[Animals] A Horse’s Collapse Rekindles Debate About New York City’s Carriage Rides

[KingSlayer]

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Sept. 21, 2022

 

Horrified onlookers gathered last month around a fallen carriage horse where it had collapsed on a street in Midtown Manhattan. As the horse’s driver frantically tried to rouse it — and police officers sprayed it with hoses to cool it down — the crowd captured the moment with cellphones.

 

Video of the horse, thin and prone on the pavement, has now reignited calls from residents, celebrities and politicians to ban the horse-drawn carriage industry which has existed in New York City for more than 150 years. The Manhattan district attorney is investigating the incident, and a bill before the City Council would replace the carriages with electric versions.

 

Eighty miles north and a world away from Manhattan, the fallen horse, named Ryder, is recuperating at a grassy farm, with a little goat for company. It is a quiet retirement for an animal who may have set in motion the end of a way of life for scores of drivers or — depending on whom you ask — the liberation of nearly 200 of his equine peers.

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A horse named Ryder collapsed on a Manhattan street in August.Credit...L2FTV/Freedomnews.tv
Existential battles are not new for the city's tourism carriage industry, which takes visitors on rides through Central Park for about $165 an hour. It has weathered them all, from Mayor Bill de Blasio's unmet campaign promise to ban it “on day one” of his administration, all the way back to 1866 when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established — its founder inspired by the abuse of carriage horses.

But today's threats seem potent: a public losing its taste for working animals, from circuses to rodeo, and an urbanized audience unfamiliar with the realities of large animal husbandry. Even those who might admire the big horses cocking a hoof on 59th Street are armed with recording devices that can amplify the sight of a colicky or spooked horse — conditions experts say can befall any equine, whether in a pasture or on a city street — into the stratosphere.

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Detractors say the industry is inherently exploitative and abusive, bent on evading the city's many regulations designed to keep horses safe, though the number of recorded violations appears relatively small. They say carriages are outmoded, urging New York to join Chicago, Montreal and several other cities that have banned them.

 

“Anyone with a heart can see that these horses are abused and suffering,” said Councilman Robert F. Holden, a Democrat from Queens who introduced the bill to replace horse carriages with electric versions. “This is one more barbaric trend that we are doing now that should be eliminated.”

 

Drivers and their supporters insist that they care for their animals, on whom their livelihood depends. They say there are just a handful of accidents and illnesses each year — and that they are unavoidable, even within a highly regulated industry.

 

Christina Hansen, a spokeswoman for the carriage industry, says the notion that horses don't belong among cars and buildings is misguided. “People have forgotten what horses are like, what they are capable of,” said Ms. Hansen, who drives three horses stabled in Manhattan.

 

“We are doing more than just giving people nice rides in Central Park,” she added. “We are this living connection to humanity's partnership with horses.”

 

A three story stable

 

Up on the second and third floors of a low brick building on West 52nd Street live about 90 of the city's carriage horses. It is one of three such stables in New York, all on Manhattan's West Side. Inside, it could pass for many other barns, except for the rubber-covered ramp the animals must climb to access each floor of stalls. “In nature, it’s called a ‘hill’,” Ms. Hansen said on a recent tour, responding to criticism that walking up the incline is unnatural for horses.

 

Indeed, the Manhattan barns appear tidier and better equipped than many pastoral stables: Electric fans aimed at the stalled horses whir overhead, and automatic waterers refill each trough. It is mucked and swept by rotating shifts of stablehands on a 24-hour schedule.

 

What troubles animal welfare advocates is what the stables lack: anywhere for the horses to run free. While the city mandates each animal have five weeks of vacation a year, at their urban home base there are no pastures or paddocks, known as “turnout,” for these horses.

 

“They are deprived of everything that would add any enrichment or joy to their lives,” said Ashley Byrne, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

 

Supporters of the carriage industry disagree: “It’s anthropomorphizing,” said Dr. Joseph Bertone, a veterinarian who in 2015 conducted a study that compared stress levels in a group of Manhattan carriage horses and their counterparts on city-mandated vacation. The study, which Dr. Bertone, then a professor of equine medicine at the Western University College of Veterinary Medicine in California, said was independently funded, showed that the horses in their Midtown stalls evicted fewer chemical signs of stress than those in the unfamiliar agrarian setting of holiday.

“People in cities think that they are a wild animal, and they are not,” Dr. Bertone said in an interview. “They are very used to that lifestyle, and with habituation they are very happy.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/nyregion/carriage-horses-new-york.html