Montreal City Weblog

Kate 16:03 on 2025-05-07 Permalink Reply  

• Jane 13:03 on 2025-06-18 Permalink

  Which is what the Ville and the developer lobby were planning on, all along. Such a crying shame. It could have been very, very different. Because the Ville was absolutely, incorrigibly indifferent to any and all animal concerns prior to their “let’s harass all dog owners and make them feel unwelcome [this is not imaginary, this was real], and BTW we need to get a pitbull ban going” campaigns of the early 2000s, which stayed in place until the current dcevelopment-happy administration came in, there was no way to valorize the caleche trade – like they do in Charleston, NC, you really ought to see it – and improve the existing stables. No, the indifference was very convenient. All heritage properties were and are in the crosshairs for developers to take over, and there’s more tax revenue in it for the Ville to ignore the needs and potentials of protecting these sites, these people, and these animals away. You can even see it in the news reports – no mention of what happened to the horses or their owners. I’m sure digging deeper shows as little concern all along.

  To battle this kind of indifference, as well as the open hostility of the nearly-insensibly abolitionist urban “animal rights” people, was already too much for one lone let’s-do-it-different voice like my own. What I would have loved to have seen all along was a capital campaign to take over the stables, tear them down and build a proper stable, and turn the land that was being used to store trailers and vehicles and other such equipment into a proper grassy paddock, where the horses could rest rather than be cooped up in their shitty stalls and boxes the rest of the time. Only one or two caleche drivers that I met used to take their horses to the canal to touch real grass – but given the sensibilities of these over-urbanized other users (who already seem to want the whole of the canal turned into an open-air plaza, rather than an actual green space), this was an inconvenient risk, and so it rarely happened.

  BTW, I use scare quote because these “animal rights” people are 100% correct that animals deserve rights, but abolition of human use and ownership (guardianship) of animals is something they are 100% wrong about. *They* need to touch grass. Both human and animal lives are better when they’re conspicuously entwined. These activists are not, and never have been, competent at focusing on making real, actual inroads into making concrete change in laws to *benefit animals,* instead they choose abolitionist projects like this, to sweep animals even more under the rug than they already are for 95% of all urban people. Abolitionism suits the powers that be because if you never see an animal, if you never see the source of anything that serves your consumer appetites or the value chain that provides you services, you never have to think about them, and so the power remains in the hands of people who like to dispense with “trivial” concerns like morality or justice towards those who are silent (animals) or most marginalized (the people who work with them). It’s like they, the activists and the politicians, not only implicitly disrespect, they get the pleasure of exerting power in harming the men and women who live and work with animals. This is a complex phenomenon: They think they’ve become enlightened about animals, and agree with totalizing control of animals under municipal by-laws as a civilizing force against animal abusers (they barely even admit that overcontrol of animals emboldens the people who are anti-animal enough to seek ways to harass animal owners) – but can’t imagine that because *all people, politically* used to, still do derive the most power by putting animals as low as they could, the marginal few who didn’t take the hint and remained in the down-enough position to continue to work with animals, that those very people who continue to work with animals *also evolved to respect animals.* No, they are all subhuman exploiters – not people themselves curtailed and exploited such that they are disenfranched, and have next to means to do as well as they would otherwise like to. And so the Perfect is the enemy of the Good.

  Plante just fell for, or even orchestrated, the “animal rights people, meet the developers, discuss” machinations of having one set of useful idiots serve the interests of those who think any and all real estate transactions are good. This ugly condo project is already another blight on a much-blighted stretch of former open land, which, by the way, serves an ecological and psychological function that most people, concerned with their daily grind, are blithely unaware of unless or until you realize it. I was a voter for Plante in 2018 and 2022. In 2026, I’m voting her and all of her kind out.

• Jane 13:07 on 2025-06-18 Permalink

  Please disregard my writing errors (disenfranchised, next to no means, others). I should have written it elsewhere and pasted it here.