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“Accident: An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.” – The Oxford Dictionary.

In one sense, it is difficult to believe the stories of the howling mobs of animal  trolls who descended on the Cincinnati Zoo in outrage over the killing of their 17-year-old gorilla, Harambe in order to save a three year-old boy.  The zookeepers were heroes in every sense of the word.

The response  is digital outrage, of course, not the same as the real thing, it is perpetrated by unbalanced outrage addicts who hide safely beyond their keyboards.

Blame the mother, blame the zoo. But by all means, blame someone. In this world there is no such thing as life or accidents.

Thousands of people are demanding that the mother of the boy be criminally prosecuted for neglect, that there was no reason to kill the gorilla,  that the zoo be boycotted or even prosecuted for killing the gorilla, whose name was Harambe.

That they know nothing about gorillas or were not present when life-and-death-decisions had to be made by highly trained and professional experts no longer seems to matter in the universe of outrage and second guessing.

We have lost perspective when it comes to understanding animals. Day by day, we are driving them into extinction and out of our lives by a warped and profoundly unknowing sense of what animals are like and what their true rights are.

In Vermont, on July 6 (3 p.m., Room 2, Rutland, Vt. Criminal Court), an excavator and animal lover and rescuer and a local hero after Hurricane Irene named Craig Mosher will be arraigned on criminal charges of involuntary manslaughter after his bull Big Red escaped and was hit by a car driven by a man who died in the collision.

Mosher faces one to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Even a few years ago, both of these responses would have seemed bizarre, even unthinkable, but in the animal world, the bizarre and unthinkable are becoming commonplace. In this Orwellian mindset, there are no accidents, there is no such thing as real life, every mishap involving every animal must result in blame and prosecution.

There is not a farmer or animal lover in the world whose animal has not escaped at one point or another and for one of a million reasons. Just think of your dogs or the other dogs (or cows) that you know. There are not enough jails to hold us if each escape is now to be considered a crime. The impact on farmers would be devastating, from their inability to rent land to insurance and fence costs. When you go to pick up your dog, put your lawyer’s name in your wallet.

Some prosecutor or clueless mayor somewhere is ready to make a career out of you and your bad luck.

Accidents are an integral part of life, especially with animals, and if there are to be no accidents involving animals, only accusations and blame when our animals get into trouble, then there will soon enough be no animals and no people daring or rich enough to own one.

It is frightening to think of what it would take to create a world with animals where accidents are always preventable and never occur.

Strident animal rights groups and those cowardly mobs online are insuring that fewer and fewer people – dog and cat lovers, horse and pony lovers, zoos and  farmers – will keep animals, permit them to be in plain sight, expose themselves to the growing and insanely hysterical cultural and legal dangers of owning them.

The process of loving and living with an animal is being criminalized, mostly by the ignorant and the angry,  people who seem to know nothing about how animals or what they really need. Expertise and science are ignored or rejected, everyone with a computer becomes a soldier in the new army of second-guessing, righteousness and self-serving superiority.

In a world where people face accidents of all kinds every now, there is now a movement to make it a criminal offense for an animal to have one.

Do not believe for a minute as Craig Mosher fights to stay out of jail that this can only happen to them. If it happens to them, it can happen to you.

Have we really lost the idea that trained professionals, like the zoo keepers in Cincinnati, or the vets who inspected the carriage horses, or the police chief who has known Craig Mosher for years, might have more judgment and expertise than we do, sitting on our widening butts in front of distant commuter screens, spewing outrage and judgement?

How sad.

Are we embracing the disturbing idea that we and our animals can live in a world without risk, where we all barricade ourselves behind concrete and barbed wire fortresses and talk to our lawyers and rage on our Facebook pages and hide from the world so that we never risk a secret informer or an overreaching prosecutor?

The history of people and animals is full of adventure and risk and surprise, it is an almost sacred and often private contract. Humans and animals have been living and working together for all of human history, this ancient bond is in danger of being disrupted by lawyers and politicians and people who claim to be for the rights of animals but are not.

The people clamoring the mother of the Cincinnati boy to go to jail are no friends of animals, or of the human animal bond. That requires thoughtfulness and perspective, love and understanding. There is none of that in the raging rants online.

In New York City animals rights groups are spending millions of dollars to pull happy and healthy horses out of the city so they can be sent to slaughterhouses or exiled to rescue farms.

In Santa Monica, Calif, a much respected and loved operator of pony rides was driven from her long-held and popular place int the Farmer’s Market because a local politician and animal rights activist decided – in the face of two different and thorough police investigations – that it is torture and abuse for ponies to give rides to children.

This activist also poured through the pony ride operator’s Facebook page – and accused her of being an alcoholic gun-toting racist. The accusations were false and outrageous.

Instead of sticking up for Tawni Angel, who took excellent care of her ponies and was much-loved for her rides, the City Council panicked and ran. “The time for pony rides has passed,” said one City Council member sadly Really? I wonder where it was that animal lovers got to vote on that, or whether we will ever have a say in it.

In Glenville, N.Y., a young farmer named Joshua Rockwood was arrested and nearly lost his farm when it was raided by the police, who charged him with animal cruelty  because his water tanks had frozen in -27 degree temperatures.

A farmer in Oregon was raided by the police because a secret informer in the animal rights movement – one of many – saw a horse lying down in a pasture and called the authorities, convinced the horse was being starved or abused. The farmer spent thousands of dollars and much lost labor getting his horses back, even though he was not convicted of any kind of wrongdoing.

The list of victims – animals and human – of the new idea of rights for animals – is growing longer all of the time. But the response to the Cincinnati tragedy is perhaps the most shocking, even at a time when outrageous ignorance and loss of perspective about animals is becoming routine.

How did this happen? A number of reasons. One is that lawsuits and an avalanche of animal rights sponsored bills and laws have made the ownership of animals increasingly fraught, potentially expensive, even dangerous. Everywhere, people are having to fight to keep animals and to adopt them, even to buy them. Everywhere, notions of abuse and humane treatment are changing so rapidly and in such an arbitrary way that owning an animal is becoming a very difficult and risky thing.

That is horrific news to the endangered animals in our world, fighting for survival.

Elephants that have entertained human beings for thousands of years, are now seen only as victims of human cruelty and greed, they are being driven out of their work in circuses and  with people and into extinction or oblivion. No one seems to know or care that there is no place for them to go when they are finally driven from the circuses. Or acknowledge that entertaining and uplifting human beings is a sacred tradition in many parts of the world, and a major opportunity for animals to stay among us.

For centuries, the experience of living with and working with animals was commonplace, a part of life in our world. As we have become increasingly disconnected from nature and the real lives of animals, animal lovers and farmers a wall of ignorance and hysteria has risen up. It is a jaw-dropping idea to me to read that countless number of people – they call themselves animal lovers but are essentially lovers of self and rage – believe the zoo keepers ought to have risk a horrible death for a 3-year-old boy rather than take the decisive and and utterly defensible steps to take his life.

No animal lover I know believes that an animal’s life is worth more than the life of a small child.

Or that the child’s mother ought to be charged with criminal offenses (like Craig Mosher, the bull owner) because of an accident that no one foresaw and no one could have prevented other than by stanying home, locking the doors and hiding in the basement all day). Or deciding that rescuing a bull in need of a home was worth the risk.

It was a profound tragedy for animals and for people when the animal rights movement, a liberation movement of the 1970’s, decided that animals ought to be given the same rights of people and to be seen as equal to humans in every way. I suppose if  you believe this than Harambe ought to have been saved and the zoo keepers ought to have stood by and watched while a three-year-old was (possibly) mauled to death while his mother watched.

At the core of this is ignorance as well as arrogance. Many of the enraged posters on Facebook yesterday, our newest digital mob, do not seem to know that tranquilizer darts take a long time – 3 to 10 minutes in most cases – to take effect and if Harambe got angry or upset, the boy was unlikely to have survived the time it would take for the agitated gorilla to have felt the effects of the tranquilizer.

The people screaming for human blood on Facebook do not know a thing about gorillas.

The animal rights people in New York City do not seem to know that the horses in the carriage stables are the luckiest horses on the earth, among the best cared for, healthiest and longest-living. They don’t know that working horses love and need to work with people. So do ponies, some elephants,  and many kinds of dogs.

The police who raided Joshua Rockwood’s farm did not know that water tanks freeze in bitter weather,  that is not animal cruelty, that is life. They could have arrested half the farmers in the Northeast.

The prosecutor in Rutland, Vt., did not understand that accidents are a commonplace, expected and inevitable part of living with livestock. A thousand things can happen to fences, and no farmer can monitor them every minute of every day. No farmer with animals has escaped this experience, including me and everyone I know.

The people who make decisions about animals in our world need to know something about them, that is the least they are owed, one of their most basic rights.

Animals are a metaphor for our culture, a window of our society and its values.

At a time when half of the animal species in the world have vanished, according to the World Wildlife Fund, our lawyers, politicians and animal rights activists are moving steadily towards a world where it is unwise or impossible to live with animals. Remember, if it is a criminal offense, for the owner of an animal to have the escape and end up harming someone, it is a criminal offense if your dog or cat runs into the road.

I plan to do everything I can to bring a different kind of mob to the Rutland Court next week. Ordinary people, civil people, respectful people. The world of the real animal lover – the people who know people and animals best – are awakening. They are no seeking to disrupt proceedings or call people ugly names. They want to keep animals in our world by preserving the very idea of the accident, long a staple of the human experience, and of the human animal bond.

Most of us are talking and thinking about our democracy these days, and uncharacteristically, so am I.

I was a political writer for some years, and have not generally missed it.

I’m not interested in arguing about politics – you have a lot of places to go for that – but in understanding politics this year, something in which we all have a stake. I hope I can be helpful to you, but I am eager to be helpful to me, politics have become more important to me, more relevant.

In my search for understanding,  I’ve decided to pair up with the iconoclastic critic, political analyst and writer H.L.Mencken. I am sorry he is not alive to see this political year, it is, in many ways, the culmination of so many of his ideas, dreams and observations. And his nightmares.

I’ll share the journey.

Mencken was harsh sometimes, but also prescient,  brilliant and piercing. He was merciless in his skewing of feckless citizens and politicians, he had little faith in either.

I am quite in awe, re-reading his famous “Notes On Democracy,” of how little things have changed in American politics, or put more gently, how much they are the same.  Historians tell us that nothing is really new. Reading Mencken, you see that they are correct, for all of the hype and hysteria of the pundit class. The commentators telling us what to think don’t see to care much for history, every utterance is a revelation, never before spoken or thought.

Political journalism has become punditry, not reporting. The reason we are all so stunned by what is happening, is that commentators talk mostly to one another, not the people. Nobody ever broke a big story sitting at an anchor desk in Washington or New York. And there are hardly any reporters anywhere any longer who go out and talk to ordinary people. It’s no longer in the budget.

That’s why we didn’t begin to grasp or foresee the rage building among white working class people in America, their lives trampled, discarded and abandoned by the political parties supposed to be representing them. Someone is finally speaking to them.

Everything that happens seems to stun the people responsible for telling us about it. If you read Mencken, nothing that is happening is even surprising.

Mencken is going to help me get through this election year. You are welcome to come along. Mencken did not write about democracy so much as he wrote about The Democratic Man. He defined our society as a never-ending conflict between the superior – or civilized – man and the mob.

The  Political Mob Man was a monster, governed only by emotion and ambition:

“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not., he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history, he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race..In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true…”

This inferior political man absorbs delusions, Mencken argued.

His mind is stocked mostly with fear and rage, which he ruthlessly exploits.  “The demagogues, ie., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the cornerstone of their exact and pussiant science.” Politics in a democracy, he wrote, consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of hysterias and bugaboos, most false or exaggerated.

Many of the sound elements that exist in a stable democracy – equal rights under the law, free speech limitations of government – are abandoned in times of war and fear and danger, real or perceived. Mencken saw this first hand in 1917 when anti-German hysteria peaked in American on such an epic scale that pacifists were silenced and jailed, sometimes killed; newspapers were censored and shut down, citizens joined private militias to spy on their friends and neighbors.

These terrors are episodic, they date back to the Salem Witch Trials, they move forward with history –  African-Americans, Native-Americans, Bolsheviks,Communists, Japanese-Americans, Terrorists, Muslims, Mexicans, sometimes the Irish, on a smaller social scales, gays and transgender people.  There is nothing new about them.

It is not a new story. It is not even a different story. In Mencken’s view the wise and noble democratic citizen is a myth, some Americans have always been ready to join mobs eager to trample the underpinnings of democracy. when they are frightened. And there are also always political leaders eager to grab a torch and lead the way.

Mencken sometimes seems bitter in his writing. Instead of a  democracy as laid out by the Founding Fathers, he saw a country  bent on blindly following leaders eager to hound their critics and enemies. They waste public money, persecute opponents and critics of war, openly bribe labor leaders, (and now, corporate leaders) spread hysteria and false information and often abandoned decency, decorum and  self-respect. And Mencken did not even live to see the Corporate Nation, hard at work buying the political process with billions of dollars.

What saves democracy?

Mencken believed in the Civilized Man, the Superior Man. This was a man (or woman in our time) of honor, regardless of race or social background. The savior of democracy is an independent, enlightened citizen, disposed towards liberty and the protection of people’s rights, on guard to keep freedom from being eroded by self-styled patriots or ambitious politicians who play upon the fears of people.

The Superior Citizen is beset on all sides, their troubles grow and grow.

Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner also had a concept of this noble creature, he called it “The Forgotten Man,” the man who fought to keep the mob in check, “the normal,  educated, well-disposed, unfrenzied, enlightened citizen of the of the middle minority, whose virtues include initiative, enterprise, self-reliance, courage and hard work. And honor, a commitment to doing the right thing for the greater good.”

These are the people who stand up to the mob, keep it at bay. I don’t see any of them on the news.

I am touched by Mencken’s writing, however cynical it sometimes is. But I want to be that kind of citizen, with those kinds of values. It is exciting for someone who doesn’t care to be in the left or right to see another path that is comfortable and inspiring.

At heart, Mencken loved the ideals of the democratic system, a nation of equal justice under the law.In his own way, he was fighting for them.

He was not always optimistic about the future of democracy, much as he loved it. He thought the only way it could ultimately survive was by developing and cherishing a class of men and women honest and independent enough to challenge the political class. Mostly, he thought, this responsibility lay with the press, their clearest mission was “to keep a wary eye on the gentlemen who operate the nation, “and only too often slip into the assumption that they own it.”

When the press fails to do its duty, the quack would rise up and take control, he predicted.

In our time, no such class has emerged in any great numbers, and the press is a shambles.

No one is keeping a wary eye on those gentlemen.

Mencken warned that leaders keep the mob at bay, real trouble comes when the mob becomes the leaders. Instead of uplifting the people or steering the passions in a positive direction – think Churchill or Gandhi – Mob Men in politics fuel the fears and exploit them to gain power.

But I know what I want to do. I am looking to find that Civilized Man or Woman, the Superior Citizen, the person, he or she, of honor and courage,  I want to follow him or her and support him or her. I’d like to be him in my life as a citizen.  I can be normal, educated, unfrenzied, an enlightened citizen of the middle way.

I am grateful to Mencken for guiding me, I am more hopeful than he was.

Some months ago, I wrote an article here called Rethinking The Ethics Of Animal Rescue. The piece was widely shared, and much discussed and debated. This morning, I got a long message from a woman named Susan Griffits, she lives in Austria, and she wrote that she found my piece “long and dangerous.”

She wrote that it advocated the continued enslavement of animals by human beings, and was simply an argument for the “status quo of the animal holocaust” to continue. It will not happen, she wrote, that all animals will be released from slavery at the time time, rather those who are rescued from the cruel exploitation of people can, with humane and good management, be housed in sanctuaries until their natural death.

I have to say I was a bit surprised to find my work being discussed in Austria, but more importantly, it got me thinking  more about what animal ethics really mean now, and how disconnected the underlying theory of much of the animal rights movement is from reality.

Susan’s piece captured the ideological roots of the modern animal rights movement, and the reason it has become so alienated from so many animal lovers all over the country and so disconnected from the real lives of animals. It attributes the “holocaust” affecting animals on the earth to enslavement by people rather the reality known and studied by biologists and naturalists all over the world: climate change, over-development, and the elimination of so much of the work that animals and people have done together for thousands of years.

The animal rights movement does not address these very real dangers to animals. Instead, it lobbies relentlessly to remove animals from the care and companionship of people. It has caused the deaths of more animals than can possibly be counted.

Quite suddenly, it is abuse for carriage horses to pull carriages, elephants to work in circuses, ponies to give rides to children in farmer’s markets, any kind of animal to be used in any kind of research, any kind of animal to be used to entertain people in any way. (Dogs and casts, whose sole and primary purpose on the earth is to entertain and comfort people, are excluded from this kind of judgment, almost surely for political and fund-raising reasons.)

The animal rights movement, as embodied by Susan, was formed as a liberation movement in the 1970’s. It major premise was that animals need to be freed from the inhumane shackles of people, and returned either to the wild or those sanctuaries we keep hearing about but almost never see. The terminology used to describe the enslavement of animals is eerily and disturbingly familiar to the language used to describe human slaves in America before the Civil War, even down to the idea of sanctuary for the rescued animal slaves.

This speaks well enough to the semantic and ethical dilemmas of a movement that so passionately compares the rights of animals to the rights of people.

There was recently in New York City this now thoroughly debunked argument that the hundreds of New York Carriages would be housed in sylvan settings  – those sanctuaries again – for the rest of their lives once driven from New York, and the equally naive belief that all of the Asian elephants driven from the circuses by people who believe they are supporting animal rights will make their way to spacious and wealthy elephant preserves when they find themselves unemployed.

For years, we have been told there are sanctuaries waiting for every displaced carriage horses, but in all of that time, not one has been identified.

No one has bothered to check on the fate of the hundreds of ponies driven away from their work by animal rights protesters, or the many animals who once worked in Hollywood making movies. By all accounts, they are all mostly dead. There is no work for them to do, no way to house and feed them. Our love of animals doesn’t seem to go farther than taking away their work and assuming that someone, somewhere, will take them in.

It seems there are very few preserves anywhere in the world rich and big enough to take in healthy and active and hungry animals for the rest of their lives when so many starving and truly abused animals are in such need.

This idea – let’s kill and endanger the animals in order to save them from the deprivations of humans – is a staple of the modern day animal rights movement. It doesn’t work in 2016, if it ever did. There is no longer any wild for animals to return to, there are very few functioning large animal preserves or horse farms to handle carriage horses. Global warming is destroying habitats all over the world, along with greed and human development.

Susan is trapped in an ideological time warp that has caught the animal rights movement with it’s empty vision exposed. The carriage horse controversy in New York revealed to the world that we don’t have a sense of rational animal ethics for modern times. No one in New York City ended up buying the argument that it is dangerous for the horses to be in New York, or that they are abused or mistreated or overworked.

But nobody has committed to keeping them safe and sheltered for all time either, especially the face of runaway real estate development and the glut of motorized vehicles.

The ethical underpinnings of the animal rights movement are old and increasingly useless for our times. The animal rights movement has failed to target climate change or development as the greatest threats to animals, nor have they succeeded in drawing public attention to the most serious abuse of animals, that which is occurring to the nine billion animals trapped in horrific conditions in industrial factory farms to feed to gargantuan fast food industry.

Susan’s message underscored this irrevalance, I felt as if I were reading a college rant from the 1970’s. Animals and people have worked together for thousands of years. When there was no work for the vast herds of horses on the American range, the horses vanished, just as the elephants will soon, and as the ponies have, and as the carriage horses would have if the mayor of New York City had prevailed.

The idea of animal returning to the wild is a  fantasy now. So is the idea of a vast network of sanctuaries existing all over the for animals freed from the enslavement of people. Animal rights cannot exist  only as a selfish idea that serves the emotional needs of human beings to feel good about themselves while killing animals and removing them from the world. The carriage horse controversy signaled a cosmic awakening in the realm of animal ethics, people are seeing we need a much better understanding of animal rights than this.

The failure of the animal rights movement to adapt to modern challenges and modern times suggests urgently needed new ideas for animals and their well-being. We need to keep animals among us. We need to treat them well and humanely. We need to do the work necessary to make them safe in our towns and cities. We need to recognize that once separated from human beings and their long partnership and work, domesticated animals are in great peril and face oblivion and extinction.

Susan can dream all she wants about the slavery and sanctuary, but to me, this is the core of the new animal ethics.

There is a deepening sense in and around Glenville, N.Y. that Joshua Rockwood’s arrest last February by local police on 12 counts  of animal cruelty was a mistake, a miscarriage of justice.

When farmers and animal lovers like Joshua Rockwood get caught in the increasingly irrational and hysterical net of the movement that claims it supports the rights of animals, but does not, there is very rarely a feeling of fairness or thoughtfulness in  media coverage.

Joshua can testify to the horrific experience of having a mug shot broadcast all over TV and the Internet while people who knew nothing about him or animals were quoted day after day calling him an abusive monster and torturer in front of his friends, family, and community. When he was essentially cleared of all of the changes, there was only one reporter in the courtroom.

Reputation and peace of mind are easily taken away, but not easily returned.

As a former journalist and one who loves the practice of journalism, I was pleased to have been sent the writing of columnist Chris Churchill of the Albany Times-Union this morning, it wasn’t just that he saw through the quite obvious injustice of the charges. He was direct,  balanced and thoughtful about the story in the way journalists are supposed to be, and increasingly, are not.

Animal rights issues are not subjects reporters have learned to be nuanced or thoughtful about, it’s just too easy to put up grainy photos of animals who don’t look good, people soak it up, politicians bask in the glow of loving animals. I confess to feeling quite lonely when I started writing about Joshua Rockwood’s case, I did not see my conclusions and beliefs showing up much of anywhere else.

Many very angry people pointed that out to me every day.

When I became a reporter, my editor told me my job was to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted. I don’t see that idea reflected very often in the cultural diaspora we call the media and very rarely in coverage of issues relating to animals. As it turns out, blogs are gaining in influence. They matter now.

Churchill was one of the very few mainstream local journalists to question the arrest when it happened, or even think much about it.

“I’ll make my opinion clear right at the start of this one,” Churchill wrote in the Times-Union this morning. “Joshua Rockwood should never have been charged or arrested. What happened to him was a clear case of government outreach – however well-intentioned. And although all of the charges have been largely dismissed, the stench of this case will linger.”

Good reporters are like that, they have sensitive noses for things that don’t smell right.

I can’t speak to the intentions of the police or prosecutor. Mostly, both just seemed to be pandering to the mob,  ignorant about the real lives of farmers or animals.

But I do imagine the case is significant, and will shape the way we think about what the abuse of animals really means and the need for prosecutors and police officials to not simply parrot and reflect extreme notions of the animal rights movement and seek a healthier balance when they make their decisions. This is a very real conflict, this struggle between people who have pets and people who live with animals, and government ought to understand both sides.

The Times-Union is the biggest newspaper in the region and in the state capital, so Churchill’s column matters. Since the trial, the district attorney’s office has defended its prosecution of the case in a muddled and half-hearted way. They don’t seem either chastened or shaken by the drubbing they took, but insisted they were acting in good faith.

The assistant prosecutor who was at the court hearing told one reporter the case was “just.” People with animals are responsible for taking care of them, he said, and Joshua didn’t make sure his water tanks didn’t freeze in – 27 temperatures. The reporter, quite typically, did not ask him why the charges were dismissed if they were just, or why Rockwood’s many cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens are still living with him on the farm and have never required treatment of any kind or been removed.

I wanted to ask him why the police didn’t ask Joshua if he needed help, rather than hauling him off to jail to be booked and post bail.

The young, red-faced prosecutor may have been delighted to get away from his stinkpot of a case – the police just do not look good here – but he did raise the right issue: what is “just” in a case like this? To be just means to act in a way that is morally right and fair.

There is no simple consensus about justice when it comes to the world of animals and their rights. The animal world is in the midst of a fierce and deepening conflict between the animal rights movement and people and farmers like Rockwood or the New York Carriage Drivers or so many others who live and work with animals.

The animal rights movement was founded on the idea that animals and people are equal and need to be treated in precisely the same way. If you had running water last winter and your horse or dog or cow doesn’t, even for a few hours, then you are a criminal. If your bedroom is heated, and your sheep sleeps in a cold barn, you are torturer and abuser.  People with pets generally have never seen a horse or elephant or carriage horse, they support the idea of animal rights but have  no idea what the real lives of animals are like.

A horse on almost any farm is safer and healthier than almost any horse in the wild, subject to predators, savage internal rites of survival,  disease, starvation and intense elements. Any one of the nine billion animals trapped in the mostly horrid industrial animal farms in America would be happy to live on Joshua’s farm, to range freely and eat grass and high quality grain.

We have lost perspective when the town of Glenville sends a police squad out to Joshua’s farm and commits to spending many thousands of dollars in a false and hopeless cause. There is nothing just in that. “It’s not like we want to do that,” one Glenville police sergeant told me last year, “we all have better things to do.”

In our time, animal politics and media coverage of animal-related issues are largely shaped by urban and suburban people who are political about animals but seem to know little or nothing about them. In the 1940’s, 90 per cent of Americans lived on farms or in rural areas and understood that cows and horses can do some time without water and usually do in their natural environments. Today, 90 per cent of Americans live in congested areas along both coasts. It seems the farther they get from the real lives of real animals, the more certain they become about how they should live.

No animal in the wild has heated water available to them 24 hours a day.

The Glenville police and the politicized small animal vet who accompanied them did not seem to know this, nor did they know that almost no farm has a heated barn for animals like cows or sheep or pigs. Any large animal vet will tell you (or would have told them) that pigs and sheep and work horses don’t like to be confined and heated confinement in closed spaces, they can be dangerous to their respiratory systems.

No farmer can guarantee their animals the perfect, life-protected environment that the animal rights theologians believe should be guaranteed by law to every animal who lives with people. Nature and the weather and animal biology intervenes – as it did to Joshua Rockwood, an unusually conscientious and ethical farmer. There is no outdoor heating system for water that cannot freeze in sub-zero temperatures.

The job of the farmer or animal lover isn’t to guarantee a perfect, accident free life, but to pay attention and respond when trouble occurs. Joshua made certain his animals had fresh and potable water, that’s why two vets certified that they were healthy and hydrated days before their arrest. The police didn’t care. That isn’t a question of justice but competence and laziness.

As a former police reporter, I have the greatest respect for the police and the difficult work they do. But the bloated-coffers of the increasingly extremist animal rights movement have led to the passage of countless laws designed to redefine what it means to be cruel to an animal or to neglect them. The police have once again been drawn into a conflict they are not prepared to cope with, and shouldn’t be asked to. There is real crime in Schenectady County, lots of unsolved murders and robberies.

In most states, the standard for abuse is, or was, simple: willful and sustained neglect to the point of grievous injury or death to an animal. Joshua Rockwood’s arrest meet neither of these criterion. His animals were fine, none died during that awful winter and none were injured. Nothing else is really the business of the police or the secret informers of the animal rights movement, now a plague on our very ideas of fairness and  civil liberties.

Joshua Rockwood should get a medal from the Chamber of Commerce for raising healthy food so carefully and in such environmentally sensitive ways. He is the future, not a criminal.

For centuries, there has been a sanctity about or relationship with our animals, some of us do better than others, but if we do not hurt them – grievously and seriously – then it is no one’s business how we live them and what decisions we make about them. That long-standing ethic kept the police and government out of this kind of trouble, and would be a good model for them to return to.

Joshua not only had to endure the nightmare of arrest and prosecution and near financial ruin, he was compelled to give thousands of dollars to the horse rescue farm that helped impound his horses for no reason anyone can yet explain. That does not seem just to me, either. Justice will be served when the police and the district attorney apologize to Rockwood and explain what steps they are taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Do not hold your breath.

This is  now an intense, sometimes bitter political issue. When the police raided Joshua’s farm on the basis of untrained and unqualified secret informers, they are taking sides in a volatile disagreement. At stake is whether or not working animals can remain in our everyday lives, and whether any sane and honest person dares to live with them.

The animal rights movement is a liberation movement, not a rescue or welfare movement for animals. In every single case they are a part of  – the raid on Joshua’s farm, the move to ban the carriage horses, the seizures of pets like dogs and cats, their long and often dishonest campaign against the circus elephants, their campaign to bar ponies from being ridden by children, their opposition to any kind of work or entertainment animals might do for people – their goal is exactly the same: remove and liberate animals from people, who they do not like or trust, and send them to rescue farms and preserves or put them down.

In almost every case, these animals will never be seen again by most human beings, or go to extinction and slaughter, the more likely outcome.

This is the movement that the police in Glenville, N.Y. and the Schenectady County District Attorney have entwined themselves with  and embraced. They have not explained why.

Chris Churchill was honest and correct in his column about the Rockwood case, but I would add one thing to it: the stench of this case will not go away until there is an open and honest discussion about disturbing and irrational notions of abuse,  and about the future of animals in our world.

Joshua Rockwood’s sweeping victory gives reason to hope.

 

 

 

One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to help people in ways we often can’t do as individuals. When a community fails in it’s moral responsibility to help one another, then society is broken, our ties to one another cut. From the first Joshua Rockwood’s story is one of community.

More than 30 piglets were born in the past week or so at Joshua Rockwood’s West Wind Acres Farm in Glenville, N.Y. That is happy news.

Life on the farm goes on, despite the persecution of the good man and  honest farmer who runs it.  Joshua Rockwood is straining to deal with legal bills, the distraction of waiting to see if he goes to jail, an agonizingly complex and expensive legal system, and is fighting every one of the 13 counts of animal cruelty charges lodged against him.

Joshua Rockwood is a person of principle, he will not admit to any wrongdoing that he has not committed. Hundreds, if not thousands, of farmers, animal lovers, friends and customers have rushed to his aid. Almost to a one, they say the same thing: it could have been us.

Joshua’s life is very much on hold:  three horses remain on the rescue farm that impounded them along with the police last March. Joshua is uncertain how or when or if ever he will be able to get them back or afford the mounting boarding and veterinary fees he would have to pay for their return, no matter if he is guilty or innocent. It seems that animal rights justice is different from people justice. Unlike accused murderers, Joshua has no right to confront the informers who upended his life, he must pay to get his animals back, even if it is found they were never treated cruelly or neglected.

It is a terrifying thing to be the target of a vast legal and police apparatus, it is a nightmare if you are innocent. Once Joshua’s face appeared on television, online and in all of the local newspapers, he lost some of his customers, and of course, has had to put on hold many of his ideas for improving the farm and it’s infrastructure, for distributing his meat, or selling more CDA shares in his farm. West Wind Acres was created to produce healthy meat from free-range and pasture fed animals that is sold to local people.

Joshua is part of a movement that helps people  trust the food they eat and know where it comes from. We hear more and more about the dangers of processed foods,  the waste and inhumanity of the grocery chain food system. Joshua doesn’t sell processed foods shipped thousands of miles.  In a rational time, he might get an award for helping save the earth and promote good health for people and animals.

The political and institutional community surrounding Joshua Rockwood has failed him terribly, but a new kind of community, joined by common experience and connected with new technologies has risen to help him. The need for community, it seems, is more powerful than the need to hate and persecute.

Joshua Rockwood is an open man, a transparent farmer. He tells no lies, keeps no secrets. Check it out for yourself.

It seems we are not living in a rational world, certainly not when it comes to the lives of farmers or the welfare of animals.

Unlike the nine billion animals in industrial factory farms living in sometimes horrific conditions, Joshua’s animals live on a 90 acre farm. They all range freely on pastures and hillside grass, they live in shelter, they receive  regular medical attention, they drink out of fresh streams, they are not fed chemicals or artificial foods. They are slaughtered in the most humane possible way.

And they live on a farm where the farmer cares for them, knows each one of them. Like the New York Carriage Horses, these are the lucky animals of the world.

Sometimes I imagine what might have happened to Joshua last winter (it was one of the world cold waves in the history of the Northeast)  if there was a truly humane animal rights movement and a rational understanding of farms and animals. The persecution of Joshua Rockwood is a study in the growing arrogance and cruelty of the people who claim to speak for the rights of animals,  and of government overreach. In the American experiment, government was meant to protect freedom and property. In the nightmare that has engulfed Joshua Rockwood and has farm,  government seeks to take both from him, on the flimsiest imaginable grounds.

Joshua has been accused of having frozen water tanks unheated barns and shelters, even though no animal died last winter or was found to be starving, de-hydrated or injured. His horses were taken from him because their hooves were overgrown. He was given no warning, had no chance to explain or defend himself, was given no time to correct any of the allegedly inadequate conditions on his farm. The farmers are right. It could have been you. It could have been me.

I doubt there is a horse or animal lover of any experience who would argue that the horses are better off now, languishing on their rescue farm, than they were in their own safe and  healthy environment. Like dogs, horses attach powerfully to the people they live with. It is traumatic for them to be separated so abruptly, it is a kind of abuse of it’s own.

But does it have to be this way? Are we not a people of communities, responsible for one another, connected to each other? All kinds of people who have rushed to help Joshua it it was known he needed help – farmers, animal lovers, farm organizations.

Imagine if the secret informer who called the police and nearly ruined Joshua Rockwood’s life had knocked on the door instead and asked him if he needed any help.

Imagine if there was an animal rights organization that might have helped him  rather than accuse him and take his animals away during that awful bitter winter that saw the temperatures plunged to nearly -30 degrees day after day. Joshua was not an impoverished owner who couldn’t afford to care for his horses, they were loved, healthy and very well cared for.

Imagine if a horse rescue group offered to help him care for his horses instead of seize them, offered to find a farrier who would come in such weather and help trim the hooves (the did not  pose any kind of health risk or danger to the horses, according to several farriers who saw the photographs of them posted online).

Imagine if the police chose to ask Joshua if he needed help in that awful cold and offered or arranged assistance rather than raid his farm, threaten him with jail, push  him towards financial ruin and endanger the lives of all of the animals on his farm. Imagine if the town government actually had a program to support farmers rather than simply prosecute them on the say-so of extremist ideologues  and the growing number of secret informers spying on private citizens. These informers are not held accountable in any way for the charges they make and the great trouble they can cause.

Imagine if the rights and welfare of farmers and other human beings were held to be as precious as the rights and welfare of animals. Imagine if the media and the animal rights organizations talked to farmers and sought to understand their lives and went to help some of those nine billion animals in industrial factory farms.  Criminals make us think about evil, says the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, but hypocrites are the lowest form of life.

Two different veterinarians came to West Wind Acres in the days before Joshua was arrested and said his animals were all healthy and hydrated and well cared for.

Imagine if we lived in a rational world where that would have been enough, and the police could have driven away and tended to preventing and prosecuting actual crimes.

In a rational and humane society, this story would never have happened.

Joshua’s farm would not be struggling today, an honest and idealistic young man would not have to fight to deep his very good reputation from being destroyed, his face offered as a mug shot on every TV station and newspaper for miles around. He would not have had to spend tends of thousands of dollars in legal fees. His wife would not have to forbid her children from playing outside for fear some informer would call the police and claim they were being neglected. Imagine if Joshua were free to work his farm and raise his family and pursue his life, rather than have to fight for its survival.

There is no point, truly, in raging against reality and bitterly decrying fate. Joshua is fighting back in a civil and principled way. Many people are supporting him. They understand that the charges against him are unjust, that it could have been them, that this a perversion of the very idea of animal rights, not an affirmation.

For me, this is no longer an argument, it is a new kind of movement. Animals and the people who own them and live and work with them deserve better, if animals are to remain in our everyday lives at all. We need to get on with the work of restoring sanity and compassion to the animal world, we need a better and wiser understanding of animals than this.

I believe if we imagine the way it might be and should be, that it will one day come to pass. Animal lovers are awakening, they will fight long and hard to keep animals in our world.  In the meantime, it is happy news to see the new piglets on Joshua’s farm. He has more than 30, all but one survived and is healthy. However long they are to live in this world, they are the fortunate pigs.