Horses in New York City’s horse-drawn carriage industry are being forced to draw carriages for hours in scorching heat or freezing cold, on harsh pavement, in crowded streets, in bust traffic, blaring horns, and wailing sirens terrify these easily-startled animals, while exhaust fumes damage their lungs. Many horses are also suffering painful leg and joint injuries from hauling heavy loads on hard surfaces.

Finally, after more than 165 years that horses are being forced to draw carriages through Manhattan’s Central Park, it seems as, hopefully, at least this form of animal exploitation is about to end. Hopefully, because campaigns against this harsh exploitation had been held for decades now and with no success.
The most depressing thing about the failure to end even this tiny exploitative industry so far, is not that the animal activists failed to convince the relevant legislators to act on behalf of the poor horses, but that the relevant legislators, despite their firm opposition, failed to end this exploitative industry.

Supposedly, there is room for hope as all four leading candidates running for mayor have all spoken out against it. One of them is current mayor Eric Adams who opposes this and tries to act against the cruel carriage ride industry, yet it continues. Not only that, former Mayor Bill de Blasio, campaigned in 2013 with the promise to ban horse-drawn carriages, and failed. So even mayoral administration that vowed to ban this horrible tourist activity couldn’t end this one small exploitative industry.
This is what de Blasio said during his campaign at the end of 2013: “We are going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape in New York City. They’re not humane. They’re not appropriate to the year 2014. It’s over. So just watch us do it now.”
6 years before that, at the end of 2007, after a horse called Smoothie died, former council member Tony Avella introduced the first ever bill to ban the industry. 
Even the influential Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the park, announced that it also was backing calls for a ban.
And yet…

The only achievement in this regard was that in 2019 (only in 2019!) The Carriage Horse Heat Relief Bill passed and enacted into law that at least forbids forcing the horses to draw carriages in extreme humid heatwaves.

If the animal rights movement cannot end an exploitive industry of such a small scale (there are currently 68 licensed carriage owners with a total of about 200 horses) despite having such a strong support from legislators, celebrities, influencers, and the general public, what are the chances that it will ever end enormous ones such as the chickens and fishes industries?

If the animal rights movement can’t even ban an exploitative industry such as the horse-drawn carriages, in New-York City, despite strong support from legislators, celebrities, influencers, and the general public, then activists should seek other ways to end all the suffering.

A zoo in Denmark is asking people to donate their unwanted pets, particularly chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs but also horses if they are small, to help them feed the zoo’s predators.
The request created a backlash online, but the zoo said that “The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder” and that the purpose of the program is to make sure “nothing goes to waste — and [to] ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being of our predators,” according to the zoo’s website.

Obviously everything here is wrong – the fact that zoos still exist, the fact that pets still exist, the fact that some pets are unwanted, that zoos ask people who have unwanted “pets” to donate them to feed other animals, the fact that this Danish zoo could seriously make the following statement: “In zoos, we have a responsibility to imitate the animals’ natural food chain — for reasons of both animal welfare and professional integrity” – but we wish to focus on something else.
Animal activists are shocked that people are shocked by this zoo seriously proposing to bring unwanted animals as food for animals in zoos because they are “pets”, even though it is feeding animals that can’t do otherwise, and while the protesters themselves eat chickens and rabbits even though they really don’t have to. So the activists are shockingly pointing out the double standards of the online protesters.

But the shock should be that animal activists are still shocked by the double standards and irrationality of humans.
We saw similar online outcries when a giraffe was executed in another Danish zoo to feed other animals in the zoo a few years ago, and of course in cases like Cecil the lion, or when an animal manages to escape the slaughterhouse.
Some activists claim that these kind of cases set as an indication that humans care about animals and just need information and guidance. But it’s actually the opposite. For example, and directly related to this case, humans know that some animals in zoos need meat to survive and that all of them don’t, yet that’s not enough for them to acknowledge the hypocrisy and double standards in their shock. Obviously, it’s not that simple, since here it’s very tangible, as humans are asked to bring an animal they raised themselves to be killed and fed to another animal. But this is just another indication of how irrational humans are and how untrustworthy they are when it comes to moral issues. Humans do have all the information they need for them to change their habits, they just choose not to. If anything, these specific cases of supposed caring for nonhuman animals function as fig leaf and as moral licensing to be carless about the fate of the animals directly tortured for them.

Any animal would prefer to live as a “pet” and be killed by a veterinarian in a zoo over being imprisoned in a factory farm and be murdered in a slaughterhouse by a slaughterer. But it’s not about the animals and how they feel, but about humans and how they feel. It always has been and always will be. That is unless animal activists would stop being shocked by what is shocking humans and what doesn’t, and what motivates humans to change their cruel habits and what doesn’t, and start acting to change the reality of animals regardless of humans’ willingness to change.

Today, probably the most famous animal abuse festival in the world – the fiesta in honor of San Fermin mostly known as Running of the Bulls – has ended for this year.

For anyone not familiar with the abusive festival, a run takes place every day at 8A.M. between the 7^th and the 14^th of July. 6 bulls and 6 steers who are supposed to herd them, run the 825 meters of immensely crowded narrow streets from the corral and into the bullring.
The terrified bulls, surrounded by hundreds of runners, are harassed and touched all along the run.
Running on the cobbled streets with sharp turns, the bulls also suffer from falls, trampling, bruises and fractures. They often collide with the walls, get severely injured, sometimes breaking bones.

When entering the bullring the bulls are immediately imprisoned inside the ring, saving them for later. Meanwhile cows and calves are released to the bullring for the runners to enjoy as they abuse them, playing matadors. In the evening the 6 bulls, who were forced to run in the morning, are tortured in a bullfight spectacle.

The Running of the Bulls festival is consistently preceded with creative protests by animal rights activists, and until about a decade ago, humans were even offered to forsake the running of the bulls festival and instead join the alternative Running of the Nudes festival.

Campaigns against this festival, as well as against bullfighting in general, are being held for decades now. Dozens of animal rights organizations campaigning for decades, thousands of demonstrations in front of Spanish embassies, tens of thousands of letters to Spanish governments, decades of a boycott on Spain by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. But nothing helps.
Even the Catalan ban on bullfighting is small, regional, and was originally made for political reasons and not moral ones. And even that was repealed about nine years ago by Spain’s Constitutional Court who overturned the ban for being unconstitutional. The formal excuse is that bullfights are part of ‘Spanish cultural heritage’ and thus outlawing them can only be legislated by the central government.

In this world, things don’t change for moral reasons. The two things that did manage to call off the festival and bullfights are the Spanish civil war and the Covid19 pandemic. And still, they didn’t end these horrors permanently but just canceled them for one year. So to end it for good, along with the rest of the animal tortures, what is actually needed is something similar but with a much more profound effect.

About a decade ago we wrote the following post about Eid al-Adha which began yesterday, and unfortunately it is as relevant today as ever.

Eid al-Adha – “the feast of sacrifice” which commemorates the tale of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son at god’s demand, as part of a twisted faith and loyalty test – began.
In reward to Abraham’s obedience, his son is spared, in exchange for a much more “suitable” and “natural” victim – a ram. This epic myth of the ultimate obedience and its, so called, happy ending is commemorated in all 3 monotheistic religions, and is still universally admired. Millions of animals, all around the world, would be slaughtered tomorrow in millions of Muslim houses and public squares.

Knowing such butchery happens daily all over the world, many activists give it no special attention. They see it as more of the same horribleness, disregarding the added spiritual and cultural element and its long term implications.
But the ritual is significant even if it doesn’t increase the number of victims in the short term (assuming more or less the same number of animals would have been slaughtered as part or separately from the ritual). And it is so from 3 main angles.

First is the dominance display exemplified in the ritual, which we have broadly discussed in two of our former posts (here and here) and in the article about the various rituals and festivals that include animal abuse all around the world, so we won’t elaborate about that angle again here.

Second is the significance of the overtness of the abuse, which not only legitimizes it but also preconditions young children into the same violence patterns, as they watch their own father forcefully grabbing animals, aggressively subduing them to the floor and cutting their throat while they struggle and convulse until they die. All in front of the children who can smell the blood, and the urine and sweat of fear, they can hear every scream and observe every spasm. That is the strongest and deepest objectification and speciesism lesson possible.

Even the ones who are innately more sensitive, when raised exposed to such brutal customs as normative, conducted by the head authority figure, and celebrated as part of a feast, learn to suppress their more developed intuitive sensitivity towards the victims at the face of this severe violence. They are much more likely to copy this brutal behavior and carry on the objectifying outlook, instead of recognizing how appalling this ritual is.

This relates to a much bigger issue which we’ll broadly refer to in the near future, probably as part of reviewing the civilization process theory of Norbert Elias and the changes in the standard of violence along history. Basically and rather plainly for now, it refers to a centuries long process in which violence was gradually taken out of humans’ sight, and as a result they became more sensitive towards it. The outcome is that when humans encounter a violent act, most of them feel deterred by it. Those who grew up with slaughter as a regular part of the scenery are less likely to be deterred, as opposed to those who never encountered animal slaughter and then face it at some point.

However as you all know, being deterred by an act is far from enough to shift humans from taking an active part in the same violent act they were just deterred by, and that’s directly connected to the third point of the significance of this sick ritual – conformism and obedience to authority as inherent elements of human’s character.

The glorification of this iconic tale, one of the founding stones in human civilization, sadly symbolizes human’s conformity and obedience. You encounter these features all the time, while you talk to humans about animal exploitation and they come up, again and again, with the same thoughtless, readymade, confirmative excuses, comfortably hiding – behind what the majority does and approves, behind the tradition of what was done for centuries, behind authoritative figures such as their parents, doctors and nutritionists, religious figures, secular leaders and trend setters. Most humans go along hardly bothered, as unconsciously and automatically the answers were already provided to them by others. Not surprisingly, it’s the same answer that allows them to keep their own convenient habits, and spares them of the fear of change.

Not accidentally, the figure of Abraham and the story of the sacrifice have rose to become such iconic elements in the 3 big monotheistic religions and even within non-religion cultural areas.
According to the tale, Abraham is considered to be the first monotheist in human history and monotheism is considered a key-stone in human culture development.
Not accidentally, Abraham, who is the ultimate embodiment of obedience, accepting god’s command without questions and hesitations, became such an ultimate icon of human culture.

Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son can set as a microcosm for many human culture characteristics. As we wrote regarding Eid al-Adha in the article Celebrating Suffering 
Religion was created in humans own image and innately so are the myths, the founding stories and the role models. Ibrahim, the undoubtable ultimate believer (Søren Kierkegaard’s Knight of faith) of the Islam which is discussed here but also in Christianity and Judaism, is indeed characteristic of the human race and its cultural milestones. Ibrahim expresses his complete and total submission to Allah by the willingness to kill his son. No questions, no speculations and no hesitations. Following orders is the ideal of being faithful in human culture. But of course infanticide, certainly of your own descendants, cannot be such a fundamental element of humanity and of the exhibition of one’s faithfulness, clearly only a few would pass such a loyalty test. But murdering animals? Everyone passes.

Ibrahim is not supposed to doubt the supposed command from god, and Ishmael is not supposed to doubt his father’s actions no matter how crucial the consequence is for him. Hagar’s (Ishmael’s mother) voice is not even mentioned, not to mention counts for anything and far down the line there is a ram who his whole life’s purpose is to serve humans and is expected to feel very proud that he was chosen to be slaughtered instead of Ishmael.
And so should the hundreds of millions of animals who their throats are publicly cut and they bleed to death for the longest minutes in their poor lives as humans’ meat and rituals vessels.

Although Abraham’s behavior (according to the tale) was rather unique even back then, about 4,000 years ago, the thought of killing and sacrificing your own son is nowadays obviously considered much more appalling and absurd. If someone would do something similar today he wouldn’t become a faith icon but a hate one. However what was the logical, natural and self-evident solution back then, murdering an animal instead, still works nowadays. In that sense nothing was changed. Every year since the ritual started millions of animals are sacrificed for it.

If you feel that despite the glorification and iconic symbolism of the story, for such a long time and among the 3 big monotheistic religions, it is merely a folkloristic tale and not really an indication of modern human culture, think of the famous experiments on obedience to authority conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Milgram’s study, with its notoriously frightening results, is somewhat of a modern, controlled condition, reenactment of the Abrahamic tale. Most of the participants of the experiment personally pressed a button which supposedly gave an electric shock to another person in another room, despite hearing him beg for the experiment to stop and crying in pain, “just” because an authoritative looking figure (a person in a white coat not god himself) told them to.

It appears that before he ran the experiment, Milgram polled his colleagues, students, and a sample of psychiatrists on how far they thought the participants would go when an experimenter instructed them to shock a fellow participant. The respondents unanimously predicted that few would exceed 150 volts (the level at which the victim demands to be freed), that just 4 percent would go up to 300 volts (the setting that bore the warning “Danger: Severe Shock”), and that only a handful of psychopaths would go all the way to the highest shock the machine could deliver (the setting labeled “450 Volts—XXX”). However 65% of the participants went all the way to the maximum shock, long past the point when the victim’s agonized protests had turned to an eerie silence. The percentage barely budged with the sex, age, or occupation of the participants. And they might have kept on shocking the presumably comatose subject (or his corpse) had the experimenter not brought the proceedings to a halt.

And for those who think that even Milgram modern experiments don’t reflect our current era, in 2008 another social psychologist replicated the test. 70% of the participants went all the way to brutalize a stranger and got to the fatal levels. The remake of Milgram’s experiment asked whether humans in the 2000’s still follow the orders of an authority to inflict pain on a stranger? The answer is that they do.

So what are the odds that humans would stop “pressing the button” when they don’t hear the screams? When they don’t see the victims? When they personally and directly enjoy the violence outcome? When they don’t personally inflict the violence but still enjoy its outcome? And worst, when it is not even considered violence to begin with but “a perfectly natural and legitimate” way of feeding themselves?