Carriage horses: the battle begins

I should have said-- and will now-- to check in just in case something that is actually important comes up. I would not brag that most of what is reported here is important in the grand sense-- but my defense of animal- human bonds, the "Old Ways": partnerships, "jobs", memes-- IS. I helped push back the AR tide when they tried to ban coursing in California. The good guys won that one, however temporarily.

But now, a more visible and symbolic fight has commenced for real in New York. A blinkered urbanite might be forgiven for misunderstanding dogs that chase jacks and their human partners. But more than sixty percent of New Yorkers, three newspapers, an actor (Liam Neeson), a horse trainer (Buck Brannaman), and just about everybody but the most self righteous and resentful Animal Rightsers and a few dubious real estate developers--oh, and the silly playpen Marxist mayor who won his office when only 26 percent of the electorate voted, who did so with the money of said developers (the stables are prime real estate), and who is a "strong Animal Rights activist" who has never owned an animal of any kind, but who tells the little kid of one of the horse drivers that his father is "immoral", while refusing to meet the drivers; a "man of the people" who says that his administration's highest goal and priority is to take away the livings of working people who have never been accused of a single act of cruelty...

The battle is joined: Read Jonathan Katz here for a good summary;if you subscribe to him he will keep you up to date. Then join us in sending some funds to the drivers here.

If the screaming fanatics of AR win this one, no city animal will be safe.  A lot of country friends forget that, a few years ago, Albuquerque animal activists tried to enforce draconian dog regs that slipped by in Albuquerque to the rest of our very rural and western state (ban on more than two dogs, rigorous permits including no in- house litters, on- site inspections, and huge fees to breed, and apparently only AKC purebreds).  They want a war, they have a big war chest-- check out HSUS-- and believe they can win it, while the carriage drivers only want to live in peace. If they want to play ISIS to our border fortress, our Kobani, let us be as brave as the Kurds. Stop them in New York before they knock on your door.

OK, a little humor. Mayor DiBlasio claims he is a "Marxist". He says so; I am not red-baiting him. If we must have Marxists, let them be like this iconic one. Here he is shooting birds in exile in the Caucasus in 1926 (next stop Kazakhstan, where he mostly hunted birds with his dog for two years); with his rabbits, in lonelier exile in Mexico; and big- game fishing a la Hemingway off Mexico, shortly before the traitorous "Ramon Mercader", who had insinuated himself into Trotsky's trust,  sneaked up behind him and put an icepick in his head (if you think I am comparing that sleazy Stalinist hit man to "the coward Robert Ford", of course I am!).