pretty clear on that, so is today’s news. Hannah Arendt says the dehumanization of people is the true breeding ground of evil.

The leaders we love, admire and remember –  Lincoln, Gandhi, King, Mandela, the Dalai Lama –  did not dehumanize people, not even their worst enemies. That was the source of their greatness. In his exchange with the carriage driver, the mayor seemed very small.

___

Before I met the carriage drivers, and like the man from Oklahoma, I heard a great deal about them, not a word of it good.

They had, in fact, been systematically and relentlessly dehumanized for years. They were – and are almost daily –  described frequently and in many places – blogs, websites, press conferences, media stories, –  as profoundly immoral:  corrupt,  dishonest,  cruel. As thieves and greedy abusers of animals, as slave drivers. As people who rob tourists. They starve their horses, push them to overwork, put  them into danger, tie them up in chains – never harnesses, lock them in cells, never stables,  where they could not lie down or turn around.

The horses are slaves, we are told, the drivers force them into brute work and exploit them and deny them their true destiny to roam freely in the wild. The horses are depressed, dejected.  They pine for the wilderness, for grass. They are sick, their wounds untreated, they are doomed to live unhealthy and short lives of abuse and mistreatment. People saw these stories and images for years and sent lot of money – millions of dollars.  The drivers were slow to believe that anyone would accept these stories or believe them.

The people in the carriage trade, an ancient work known all over the world,  stood by in anguish and confusion as their humanity was taken from them. They have been harassed, insulted, spit upon, doused with beer and soda, called murders and abusers in front of their customers and families, accused of various crimes on the Internet, almost none of which are true. They live in perpetual fear of losing their work and livelihood, their way of life, the food for their families.

I was a reporter for a long time, and I learned not to accept or embrace one dimensional descriptions of people. Not of criminals, not of police, not of women, blacks, kids, Muslims, Jews, priests, drunks, Muslims,  politicians, not carriage drivers. I decided to go to New York and see the stables and talk to the carriage owners and drivers and see for myself, I was a good reporter for a long time, I love hunting for truth. In the carriage horse story, I found much truth, it was not the truth I was led to expect.

The mayor and the animal rights leaders who denounce the carriage drivers so cruelly are careful to never describe them or acknowledge them as beings capable in even small ways of pain, sadness, suffering,  or compassion. They are not worthy of our concern, or the concern of society. The carriage drivers are, in the animal rights and mayoral lexicon,  cartoon representations of evil, shallow portraits of cruelty, greed and corruption. They hurt animals willfully for money, and then laugh at their suffering, stuffing their pockets with gold earned from cruel abuse. You will never find a single word about them that is good in the vast archives of the New York animal rights movement, or a compassionate one from the mayor.

They are not people one needs to speak to or whose humanity one must acknowledge.

The mayor meets with all kinds of people all the time – sanitation workers, immigrants, laborers, movie stars, correction officers, community activists, ex-convicts,  police officers, street vendors, and many times, animal rights activists. There is only one group in all of New York City that this progressive mayor refuses to talk to or meet with – the carriage drivers, the people who drive horses for a living.

___

The carriage drivers, of course,  are not other than human, they are intensely human.  They are just people, like you and me.

They love their parents, they care deeply about their children, they pay their bills and their taxes, they worry about money. They talk about their mothers and grandmothers all the time, back in Ireland, in Russia.

They follow music, they love to laugh and drink together, they appreciate their horses very much as the source of their livelihood, they are always watching them, feeding them brushing them, talking to them. Some are mystics, some eclectics and spiritualists, some are working on the way to something else. Some are nicer than others. Almost all all of them love their freedom, love being outdoors, love being their own bosses in the great and beautiful park, love being around one another, love working with animals and getting paid for it, love chatting up the tourists and hearing their stories, trading them for their own.

They talk about their their wives and husbands, how they will pay for their children’s college, what they will do if they can ever retire, squawk about all of the inspectors and regulators who swarm around them. They seem to all want to have farms with animals one day, much like mine,  they say. They ask me about my farm all the time, how much did it cost, how many animals, how must they be cared for? They are almost all avid readers, men and women, they always tell me of the books they’ve read, the things they’ve learned, they are full of quotes and lyrics and jokes and tales.

They are all good story tellers, it is part of their work, the drivers come from many places, but many are Irish, and  no one in the world tells stories better than the Irish.

Their eyes light up when they talk about the animals. On  weekends or days off, a few go and visit their retired horses on farms in New Jersey and Massachusetts and upstate New York, they bring them oats and feed and carrots, show them to their children.

They especially love regaling the people in their cabs with the stories of New York and it’s history – who shot what movie where, who gave what concert in what part of the park, where John Lennon was shot,  who built what skyscraper when, what Frederick Law Olmstead had in mind when he built which bridge.  They take cellphone photos of lovers and kids and tourists. I have been around animals a good long time, for much of my life and written many books about them, and I also see – it is quite apparent – that they care for their horses and would not harm them or exploit them or treat them as slaves.

Arendt says moral people are content with themselves, at peace when they look in the mirror. “Are you happy?,” I asked a carriage driver when I was in New York two weeks ago. “Do you love your life?” He looked at me for a few minutes, and he teared up very quickly and very slightly. “My grandfather loved this work. My father loved this work. I love this work. It is my wish that my son will love this work also. I have never done anything in this work or in my life to be ashamed of.”

The drivers seem tough to me, they are ferociously protective of their families, clannish and guarded. They text their families and kids while they wait for rides. They are anxious, battered by years of accusations and conflict, but they are also not running away anytime soon. They will fight for their livelihoods and their lives. “We have done nothing wrong,” Jerry told me, “we will not let them drive us off.” I should never, another driver told me, have to explain to the government that I am a good and moral person. “I have done nothing wrong. They lie about us every single day.”

If you want to know what the carriage drivers are like, go to the stables or better yet, go to the park, ask any of the drivers where Stephen, Paul and Frank are. Go and talk to them.

These three, in the photo above,  are all from Ireland – Frank and Paul grew up in the same town and have been friends all of their lives, now they line up their carriages next to one another while they wait for rides in New York City, laughing and talk with the tourists and children and telling stories of the old country and their free and outdoor lives in the great park.

Stephen Malone’s parents – Jean and Paddy – came to America from Northern Ireland also and they found good lives for themselves and their families in the carriage trade. Paddy, his father, started cleaning the stables and then got his own carriage and passed on his medallion to his son.  Steve chose to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a carriage driver, he loves his work and spends much of his time working to stop the movement to ban the horses from New York.

The carriage drivers are quick to laugh and smile,  you can not fake warmth and humor.

You will never see an animal rights protester in New York City smile or laugh.

Can I tell you from the heart and without hesitation that every man or woman in the carriage trade is moral, doing moral work every day? No, of course not, how could I know. Some may even treat their horses poorly, as many people are not good to their dogs. Sainthood is not a requirement for carriage drivers for the horses to remain in New York.  But I do know this. They are as moral, I think, as me, or you. As the mayor. Or police officers and politicians, bartenders or school teachers, soldiers or doctors. They are not more or less than us. They are us.

They came to America for the same reasons as my people and the mayor’s people did, in search of freedom and security, and it seems fair enough to say that at the very least, the mayor might go and speak with them before he tries to take their freedom and security away.

If the mayor came up to me at a book reading – not likely, as my agent would say – and asked me why it is that I write so much about the carriage horses, why I am so committed to helping to keep them in New York, I would say this to him:

Because it is the moral thing to do.  Because it is moral work, a good and  honest way to feed families, keep animals in our lives and live an independent life.

John Locke, who knows a lot more about morality than you do, sir, says a moral leader is one who protects the freedom and dignity and property of the people he serves. That, he says, is what a moral government does.

__

My new e-book, “Who Speaks For The Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World” is now available for $3.99 on Amazon, Bn.com and everywhere digital books are sold.

Central Park has enriched life in New York for more than 150 years. I know many of you reading this have been to the park where the horses work,  but most have not had the opportunity to see this spectacular achievement, mostly the vision of Frederick Law Olmstead, the brilliant designer who created it.

For those of you who cannot see the horses there, I wanted to say that of all the things you see in the park today – pedicabs, joggers, bicyclists, food and water vendors, artists doing sketches, homeless men and women sleeping, popcorn vendors, cars, taxis and buses,  park rangers and police officers on horseback, runners and baseball players, kids with cellphones and tourists and families with video cameras – the carriage horses are the most beautiful and natural things in the park, apart from the trees and gardens and magical landscapes.

Olmstead wrote that he designed every single bridge in the park to accommodate the big and beautiful horses, so that they would have room, could be seen by and move among the masses of people moving into the great city. Every road they ride on, every bridge they move over, every big path they turn on was built for them, and with them in mind. And from the first day the park opened, and every day since, the horses have been a part of life  in the park, a way for people to see it, a thing for people to see. The horses are as organic to the park as the trees, as natural and appropriate.

The sound of their hooves rises – it always makes itself heard – among the great din, honking, sirens and exhaust of the defiling cars. As if they are sending their own messages in their own way.

I often wonder what Olmstead would make of a city 150 years later where, of all of the disparate and discordant things in the park – the carts, the pedicabs, the cars and buses, the city government has chosen to try to ban the horses, the first conveyances ever to be in the park, the most beautiful and most popular. How would he come to understand the idea that the work of these horses, prized so much and valued so highly that he built the park in part for them,  is suddenly intolerable,  abusive and cruel? Hundreds of pedicabs swarm the roadways, and for most of the day, taxis and cars and cards, dogs and bicycles  clog the roads through the park. No one has suggested banning or curtailing them, only the horses would be banned by the mayor.

It seems that everything about the carriage horse controversy is a moral inversion, the crazed logic of the White Rabbit. The spirit of and will of Olmstead is so very clear. Every bridge was built so that every person walking in the park could look up and see the big and beautiful horses pulling their carriages through the park. Is New York City really a place where cars and taxis stay forever but the horses in the park will never be seen again?

Olmstead’s spirit can join the other voiceless victims of this sad campaign – the tourists, the children, the lovers, the people who truly love animals and wish them to remain in our world – they challenge us to understand right from wrong and truth from lies and keep the horses in the city and the park, which was built for them. Sometimes it seems that they are the only living things that truly belong there.

A friend of mine in the carriage horse trade posted a story online about a farmer who dumped a truckload of horse manure in front of the French National Assembly to protest the policies of the French government. The police arrived and hauled the farmer off before he could drop the entire load, but he made his point and it was a big one.  The manure dump was a major sensation in France, it was covered everywhere and almost universally celebrated and applauded. The farmer touched a deep nerve, it was a classic moment in the rich history of protest.

My friend in the carriage trade was a bit horrified, I think, he said the carriage horse owners and drivers would never do anything that negative, if they ever protested at all. The dropping of manure would simply annoy the public and turn them away from their cause. I think I made him somewhat uncomfortable, my gift to the world.

I said I thought it would be great to take a wagon load of good horse manure – I have great donkey manure – from the carriage horse stables and dump them in front of the offices of PETA or NYClass, the animal rights groups seeking to ban the horses from New York and put hundreds of people out of work for no legal reason. it is after all, where horseshit would be much at home.

The people in the carriage trade are not like the kids from the Occupy Wall Street movement that called for global revolution. They are not barefoot anarchists without a particular cause or purpose. They are just like us, our neighbors, friends and family members. They are generally conservative, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, they are clannish and generally averse to conflict. They have a just cause and a powerful case to make.

Their caution and reticence is why the animal rights movement had nearly carte blanche to abuse them for years, accusing them of all sorts of things that were not true, or were grossly distorted. A compliant and generally clueless media was happy to relay these many falsehoods  as if there was some truth to them.

Almost everyone in New York – me, too- assumed the horses were being cruelly overworked and mistreated. I had no idea that the horses got five weeks of vacation, worked an average of six hours a day, had heated and air-conditioned stalls and were healthy and lived a good long time – longer than horses in the wild or on rescue farms.

In the past year, the carriage trade has begun to fight back, organizing their own media, standing in their truth, making their own statements and they have turned public opinion around in New York, uniting the fractious city to an almost unprecedented degree. 66 per cent of New Yorkers want the horses to stay, so do all three newspapers, the labor unions and the Chamber Of Commerce. Nobody can remember when there was that kind of unanimity about anything in New York. The mayor, who refuses to meet with the carriage trade people, visit the stables or communicate with them in any way – he is happy to talk to the millionaire animal rights activists seeking to banish them – says he does not care what what the people of New York think, he has his own mandate.

Still, protest and media management are not natural gears for the people in the carriage trade, they prefer to work and raise their families.

The animal rights groups are ingenuous, if not especially fact driven or congenial, they have taken the idea of the protest to a whole new level. They don’t really have much to protest – there is absolutely no evidence that the horses in the carriage trade are being abused – but they demonstrate  continuously, usually weekly, mostly just shouting insults at the carriage drivers and the tourists and kids who want to go for rides and holding up photos of horses who fell down years ago. It is true in our world that if you repeat lies loudly and frequently, people will eventually come to believe them, the Internet is the great friend of the lie in many ways.

Is there a better cause for protest than this issue of the carriage horses for anyone who loves animals and the freedom to choose our own way of life?

Protest is not radical or offensive. America was founded on protest and civil disobedience, the founding fathers believed it is the citizen’s duty to protest and defy arrogant and abusive government. Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the government is best which governs least,” and he went to jail rather than pay taxes to support slavery.

Creative protest has taken many twists and turns in America. The patriots went out to Boston harbor to toss tea overboard because of a governmental authority seeking to take the colonists livelihood and way of life away – much the same issues the carriage trade faces. The first feminists rode bareback through the capitol and disrupted Congress to focus attention on women’s rights. Martin Luther King (and Gandhi before him) understood the power of focused and non-violent and symbolic protest, they accomplished more than massive armies with many guns. King believed it was an honor and a duty to protest injustice, and his notions of creative protest worked. He did more with his marches and protests than politicians and legislators did in centuries.

The horses have been visiting me in the night again, and their message is both vivid and clear.  They are showing me images of scores of them blocking off the entrance to Central Park, standing in beautiful and powerful and silent protest to the indefensible effort to banish them from the city and ban the people who own them,  seize their property and force them into work they do not want – driving vintage electric cars around the park. Banning honest and hard-working people is not the business of government,

I also see children all around the horses – every child on the earth would wish the horses to stay, if anyone would listen to them – standing with them as they seal off the park and shut down the traffic all around them.

It is an unacceptable thing to be banned for no reason other than that a millionaire with an angry obsession has purchased a mayor’s will in back rooms and hotel ballrooms.

In contemporary culture, many Americans think protest is posting an angry message on Facebook. Politics means signing a petition or hitting the “like” button. But creative and brave protest is as honored and patriotic an American idea as Fourth of July parades. We have just gotten out of the habit of  going outside.

I don’t quite agree with my cautious friend from the carriage trade, although I understand his caution. When I began researching and writing about this story, I had an open mind about it, like most people, I expected to find the horses in rough shape, worn out and abused, as I had been hearing.

Instead, what I found was a conspiracy of lies that made me angry and makes me angry still. This controversy is an injustice, it should never have happened, there is nothing to it or behind it.

PETA and NYClass – along with their newly-radicalized lapdogs in the S.P.C.A. U.S. Humane Society – have lied repeatedly, distorted the truth about minor and meaningless events, utterly misrepresented both the real lives of the horses and the ways in which they are cared for. They have exploited the good will of animal lovers everywhere by manipulating dishonest imagery in order to collect  money. They have taken a handful of minor and utterly predictable events and sought to portray these gentle beasts as dangerous and destructive, an awful thing to do to and a libel to these gentle and domesticated and hard-working animals.

They have damaged and corrupted the political process by working in secret to flood the decision-making process with money and circumvent any kind of openness, due process or fairness. They are putting hundreds of horses in thoughtless and unnecessary danger misled the public. These are not the horses that need rescue, these are not the people who abuse animals.

I want to tell my carriage horse friends that creative protest is not an ugly or unseemly thing to do. It is the essence of being American, what we can do when government goes too far, what we ought to do.

I would happily donate some of the good and pungent manure that comes to the farm every day from my three donkeys, and from the sheep as well. There is a lot of it and it is good stuff, you could smell it from the NYClass office right to the stables. I think it is the perfect statement to make to people for whom horseshit is standard practice, a means of communicating, an ethical state of being.  I would be happy to load up a truck and drop it off myself.  Martin Luther King said there are times when civil disobedience is the most heroic thing a citizen can do for his country.

And think of the impact. It would be an overnight sensation on Facebook, and Twitter,  it might well awaken many people to the true horseshit – this utterly pointless assault on people who are doing what people have done for thousands of years – working with horses that they value and care for.

And if they hauled me and my manure off to jail, I would be proud, I would think of Thoreau, sitting in his cell.

“Must the citizen for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men [and women] first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

The flies would have to come too.

A couple of weeks ago, PETA touched off a racial firestorm when it bungled it’s way into the Detroit water crisis. The city’s water company is shutting off water to thousands of impoverished city residents who could not pay their bills in recent months and years, an act the United Nations has labeled a violation of basic human rights.

PETA shocked the city – and everyone else –  by offering to pay the water bills of ten city residents if they would agree to accept a vegan diet basket and eat vegan food for free for one month. A PETA spokesperson was stunned by the uproar, she said the group had no regrets or apologies to make.

Author and activist Yasmin Nair wrote one of the gentler characterizations of PETA’s idea, which sparked nearly universal outrage among the mostly African-American residents of the city. She said on her blog that it was an “ugly, vile, and meaningless gesture.”

Nair asked the same basic question that underscores the animal rights movement in New York City and the controversy over the New York carriage horses.

“If we are to begin thinking about ending cruelty to animals, we need to ask how our economic and cultural structures enable us to be as cruel, even if in different ways, to humans.”  Or much crueler, in fact. We do need to think about that,  it is  the elephant in the room, the issue no one in progressive New York City wants to really face. It is unthinkable to me that people who are cruel and indifferent to one another can really help us find a way to be kinder to animals.

Nair’s essay speaks directly to the race and class issues that  PETA’s  tone deaf  initiative raises. The story also relates very clearly to PETA’s strong support of  the move to ban the New York City carriage horses and put hundreds of people out of work. Can we really improve the lives of animals while ignoring, abusing and destroying the lives of the people who own and care for them? Does a movement so uncaring of people and so viscerally elitist really get to speak for the rights of animals?

The animals rights movement – always an upper class fringe culture viewed by most people – not always fairly – as the social hobby of loopy, over-educated but curiously unknowing white kids  – is  viscerally and endemically cruel and insensitive to humans. It has, in direct and indirect ways, increasingly isolated and ignored minorities and the poor when it comes to animals, both in terms of civic priorities and resources.

“PETA’s proposal,” writes Nair, “is callous, short-sighted and ultimately meaningless. It does nothing to advance veganism or to get people to think about the systemic links between, say, poverty, race and the degradation of animals, for meat or pleasure.” In the same way, the effort to ban the carriage horses in New York City does nothing to advance the life of one single animal, including the horses, or challenges the city – and it’s millions of ethnic and racial minorities – to consider the role of animals in urban life, or the ways in which working animals like horses could help some of the city’s neediest people, economically or in other ways.

If the horses are banned, one NAACP board member e-mailed me, “black children will never see a horse again for the rest of their lives. Can that be good for them or for animals? Do you have to be a rich white person with a farm to ever see a working horse? Why should black and hispanic children be the only children denied the opportunity to live with animals?”

Across the country, animals like horses and dogs are being used to help autistic and disabled children, sell vegetables and other foods in inner cities, to educate impoverished children in the ways of the animals world. Instead of banishing them from the city, why couldn’t the mayor or PETA consider bringing them into the outer boroughs, where few children ever get to see animals, and where many could benefit from the amazing new therapy work being done with equines.

There are, of course, connections between race, poverty and the abuse and mistreatment of animals. Why not address them, rather than remove the animals from our lives and our worlds without due process or cause?

In the same way that PETA’s profoundly insensitive vegan water campaign exploits and misunderstands the most vulnerable people in Detroit – fresh fruit and vegetables are rare in the city’s devastated neighborhoods, where there are few markets left of any kind –  the campaign against the carriage horses in New York is more of a class conflict than a genuine effort to help horses.  Vegan dieting is the last thing on the minds of people surrounded by poverty and violence and who have  no money or running water.

In New York, the issues echo Detroit in more ways than we might have imagined. The new animal rights movement  pits the politicized and apartment-dwelling elites of Manhattan and Brooklyn against the blue-collar, mostly immigrant workers who make up the carriage trade and who drive the horse carriages. Imagine if the mayor tried to ban industries that employed people who went to Harvard and Yale – journalists or museum workers or actors –  because some millionaire didn’t like them for one reason or another and gave a lot of money to his campaign?

The new animal rights philosophy is centered on the newly fantasized and idealized notion of animals, work is now considered cruel. In the Irish and other cultures from which many of the carriage owners and drivers are  descended, work with animals goes back a thousand years or more. Animals are not pets to be pitied but partners in the joys and travails of life, they have given sustenance, survival and purpose to countless working people over time.

This ancient tradition is now – and quite suddenly-  seen as criminal in New York City. The animal rights movement has no history or understanding of domesticated or working animals, since few of the people in it have never worked with any – they do not believe in it –  or been willing to grasp or explore the social or economic importance of working animals to so many people in the world. In the carriage trade culture, as in much of rural America and most of the world, working animals are valued, even sacred. I got an e-mail from a carter in New Delhi who is following the effort to ban the horses, and he was stunned, incredulous. “What kind of country are you?,” he wondered, “where you could banish hundreds of healthy working horses to farms where they could never work again? Send them to us, there will be no controversy.” I wasn’t sure what to tell him.

All all the animals in the world to rescue, the carriage horses are an unlikely choice. Most have already been rescued from auction houses, and all are safe, healthy and well cared for.

PETA’s quite shockingly insensitive proposal  has underscored the elitism and privilege embedded in the animal rights culture, and the bizarre reasoning behind the carriage horse struggles. Without the carriage trade owners and drivers, most, if not all, of the New York carriage horses would already be dead, long sent to slaughter.

This enraged and self-righteous elitism has characterized the movement against the horses in New York – largely funded and supported by PETA and the animal rights group NYClass – since it’s inception. But for the first time in the history of major American cities, the movement has a mayor who is so fervent supporter that he will not even meet with the carriage horse ownes or drivers. The horses may pay with their lives, the owners and drivers with their way of life.

If you go to New York City and observe the demonstrators who gather weekly in Central Park, you will rarely, if ever, see a face that is not white. Beyond that, the restrictions and campaigns launched by animal rights organizations seem targeted – consciously or not – at blacks and other minorities,  the working-class and the poor. People with jobs are denied the right to rescue animals, as are those who cannot afford expensive fencing and expensive veterinary care. Do the poor have the same right to have dogs as everyone else?

The campaign against the carriage horses has had especially ugly class connotations, and has from the first. There is a millionaire real estate developer obsessed with banning the horses, working in close alliance with the city’s new upper middle-class white mayor and legions of almost all upper middle-class white workers and volunteers targeting the blue-collar men and women who work in the carriage trade.

If the horses are banned, more than 300 people will lose their jobs, they are almost all blue-collar, immigrant or working class people. . From the first, the mayor and the animal rights organizations have treated these workers as sub-human, refusing to speak with them, meet with them, negotiate with them or even talk with them. When I think of the Detroit vegan initiative, I immediately think of the assumption of New York’s mayor and the leaders of NYClass, the spearheading group of the ban, that the carriage drivers will be happy to drive vintage electric cars once the horses are gone. It is not clear why the city would permit greedy animal abusers to drive children and other tourists around in cars, but the arrogance and elitism of the idea are powerful: since the drivers are only interested in money, and less than moral human beings, why would they care what they drive through the park, or even know the difference?

The frequent demonstrations against the people in the carriage trade are often vile, the drivers are regularly accused of being murderers, abusers, greedy thieves and uncaring thugs.  Children and tourists riding in the carriages are insulted and shouted at, the horses are regularly taunted with placards shoved in their faces in the hopes of provoking them to spook or bolt.

In New York City, the mayor and the animal rights movement have demonstrated time and again that they operate in a political environment which, as Nair suggests, “often seems to care more about the animals left behind in hurricanes than the people whose lives are devastated…” In fact, the animal rights movement moved tens of thousands of animals out of New Orleans after Katrina, and in many cases refused to return the pets to their true owners, claiming they were abused and mistreated in their original homes. Animal owners in New Orleans were victimized, again and again, many spent years in court fighting to get their animals back.

Would the millions of dollars being spent by New York City and a number of animal rights organizations to banish the carriage horses  who are by all accounts, healthy, well cared for and well fed, and replace them with $160,000 vintage carriage horses be better spent on helping the many thousands of New York City children – most of them black and Hispanic – who live in homeless shelters, and are neither well cared for or well fed, according to the city’s own accounts?

Why is the city an unsafe environment only for horses, but not for poor children? Why would the mayor make removal of the horses his most urgent priority, but not the children?

What ties the Detroit water controversy to the New York Carriage Horse crisis are the same humanitarian and social concerns. People with no money or access to real political power are being victimized by exploitive, wealthy and callous political elites masquerading as defenders of animals.

If PETA really wanted to help the people of Detroit, they would of course offer to feed families (or their animals) there without condition – they have many millions of dollars to spend. Instead, they are spending millions in New York City to banish animals that are not in need or danger. If they really wanted to help horses in America, they would take their cash to the auction houses in Pennsylvania and elsewhere where more than 150,000 horses each year are taken over long distances to slaughter in cramped trailers to Mexico and Canada and transported and killed in the most brutal of ways, because PETA and other groups lobbied to close down the much more humane and close slaughterhouses in the United States.

In Detroit, PETA has revealed itself in stark and disturbing but familiar ways.  It’s vegan gesture was the ultimate expression of elitism and insensitivity. There is a backlash to PETA and the mayor’s campaign against the horses in New York as well. The public is not buying the idea that the horses are being abused by working, 66 per cent of city residents want them to stay.

There is a growing revulsion  at the tactics and inhumanity of the people who call themselves supporters of animal rights. A movement that has so little regard for human beings cannot ever be entrusted with the welfare of animals.

—

My new e-book, “Who Speaks For the Carriage Horses: The Future Of Animals In Our World,” is available for $3.99  wherever digital books are sold.

–