Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  Sobriety and care are two wonderful concepts in support of our need for a new and more mystical understanding of animals.

  It is not enough to say that animals like the carriage horses must be suffering if they work with people and earn money. Working with people and earning money are both essential for domesticated animals if they are to survive in our world.

  In fact, the carriage trade in New York has achieved what might seem on the surface to be impossible. They have found a way to keep animals like horses safe and healthy and engaged in the most densely populated geography in our country. They have created a new habitat and environment for them even as we have taken no responsibility for destroying their original and natural homes.

  Consciously or not, they have paved the way, shown us how animals can be saved and kept healthy and relevant in the modern world. The politicians and the people who claim to speak for the rights of animals do not yet seem to grasp the real significance of the horses, their real message to us.

  All over the world, forward-thinking municipalities and young farmers are looking to domesticated animals—mules, donkeys, draft horses—to replace automobiles and tractors, to reduce carbon emissions, lower costs, and reduce the use of fossil fuel. Beyond helping our bleeding planet, working with animals is a much more rewarding experience than working with machines. Farmers love their cows, carriage drivers love their horses, people love to see and touch and feel animals wherever they are. It’s hard to love a tractor or a pickup truck the same way you love a dog or horse (although I sure loved my farm truck and tractor).

  They are vastly more costly and destructive to the fragile environment than horses or elephants or donkeys.

  Saving animals is an urgent moral and environmental issue. Instead of turning horses away from New York City, we should be emulating the model of the carriage trade and looking for ways to keep them here, to relieve congestion, reduce pollution, advance the idea of community and connection. And to preserve the ancient bond between people and domesticated working animals. It is not progress for working animals to be denied work; it is the new abuse.

  For several years, I attended numerous demonstrations in the city against the carriage horses. The demonstrators in New York do not speak with animals or listen to them. They will not touch a horse or bring a carrot. They do not seem to know that the big carriage horses have never lived in the wild, and could never survive there even if it still existed. Draft horses are big animals—they need about four bales of good, fresh hay a day to survive; they need to have their hooves trimmed, to be treated for parasites; to be kept out of extreme weather; to walk on roads without big holes; to be kept away from snakes and predators and starvation, protected from fighting with one another over dominance and food.

  The horses need to give human beings an incentive to keep them around and keep them safe and healthy. All of these things are present in the lives of the carriage horses. They live long and healthy lives doing safe and regulated work with people who love them and take responsibility for caring for them. They have moderate work to do and are beloved by countless people, who flock to ride with them, give them carrots and apples, touch them and photograph them.

  What more do we want for animals than this in our changing world?

  In a sense, the same reality applies to elephants in the circus. Few animals have suffered more in the wild than Asian elephants. They are relentlessly hunted by sportsmen and poachers; they are pushed out of their homes by flooding and climate change. The few preserves available for them are notoriously underfunded and poorly run. Because an unknown number of them have been mistreated or abused, almost all of the elephants have been driven from their work in circuses. They have nowhere to go, no one to care for them, no future in our world.

  It is naïve to think that somewhere there is a pasture or preserve for all of the elephants to retire to (or the big horses), where they will be fed the enormous and staggeringly expensive amounts of food and nourishment they require to survive.

  Elephant sanctuaries estimate that it takes between 300 and 600 pounds of food to feed an elephant each day. Is it really sober or caring, to use Pope Francis’s benchmarks, to believe that the hundreds of elephants being driven out of circuses in the United States and Canada by the people who claim to speak for the rights of animals will all find homes where they will be fed that amount of food at private expense for the rest of their lives?

  Those familiar with the long history of Asian elephants and their work with people know these animals powerfully attach to human beings, that they need work for their own grounding and health, that many things that seem cruel and abusive to people are not cruel and abusive to working animals.

  If we talk with them, we can know what is good for them. If we make remote, often politicized and emotional assumptions about them, if we insist on seeing them as versions of us, if we lose the sense of awe and wonder that contact with them inspires, then we are condemning them to extinction.

  The carriage horse controversy was a turning point for me and my understanding of animals. I asked myself: What did the horses really need? What did safety mean for them? What is abuse? Is it really cruel for working animals to work?

  I don’t mean to suggest that all carriage drivers are perfect, saintly people. I know a lot of them by now, and their personalities run the gamut just as in any other profession. Some are nice, some reserved. All those I’ve met are animal lovers, though. They enjoy working with the horses, riding them, watching the tourists and children fuss over them. They carry bags of carrots, and buckets of oats. They trot repeatedly over to the horse drinking fountains that are such a lovely feature of Central Park. They talk to the horses all the time. There is rarely any trouble with these big and beautiful animals. Most of the horses follow their routes in the park with very little human direction.

  The animal rights people say the horses are lonely, that they need to be socialized, but the truth is that the horses are never alone. There are always other horses near them. They communicate with each other all day and all night.

  There is something knee-jerk about our current obsession with animal abuse and our insistence that animals be given the same rights as human beings. And who, in our time, even really knows what that means? I met an older cop in New York City who rides a police horse—he says the big difference in the perception of animals comes from the fact that people making decisions “in their best interest” no longer know anything about them.

  It’s a good point. The mayor of New York, who wishes to ban the horses, has never ridden one. Nor can he recall ever taking a carriage ride. The president of the City Council, who is eager to ban the horses, says she is qualified to speak about them because she has two rescue cats.

  At the time, the media almost daily published claims that the horses were unsafe in New York, that they did not belong in the city. but when I talked to the police, they told me that no writer or reporter had called them in years about the horses. I questioned them about horse fatalities and was told that in the past thirty years (and millions of rides), three horses had been killed in traffic accidents.

  The carriage trade is one of the oldest businesses in New York City. It was founded more than 150 years ago when Central Park was built. Frederick Law Olmsted, its designer, believed the carriage horses were so essential an element, he built many of the bridges and paths just for them, so that New Yorkers of all backgrounds and incomes could see the horses and mingle with them in the great park.

  The trade has always had close connections to the immigrant population. People in Ireland, Italy, and other countries had lived and worked with horses for thousands of years and knew them well. It was natural for new immigrants to seek out work in one of the stables, starting out as stable hands and working up to medallion-holding carriage drivers.

  It was a comfortable way for immigrants to come to the United States, find work that they loved—outdoors and with animals—and support their families. In the entire history of ho
rses and carriages, no one had ever considered it cruel for workhorses to pull light carriages, especially on flat ground. Driving a horse carriage was one of the least controversial jobs available anywhere. Suddenly, in modern-day New York, it has become one of the most controversial. The drivers are embattled, the subject of demonstrations and protests, accusations of abuse and thievery and cruelty made almost daily against them, their way of life and livelihood under siege including from some of the most powerful people in the city.

  There are three different stables in New York City, all on the suddenly valuable property of the West Side of Manhattan, in what was until recently a dingy and impoverished warehouse district. As the district has gentrified and drawn the attention of developers, there is suddenly enormous pressure for the stable owners to sell, and growing questions about where the carriage horses can be stabled in the future.

  The carriage trade is perhaps the most intensely regulated business in New York City. Five different city agencies oversee the care of the horses, from the police department to the health department. Drivers are licensed, stables inspected regularly.

  Every aspect of the horses’ lives is regulated. There are hundreds of pages of regulations governing their welfare. They get five weeks of vacation a year, and can only work carefully prescribed hours—they can’t start before a certain time, or work past a certain time (it varies depending on the day of the week). They are inspected regularly by city and police veterinarians and cannot work if they are lame or injured in any way. They can’t work in extreme heat or cold.

  When I became involved with the carriage horses, nothing in my life or work until that point had helped me to see so clearly how our culture has lost any connection with the animals left in our world, or with the natural world itself. I was to see clearly the profound failure of modern media to deal with complex issues like the future of animals in our world, and to verify or investigate vicious and hysterical claims made against innocent people. I became alarmed at the great dangers facing the animals because people no longer understand them or know what they want or need.

  The carriage horses led me many places. They were responsible for a rekindling of my life as a journalist, of my passion for facts and truth. They took my writing about animals in a new direction and set me on a quest to achieve a new and more mystical understanding of them. Through the carriage horses, I was to make some of the most powerful personal connections of my life. I came to know and love many of the carriage drivers, and their suffering and persecution was to break my heart and inspire my work.

  These drivers and their horses connected me in the most elemental way to the very spiritual idea of talking with animals.

  There were other troublesome things about the campaign to ban the carriage horses from New York City. The people who know horses best—horse lovers, trainers, vets, farmers, biologists—were never consulted or interviewed by reporters, nor is there any record of the mayor or anyone on the City Council talking to them either. It was almost as if expertise and science no longer mattered.

  The animal rights protestors that I encountered—and I talked to many at several different demonstrations—did not seem to know that there is no longer any wild, and that big draft horses have always lived in cities and on farms, that they have never lived in the wild and would not last long there.

  “You can see the horses are lonely,” Carol, an office secretary, told me outside the Plaza hotel one morning. “They should be running free, out on pasture all day, with their friends.”

  They did not know that horses who stand with their heads down and leg cocked are not depressed or lame but relaxed and safe.

  There is no evidence of respiratory disease in any of the carriage horses, despite activists’ claim all are suffering from the city’s traffic fumes. No human being in New York City has ever been killed by a carriage horse, not one in 150 years. Jared Diamond, one of the world’s most famous biologists, has said that draft horses are the most domesticable animals on the planet: gentle, adaptable, affectionate, tolerant of other species, eager to work in crowded, noisy circumstances.

  Buck Brannaman, the world’s most famous horse trainer, inspiration for the bestselling novel and Robert Redford film The Horse Whisperer, says the carriage horses are the lucky ones, they have good work to do and good care. The abused horses are the ones languishing on farms with nothing to do but eat and drop manure—the fate the mayor has chosen for the carriage horses.

  Beyond the eternal arguments that swirl about the care and abuse of animals is the very sad reality that we have become utterly disconnected from the animals in our world. Between runaway development and climate change, they are vanishing at a horrific rate.

  The carriage horse controversy led me to a better way to treat animals. To understand the real lives of real animals. To communicate with them and listen to them. We don’t have to fight with one another about what is best for animals; we can see them, live with them, know them and talk to them.

  The New York City carriage drivers have found such an understanding. So have many elephant trainers, yet they have been reviled and censured for it.

  We are banning the very animals we can and should keep in our midst because we have lost any sense of fraternity with them. We can no longer see them in context of their reality, only through our own.

  Spartacus’s fall was a turning point for me, pointing up the urgency of talking to animals and respecting the humans who do. We can make better decisions about animals if we know them, talk to them, listen to them. If we see their need for us, and our need for them, if we can know, to some extent, what they feel and want, then we have finally come closer to that new understanding.

  If we only see them as fragile and dependent creatures who must be saved from human beings, then our attitude will continue to be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, and emotional parasites. We will be unable to set limits on their real and immediate needs, and they will continue to vanish from our lives.

  What does Spartacus really need? To be released into nature, confined to stand and drop manure all day on a rescue farm? Or does he need to partner up with Tony, bring sustenance and health to both of them, to engage in meaningful work that brings joy and happiness to humans?

  Part of truly listening to animals means understanding that they’re not all the same.

  There is a carriage driver—he asked me not to use his name for fear of recrimination—who went to Pennsylvania to save a big draft female horse from being sold to a butcher at auction. He rescued her and brought her to New York. She was his fourth draft horse. Each of his previous horses had loved her work in the park, loved her life in the stables, loved all the attention from children and tourists.

  But the new horse was different, he said. She was shy around the other horses. She wasn’t aggressive but didn’t seem to like being handled. She made her way calmly through the busy streets of New York, but he didn’t sense the same comfort and ease he had felt in his other horses. Standing in line waiting for riders, she was skittish, he thought. She didn’t like the buses that went by, or the constant honking of the cabs.

  “She was a farm animal, I think,” he told me. “Most of the horses love the life in the stables and in the park, they love being around the other horses, they love all the attention and they love to work. This one was different, she just didn’t seem at ease to me.”

  So, he sold her to a gentleman farmer in northwestern New Jersey who uses her to haul firewood and help plow his hobby farm. As wary as she was in the city, she took to her new life. She was a one-person horse, the driver thought, and she just didn’t like the life in the city.

  I learned from all the dogs, horses, sheep, donkeys, chickens, and cats I have lived with that it is wrong to generalize about animals. They are not all the same. Just as every human being has a distinct personality, every animal has its own genes, instincts, behaviors, and environmental influences.

  Fraternity means a kind of partnership, not emot
ional or physical domination. Thousands of years ago, we saw animals as beasts of burden who existed only to serve us; we owed them no mercy or compassion. Organized religion began to change the world’s view of animals. Jesus Christ was perhaps the first animal rescuer in recorded history. He saved a puny donkey a farmer outside of Jerusalem wanted to kill and rode it into the fabled city. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that human beings must be merciful to animals so they can learn how to be merciful to people. Muhammad urged his followers to treat animals gently, and the ancient Hebrews decreed that animals must be given a day of rest on the Sabbath, just like people.

  The pendulum has swung far and wide, back and forth. In our time, it sometimes seems that people worship animals and love them more than they do their fellow human beings. There is, as of this writing, no national rescue movement involving the rehoming and care of needy people.

  As the idea of animal rescue grows by the day, the idea of rescuing people seems less and less popular. Perhaps the two are not unrelated. It is not always easy to love people; it is simple and sometimes more rewarding to love animals.

  Pope Francis and his encyclical may popularize a new understanding of our relationship with animals. His ideas reflect the vision of Henry Beston, who wrote that animals are our partners in the world, not our siblings or dependents. They share the joys and travails of the world. We do not owe animals a perfect life, or a better and more protected life than people enjoy. We cannot guarantee them a life free of challenge and surprise and pain any more than we can promise it to ourselves.

  We are at a crossroads in our world—if the animals are to be saved, we need to get busy doing it, and if people are to be saved, we need to actively engage in that effort, too. That is fraternity writ large.