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Are human beings broken away from nature and animals?

In 1972, a psychologist named Dr. Boris Levinson, a social scientist teaching a Yeshiva University in New York City, wrote a book called “Pets And Human Development,” which almost shockingly foresaw the dehumanizing and polarizing forces taking shape in America.

He also chronicled in much detail the growing evidence that dogs and other pets would increasingly be used to re-humanize society. His book was an inspiration for one of my books, “The New Work Of Dogs,” which argued that the new work of pets was supporting the emotional lives of increasingly disconnected and alienated Americans.

Levinson’s book, which drew little media attention, was nonetheless influential. It  helped to give rise to the Dog Therapy movement in America, and the animal rescue movement, and it highlighted the new work of dogs – providing emotional support to fragmented and anxious and dissatisfied people.

Unlike the animal rights movement, which has over the years argued more and more intensely for the removal of animals from human life, Levinson said animals like dogs (and other pets) were essential if people were to live in harmony with themselves and with nature.

A connection to the natural world, he argued, was essential to human survival.

Unfortunately, it was the animal rights view that gained traction. Animals, said the movement, much be liberated from the cruelty and unworthiness of people. Animals are not our partners, but our wards.

Since the 1970’s,  animals other than dogs and cats have been vanishing from our world – ponies, carriage horses, domesticated elephants, and politicians and even animal lovers cheer this tragic evolution as humane.  The elephants are gone from the big circuses now. Where are the supporters of their rights as these elephants are being put to death all over North America because there is nowhere left on the earth for them to go?

Pets were not, Levinson warned, a panacea for the ills of society, for the pain of growing up or growing old.  Alienation and isolation, he warned,  were increasingly created by a technologically driven society whose values and institutions were – are – dehumanizing.

“One of the chief reasons for man’s present difficulties,” wrote Levinson, “is his inability to come to terms with his inner self and to harmonize his culture with his membership in the world of nature.” That statement is so much truer today than it even was when he wrote it nearly a half century ago.

Pets can aid people in the future, he wrote, in that they help to fill needs which are not being met any longer in other, perhaps better and historically important ways. Every day, animals of all kinds are being drafted into emotional support work, as the society at large refuses to consider the root causes of human suffering.

It would be better, Levinson wrote, if we were not so mechanized, routinized, and “cut off from the vital rhythms of the natural world.” Increasingly, he predicted, unhappy people whose lives were often bereft of spirituality or real meaning would turn to animals, who would provide some  relief, give much pleasure, and remind us of our origins.

In a sense, I think, animals are now being asked to do the work of priests, rabbis, political leaders and the makers of technology. These were the people we once counted on to guide and sooth and lead us. We seem on our own today.

Levinson foresaw the new work of dogs and other animals as well as the rise of the animal rescue movement. He predicted as well as the increasing use of dogs in medical and emotional therapy work.

In a larger sense, he foresaw the emotionalization of animals by people who were no longer being sustained by politics, technology, or religion,  institutions that were no longer lifting people up and grounding them. We don’t look to political leaders or priests for inspiration, they have disappointed and discouraged us. That leaves us frightened and in conflict with one another, our shared values are vanishing.

This view – Levinson’s view –  became a central theme of my writing, both in books and on the blogs. Yet I’ve always had the feeling people who turn to animals for emotional support do not really want to think too deeply about what it means for them and their lives. I’ve always felt I was, like Levinson, exploring important themes many people were not really ready to consider.

People would much prefer reading about cute dogs and animals who rescue people. And I certainly contribute to that.

Our lives, he wrote in his book, were becoming highly planned and structured and complicated, they were bereft of the “heirlooms of former generations which gave us a sense of continuity with the past and hope for the future. City dwellers lived – often alone – in  megastructures far removed from nature, their lives marked by little emotional closeness or knowledge of their neighbors.

Because we no longer preserve neighborhoods, there is now a great hiatus between generations, he wrote; our rootless civilization is encouraging alienation and is leading towards chaos.

I can only guess at what Levinson might have made of the Internet, which claims to connect people, but which pushes people into like-minded bubbles and creates the illusion that electronic e-mails and messaging is the same thing as  real friendship.

His book was written long before social media and the rise of a “left and a right,” new political and social structures dooming us to governmental dysfunction and widening divisions. Man is also, he wrote, entering a period of great detachment, even estrangement from nature now that man had conquered, even devastated the natural forces that created the world.

Re-reading his book this week, I am struck once more by Dr. Levinson’s foresight, and also his balance. This essentially,  is why I moved to the country, to re-connect with the natural world and its rhythms, I could sense the healing power of a farm.

“Rational man has become alienated from himself by refusing to face his irrational self, his own past as personified by animals. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the two agencies which have held out hope for man’s liberating himself – science and religion – have largely failed him.” And this, before social media, bitter-divided political systems, and the rise of the Internet, which tore people apart from one another and imprisoned many in their homes.

Technology, the handmaiden of science, has created an almost impregnable barrier between between man and the rest of nature, including the members of the animal kingdom.

I know of no better metaphor for this than the New York Carriage Horses. People who call themselves animal lovers are determined to drive them out of New York forever in the name of preserving their rights and our safety. What greater disconnection from the animal kingdom could there be than a movement spending millions of dollars over many years to remove animals from our lives and from our world in the name of loving them?

Can dogs and other pets fill this void?  As Red and I approach our therapy work together, I see every day the power of animals to heal and uplift dispirited and alienated people. It isn’t that the dogs perform magic, they are not miracle workers. Rather, they are a bridge to our inner selves, our pasts and natural identity. They help to re-humanize us in a de-humanized world.

Technology and corporate and political greed – just look at the news – have caused us to see nature as an inexhaustible source of wealth for the wealthy, an endless mine of riches for the few, as a kind of global whore to be exploited at leisure and then abandoned to its fate. We are no longer even pretending to protect Mother Earth, only looking for new and easier ways to rape her.

We deny the sickness of our beloved home, the earth, only to keep rich people rich and richer. Mankind got this far, history, suggests, because people live and worked with animals and cooperated not only with people but with animals, who helped to build our world, and are now being abandoned.

Levinson argued at the end of his book that we need a new understanding of animals, we need to see them as acceptable and even desirable participants in our social order, not as dangers or nuisances or piteous beings to be removed and hidden away in preserves. He saw that we need animals not only in the country but especially in crowded urban areas, where most people are. We need to grasp the pleasures and benefits they bring to anxious and disconnected people.

“If those who believe pets are a real need for human beings in this day and age can show the way toward maximizing the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages of keeping pets in the home or in an institution, reluctant and even hostile individuals and groups may be won over,” he wrote.

That is precisely the conflict raging in New York City over carriage horses. Some people insist in the face of overwhelming and contrary evidence that the horses do not belong in New York. Others grasp their historic, cultural and emotional importance to so many people in the city.

People who love animals – people like me and perhaps you – can work to create a favorable climate of opinion among political leaders and the general public so that animals can once again be regarded as a valuable resource rather than a nuisance or danger. The political leaders of New York ought to be fighting to keep the carriage horses there rather than banning them  – they do so much more good every day than the people protesting their existence  – have ever done.

“It is certainly worth the effort to bring about this change in attitude, for while it is quite possible that animals can do without man,” Levinson concluded, “it is much less likely than man can do without animals.”

I believe these attitudes can change, I have seen this. I received hundred of messages in the last few years telling me my own writing on the horses has caused some people to re-think the future of animals, and change their minds about the carriage horses. It can be done.

it is interesting that in Dr. Levinson’s time, many people were still opposed to pet ownership for all kinds of reasons. The need for pets has become a social tsunami, people are taking ducks on airplanes for emotional support for fear of flying. In Dr. Levinson’s time, there were about 18 million owned dogs in America, today there are more than 75 million owned dogs, and even more cats.

Nobody is arguing about pet ownership any more, there are raging conflicts everywhere about the future of animals.

Other animal species have not fared nearly as well as dogs, more than half of the animal species on the earth have vanished in the past 25 years, according to the World Wildlife Federation.

Many people who call themselves lovers of animals would prefer to see elephants slaughtered by poachers and exterminated in their shrinking habitats than entertain and uplift people, as they have been doing for thousands of years. The people worried about their welfare pay no attention to their deaths or extinction.

I understand that the time Dr. Levinson was different from ours. Were he alive today, I imagine he would see the new and awful reality about the animals in our world. it seems that cannot do without man, they are vanishing from the world or being driven out of it at an accelerating and catastrophic rate.

But he was a prophet and a seer. The farther we get from animals and nature, the more troubled, angry and unhappy we seem. Pope Francis has identified this as a profound moral issue for his Church. Levinson saw it would be a problem for all of us, and he was right.

And it  seems more true than ever than we cannot do without them, as what we call the so-called “news” reminds us every day – every hour –  of our lives.

Every dog or cat who makes us laugh or smile is entertaining us. Are you cruel and abusive? Will your animals be next and suffer the fate of the elephants,  torn from their safe and loving homes and sent to mostly mythical preserves or what little is left of nature?

Because if you believe the entertainment and uplifting of people by animals is cruel, and your dogs make you laugh,  then you are most likely a hypocrite, judging others from the soft cocoon of your computers and Facebook pages.  And as the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the criminal confronts us with the perplexity of evil, but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

If they can do it to the elephants and horses and ponies, they can do it to you and your dog or cat or parrot. You might console yourself with the idea that dogs and elephants are different, but in truth, the principle is very much the same. Like dogs, the Asian elephants have been working with people – and entertaining them –  for hundreds, if not thousands,  of years.

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened,” wrote Anatole France.

Gandhi said one can judge the moral character of a nation by the way it treats its animals. How can we awaken our souls and love animals if there are none around us to love and care for?

The true moral issue facing animal lovers is not how to keep animals from uplifting people, but how to make sure they always are here to uplift and entertain people.

That is our real challenge.

It is not to wipe out the work and way of life of animals and of the people who work with them. The moral failing comes when we sent them away without process or real cause to vanish or die and we devastate their people so that we can feel superior to others and good about ourselves.

Dozens of animals, including elephants tigers, camels, horses and llamas and goats will be in need of new homes by the time Ringling Brothers shuts down its circuses in May, reports Time Magazine.  The circus says it is trying to place the animals in zoos and conservation centers.

And who, reading this, can tell me with certainty where a single one will go, or for how long?

The stories of the circus workers and elephant trainers are heartbreaking, the animal rights movement has just wiped out 800 jobs,  destroyed a way of life that will vanish for good in the Corporate Nation. And is gleeful about it, as if it can be a great victory to hurt so many people.

“I wish everyone could see Otto,” wrote one circus worker to me a few months ago. “He sleeps with his elephant sometimes, he has been weeping ever since he knew they would be separated, they have been together for 15 years. The idea that he would abuse her is just a crime in itself. It is unimaginable if you see them together. She loves to nuzzle against him. Will anyone ever tell Otto’s story.”

Probably not. The easier story is the one handed out by PETA.  It’s a juicy narrative. The circus people, like the New York carriage drivers,  are evil abusers and deserve no concern or quarter.

The people celebrating the expulsion of the elephants from their circuses have not helped one elephant, or done one any good.They have done great harm to human beings.

They have disrupted their safe lives and greatly accelerated the almost certain  extinction of these animals from the earth. The circus has not been convicted of animal abuse or neglect. They have won every lawsuit they faced.

There is no place for these elephants to go in nature or the wild, and the one place where they were safe and assured food and medical care and survival has been taken from them.

There is little left of their natural habit, ravaged by development, corruption, poaching and climate change. It is not humane to put a working animal on a preserve where they will atrophy and become disoriented for lack of activity and stimulation. It is traumatic for working animals to be taken away from the people who train and care for them.

Out of sight, they will have no oversight, no protections. We will never know what becomes of them, and soon, we will forget about them, condemning our children to a screen life free from animals or nature.  The people who think circuses are cruel do not  believe in zoos either.

Our descendants will never know what people and animals can do together, or how much they can love one another.

The elephants in the Ringling Brothers Circus were the lucky ones.  A Mexican journalist contacted me recently, she is a former circus worker, she says there were more than 1,300 animals banned from circuses in Mexico  and more than 1,000 of them have already gone to slaughter. That is the likely fate of most of the elephants and other animals in the circuses.

It costs $65,000 a year to feed, bathe and care for an adult  Asian elephant. Much of the money to pay for their care comes from circus tickets, says the circus.

Ringling Brothers says it plans to care for the elephants for the rest of their lives, but cannot say how that care will be funded, and they cannot speak for the scores of other elephants being removed from circuses under pressure from animal rights organizations.

Ringling Brothers already has 26 elephants in their center, 11 of them recent refugees from their own circuses. It cannot take any of the others, believed to number well over a hundred. The company has no legal obligation to care for  elephants at all, even the ones already living in their preserve.

I wonder as well how many good and well-funded homes there are for 18 Asian tigers.

“We are one giant family and a grieving family right now,” said circus worker Christine in a message to me over the weekend. “I think we are starting down a very slippery slope that could force humans to give up owning pets in the not-too-distant future.”

I have not seen a single circus worker or elephant trainer interviewed anywhere, even as animal rights officials line up to gloat about the loss of their jobs and way of life.

It’s too bad, their stories are compelling and powerful.  They remind us that the people in these stories are humans, not just fund-raising tools for animal rights groups.

The trainers are devastated to be separated from their elephants, many of whom were powerfully attached to them. The other circus workers are devastated to lose their very special way of life.  It is especially cruel to remove working animals from  their familiar environments and from the people who care for them. It is hardly a “liberal” or progressive action.

We are well down that slippery slope, Christine, the not too distant future is right at our doorstep. Just ask the pony ride operators, carriage horse drivers, many dog and cat owners and farmers all over the country.  Ask the homeless man whose beloved companion dog was stolen from him and killed that very night by animal rights workers who decided it was not a good home. His pain and sorrow are great.

Or the elderly sisters whose cats were taken from them and face thousands of dollars in fines and the loss of their reason for living. Or the widow who couldn’t adopt a dog because she had a low fence.

Christine understands something that many of the people cheering the end of the circus do not,  that the elephants and other animals working with and for people are in danger now, along with many species of animals who are disappearing from our only world.

When the animal rights movement sought to ban the New York carriage horses, they were asked what would happen to the 200 horses that would lose their homes. Everyone single one, they promised, would go to an animal preserve. It was all taken care of.

They never named a single preserve that would promise to feed a single one of these huge draft horses for the rest of their lives. That is because there were none. The very idea was a lie.

The evocation of these mystical preserves soothe the consciences of people who see themselves as liberators of animals, but anyone who truly loves animals would want to know the who, when and where of it.

And the term “preserves” has no real meaning.

Preserves of all kinds in America are underfunded and many are small and have few resources.

There are long waiting lists for animals, the ones taken are usually old and sick, not young and healthy. Many of the carriage horses would have been slaughtered if the ban had been approved. More than 150,000 horses in America go to slaughter each year, there is simply no place for them to go. Why aren’t they all on these alleged preserves?

Janet, who runs an animal preserve in Pennsylvania, laughed bitterly at the idea that she could take an elephant or a carriage horse. “First off, I don’t take healthy and strong animals, they can go out and work, they are valuable. I take the lost cases, the sick and abused and starving ones, and I don’t have anywhere near the money to feed an elephant or a horse. People hear “preserve,” she said, “and they think of a big plain in Africa or the Disney Animal Kingdom. We wouldn’t fit into one of their hotel lobbies and we beg for hay and feed money every month. Animals that are well cared for don’t need preserves. They are lucky.”

Why would it be easier to find life homes for huge elephants, who cost up to $800 a day just to feed? Or for tigers?

Christine has been arguing with her “liberal” friends for years about the elephants and has persuaded many of them that the elephants at Ringling Brothers are content and well cared for, and are not being abused. She has a harder time, she says, persuading them that animals should never be used as entertainment for people, as they have been throughout all of recorded history.

This is an important discussion to have, as it is a primary excuse for taking animals away from people, and destroying human lives and work. The idea that is cruel for animals to entertain people is an opinion, not a fact. If is, like anything else, open to argument.

There is absolutely no scientific or behavioral evidence of any kind that I know of that proves that animals suffer from entertaining people, there is much evidence to the country. Working animals love to work with people and seem to greatly enjoy entertaining them, as almost any large animal veterinarian, behaviorist or trainer will testify.

Many people believe that carriages horses hate pulling light carriages through Central Park, but people who actually know something about the big draft horses know better. The horses love  – and need – the stimulation, exercise and attention they receive when they work, as opposed to languishing idly in fenced in areas for the rest of their lives. Famed horse trainer Buck Brannaman – The Horse Whisperer – says the carriage horses are the luckiest horses in the world.  They almost died for it.

It is as easy to abuse animals with misplaced love as with sticks and kicks.

We need to know what we are talking about when we make decisions about animals.

Animals are disappearing from our world at a horrific rate, and people who say they are for the rights of animals are doing their best to speed up the process. Every animal we save is precious, every decision urgent.

“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “That is the way of a whole human being.”

But how can we be whole if there are no animals?

For me, the most urgent right of an animal is to survive in our world.

Every animal that uplifts or entertains a human being is a saved and rescued animal. Animals that interact with human beings and have value for them get to live, to survive, most of the others are dying off.

The first people in this world did not consider it wrong for animals to entertain people and lift them up. Nor did those many succeeding generations. This is a new idea, born from the movement that wishes to liberate animals from people. Suddenly, and in the late 1980’s, it was declared that it was wrong for animals to entertain people. It was hard to imagine then that this would spell the end of the circus, an entertainment forum much loved all over the world.

The first cave drawings showed people playing with dogs and training wild animals. Animals brightened dark lives, then and beyond.  From the beginning, they have helped us endure life in a difficult world.

Every dog and cat who makes us smile is entertaining us. My dogs and donkeys and sheep and barn cats make me smile and laugh and know joy every day of my life.

Does that make me cruel?

Should they and all the other dogs who make us laugh be banned and removed from our lives?, because our friend Christine is correct.

We have started out on that path, and we are already sliding down the slipperiest of slopes.

 

When the animals are gone. Thoughtcrime: A thoughtcrime is an Orwellian term used to describe an illegal thought. The term has also been used to describe some theological ideas such as disbelief or idolatry.” – Wickipedia. The idea that elephants and carriage horses and other animals are not all being abused and are being driven from people and the earth, often to their deaths,  is a thoughtcrime to many in America, a new form of heresy.  This story is dedicated to the animals who have been taken away, who our children and grandchildren will never seen again. And to people who love animals and can still think for themselves.

_____

The animals were all gone by 2025.

They came for the greyhounds at the tracks, then the race horses. They came for the carriage horses and the mules, they came for the lions, then the tigers.

They came for the ponies in the farmers markets giving rides to children. The polar bears died on the melting ice, the snakes and lizards and birds died in the great flooding. They came for the cows on the farms, and then, the came for the magic of the circuses and took away the elephants. They came for the old people with cats on their laps.

They came for the homeless people who slept on the streets with their dogs, and the two elderly sisters who rescued cats. They came for people who were poor, or old, or who had fences that were too low. They took their cats, and then their birds. It  was now officially cruel to keep any animal in a cage.

They closed the zoos because they were cruel, and took the sled dogs away from the sledders. They came for the border collies who herded sheep because work is cruel, and the cats let outdoors, and the barn cats on the farms,  and the cows and pigs and horses on the farms. They came for the dogs who sniffed for bombs – what could be more abusive? – and the ones who guided the blind.

They banned the donkeys who pulled carts of fruit in Baltimore, they banned the use of animals to entertain people or make them smile. They came for the rabbits in cages and shut down the pet stores in malls. They banned the breeding of dogs and cats, and then, the ownership of dogs and cats. They said animals could now only live on secret preserves, with nothing to ever do again in their lives.

Under Article 60, uttered by the Chairman of the Department Of Animal Rights, known to exist as a digital space only on Facebook and Twitter, animals could no longer be owned by the people, all animals must be returned to the wild, to nature, to their dignity and origins.

It was no longer legal to mention or discuss Climate Change, or the loss of animal habitats, or the decline of two-thirds of all animal species, which had been recorded and announced by the World Wildlife Fund in 2017. The fund was no longer legal, and had been abolished. It was not legal to say there was no “wild,” or any nature for the animals to return to.

They talked about all of the preserves where animals had come. But the preserves where animals had been  herded were closed, gone bankrupt or shut down by the Department of Animal Rights, Propaganda, and Revisionism. It turned out they were cruel places as well. And they were expensively cruel.

It was now a thought crime to speak or think of the work of animals, or to decry their disappearance in the world.

Big Victim, the leader of the nation of Atlantia,  ruled a world that was perpetually polarized, continuously at war with itself, characterized by omnipresent government surveillance, public and media manipulation, the ubiquitous use of screen technologies, and under the control of a privileged elite that ruthlessly persecuted individualism, idiosyncratic and individual ways of life and independent thinking, all of which had been outlawed.

No one had ever seen Big Victim – Atlantia was by now a nation of victims now – or even knew for sure if she existed.But she issued new instructions every day, all on her Twitter account. It was against the law to question her existence.

The Department Of Animal Rights, Propaganda and Revisionism ruthlessly sought out and persecuted people who still had and hid their animals – in basements, barns, caves, remote hillsides – and loved them and prayed to them. If caught, the animals were seized and taken to “preserves” and never seen again, the people who owned them taken to re-education camps on the first offense, were executed on the second.

The former animal lovers claimed the animals were put to death, but it was not legal to say that publicly, or to write it.

The animal were stubborn and subversive people, said Big Victim, dangerous and willful. They would all be rooted out.

The animal lovers – labeled “deviants and abusers”  – hid one another, organized secretly and dangerously.

They lived off the grid and away from the screens and video cameras that were installed in every home. They stole food to give to their dogs and horses, had a vast network of contacts and safe houses, were sometimes seen traveling or hiding in forests or woods, or abandoned factories, or basements. They comforted and supported one another, they missed the animals in their lives.

There were fewer and fewer of them every year, new surveillance technologies made it difficult for them to hide, and their need to find food for their animals often gave them away. When they vanished, they never returned.

Sometimes, people kept photographs of their animals on their cellphones, or more dangerously, in their homes. When discovered, or reported by the Secret Informers of the Ministry Of Animal Rights, they were confiscated. The lucky people were given final warnings. All photographs or books or articles about pets and people loving one another were taken and burned.

The Ministry Of Love And Compassion worked tirelessly to rewrite the historical record, issuing a stream of instructions ordering workers and citizens to correct the false history of animals and people, once rumored to share the earth together and work together to build civilization and to life one another up.

The true story of animals was abuse, the Ministry said. They were all abused. Animals should never be owned, or used to love or entertain people.

The Ministry said it was not ever true that people and animals lived in harmony, or that many people loved them or treated them well. It was not true that children loved the magic of the circus, or that lovers melted in the back seats of horse carriages in Central Park, and came from all over the world to ride in them. All mention of 4-H activities or projects was forbidden.

The Ministry said these fond memories were forgeries and falsifications. All animals were victims of people, their abusers driven to the edge of society, forced out of work, had their homes taken from them, were appropriately harassed,  denounced and dehumanized.

The Ministry worked relentlessly – and successfully –  to destroy all documents relating to the love of animals and people for each other, or the rumored rich history of people and animals working together.

No poof existed any longer that the government might be lying, or that the Department Of Animal Rights had destroyed the true history.

A group of animal lovers had marched on the capital to plead for the return of animals to a life with people, they talked of official deception, secret surveillance and manipulation of history by a political entity that had become authoritarian and totalitarian. They were all arrested and disappeared.

The images of animals were permitted only in the Holocaust Memorial For Animal Slaves, a virtual museum that existed only on social media, a chilling and emotional monument to the mistreated animals of the world –  horrific photos of tortured elephants, the ponies, the carriage horses, the lions and the tigers, dogs and cats. The animals that had been exploited so much, said the museum,  because they had been forced to pull carriages in Central Park, entertain children in the circus, offered unconditional love and support to people.

It was, said the museum, torture for horses to pull carriages or give rides to children, or for elephants to appear in circuses.

None of that was permitted anymore.

“This museum is a monument to the Age Of Animal Abuse,” said the museum’s website, “ended in our time by Big Victim. Animals are no longer permitted to be owned by people, to live and work among them, and above all, to entertain or uplift them. They have all been returned to the wild, given their dignity, they are living happily in nature.”

There were chilling black and white photographs of horses pulling carriages in Central Park, of elephants parading in a circus ring with their trunks raised, of dogs on leashes and poodles sitting on the laps of smiling people. There were photographs of racetracks, shuttered, demolished now. There were countless archives showing abused elephants, horses, dogs in the most graphic way. “No one who watches these images,” announced the Ministry of Love, “could ever wish to live with or work with an animal again.”

People fought to keep their dimming memories of the animals in their lives, the ones they had lived with and worked with. But time and the totalitarian government was against them. Thoughtcrime was a serious crime.

It was no longer safe for animal lovers to keep these images anywhere but in their own minds. The elephant trainers in the circuses and the horse carriage drivers were  especially hard hit, targeted by the Ministry and Hunted Down, one by one. They were especially dangerous, it was believed, because they had come too close to the magic and the truth, they loved their independent way of life,  they were a threatening disease that could spread.

Big Sister especially hated independent ways of life, they threatened the very idea of Atlantia.

Sometimes, children wandered off-limits online and saw a photograph of a puppy, or an elephant parading down Main Street on the way to the circus, or a puppy playing with a child, or a pony giving a first ride to a little girl, or a carriage horse trotting through Central Park, an orange plume darting in the wind on his head.

The child would ask if he could go to the “wild” or one of those “preserves” and see a horse or an elephant, one what wasn’t on You Tube or on the Animal Holocaust Museum website. Sometimes, the children would cry, it seemed this pull towards animals was a part of them.

The mother or father would shush the child and tell him or her sternly to never mention this subject again. The animal preserves were all closed to the public, for the sake of the animals, so they could have the peace and good life deserves. There were no more zoos, all the museum exhibits had been taken away.

People, who had abused animals so wantonly and for so long, were never allowed to go there and see them.

Then, sometimes later, on a walk or a swim or on the way to school, the mother or father might, if they wished, pull the child aside and tell them: “Listen to me, there are no more animals in the world. The Ministry Of Animal Rights got all of the ones who lived with us, the world changed. There are no preserves, there is no nature, there is no wild. Do not ever mention the animals again. There are no more animals.”

It seemed at first, that they only came for them. Over time, and bit by bit, it became clear that they were coming for me and you.