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Meanwhile, another city with iconic horse-drawn carriages, Vienna (where the carriages, unlike in New York, actually use city streets), is debating whether the horses should get a day off if temperatures rise above 30° C (currently it's 35°), and only a few officials are meekly suggesting that a complete ban might be considered at some point in the future.
https://www-ganz--wien-at.translate.goog/wien/news/pro-contr...
Can't afford to lose some of that sweet tourist cash so they make up any excuses.
I saw a lot of sad horses in Sevilla, with above 36°C that day
Viennese Fiaker horses are limited to 18 working days per month and there's already temperature limits. Whether those should be lowered further is up for discussion. the current limits for horses are already lower than for outdoor laborers in Vienna.
IMO completely banning horse carriages in Vienna is overshooting.
Meanwhile in Florida cowboys ride their horses every day in 38C+ weather.
Because Vienna politicians have some sense.
I was a bit surprised to see quite so many when I was over last August and it was well north of 35°C - you'd think with the water-bottle and sprinkler stations everywhere they'd also throw out a couple of troughs of water for the horses.
They all seemed to be in good health, from what I saw, but horses are pretty finicky creatures - we humans domesticated the horse about 20,000 years ago, breeding the strongest healthiest creatures we could, and they're still a bit shit - and I wouldn't be surprised if a less attentive driver is going to end up killing one.
> throw out a couple of troughs of water for the horses
They have, while not throughs per se, there are extra hydrants all around the fiaker places at Stefansdom, Albertina, Hofburg, etc for them to fill their horses water buckets, spray them down, etc.
Good. We (Montreal) did that some years ago and nobody misses it - tourists, operator, citizen and very likely the horses too. You think it's a staple until it's gone, then you realize it was just animal abuse for profit.
Also, it is a lot better for tourists than having horses faint or die on the pavement in front of your kids - which is bound to happen more frequently with the weather becoming warmer.
Humans adapt. Even if people miss them they get over it quickly. You get a lot of (social)media articles for a couple of months but after that everyone moves on.
Did the locals realise before or after tucking into their burgers?
Banning something just because kids 'might' (would love to see a % chance on this) die on the streets is alarmist nonsense. Should we ban trains and cars, too?
There's ways to mitigate cruelty and exploitation, just like we do for humans.
What's the difference between this and people keeping pets couped up indoors and exploiting them as 'emotional support', etc? If animals are meant to be wild and not exploited, people should at least be consistent.
We didn't ban horses, we banned touristic carriage rides specifically because the few companies that operated treated their animals questionably. You can still see horses, just not ones that are getting abused.
And for what it's worth, even if you provided your animals with the greatest care (which they didn't), just putting them to work for 12 hours a day on a hot paved street was largely seen as abusive.
It might not have happened often that a horse fainted or died on the job, but when it did it caused enough of an uproar to pressure the people in charge to do something. As someone who has witnessed it, you really only want to see that once.
This is a bigger deal than it might sound. Despite lots of consensus that the horse carriages are bad, it has taken years to get this done. It infamously stalled during De Blasio's mayoralty too, for example.
This is also an L for the TWU, and I suspect there will be more of those to come in the following months.
Why can't they pass legislation to get the horses treated better instead of banning them?
It seems kind of strange that the entire meat industry exists and is tolerated, yet a few horses in Central Park are making people so angry. Surely these horses have far better lives than the cows did that everyone's tucking into over lunch?
They're in proximity to people that run on a progressive threadmill.
When it became socially opportune to so i've seen city folk elsewhere shift their animal rights stance to defend halal slaughter laws deeming it to be progressive because it's tied to a group lower on the proverbial ladder.
There’s nothing more cruel about halal slaughter, as long as they stun (which most do), than the common method.
That's a load-bearing "as long as".
Animal welfare laws don't give atheist butchers the option to be cruel. They're required to stun the animal first. Why give halal/kosher butchers the option to be cruel? Especially if you claim "most do" choose to stun.
Be kinder to animals, change "most do" to "all do" by removing the religious exception.
...and then come the progressive types to defend 1000+ year old ritual slaughter customs.
In the US at least, freedom of religion does grant some exceptions. The Amish do not participate in Social Security and Medicare, for instance, but I cannot opt out. I’m not sure how it works other places.
I’m not saying I endorse this, but that is why.
Presumably any and every religious tradition on slaughter is better than max-capitalism factory farming style?
What's objectionable about halal?
> Presumably any and every religious tradition on slaughter is better than max-capitalism factory farming style?
It's really not. You're mixing two things, "max-capitalism factory farming" alludes to how the animal is treated while it's alive, e.g. caged hens vs free-range hens, while what we're talking about here is animal suffering via religious ritual slaughter.
Kosher and halal slaughter are not animal-friendly. They mandate cutting the animal's throat but preserving its spinal cord so it feels every possible pain in its last moments alive as the blood drains out.
Stunning it before death and/or putting a bolt through its brain would be a lot more humane, but those methods didn't exist when those religions came up their rules, so of course not one iota of progress can be added.
Read more about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shechita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_ritual_slaugh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronarcosis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_bolt_pistol
You'll see that authorities in e.g. the UK have been asked to regulate kosher/halal butchers, require them to at least stun the animal before doing their ritual slaughter... and the authorities chose not to, and let them keep their religious exemption to animal cruelty laws. Kosher and halal slaughterers can choose to stun the animal first, which would be humane, but they don't have to.
Thank you, that was really informative, I was totally mixing those two things. Perfect case of Cunningham's law.
The fact that kosher/halal are very similar is a hilarious wrinkle for the culture war aspect that OP was pushing.
You think the animal rights activists who are opposing the carriages are tolerable of the meat industry? This is just low hanging fruit.
But the activists are not the point. Animal rights activists are a minority, things change because the majority or a significant share of people backs them.
In this case this large group that backs banning horse drawn carriages is very likely eating industrially produced meat. That’s the inconsistency, 95% of Americans eat meat and a substantial share cause far greater inhumanity on animals through their diets which are completely optional (as in, they could vote with their mouth and stop it), than these horse drawn carriages which they want to ban.
I think if a bunch of horses were dropping dead in my city from heat exhaustion, and the only upside to having them was that they congested the roads and left shit everywhere, then I would weigh the two and probably say better to not have them. Turns out 78% of registered New Yorkers agree. Maybe they are all massive hypocrites and should actually support this, since they also eat meat.
Horseshit sucks and being around those animals in a city sucks so it’s an easy sell.
The meat industry at least has a useful output. Horse drawn carriages have no meaningful benefit and a long list of drawbacks.
I do not know. I have not looked into this issue on the merits. I have just observed the gridlock and status-quo bias around it.
I suspect though that mandating better conditions would have the same effect --- the horse tourism business probably stops penciling out if they have to make the required changes. And given that, TWU would fight it just as hard --- a de jure or de facto ban has the same effect as far as they are concerned.
They've tried but the owners continuously don't.
Not that I disagree but what has that consensus centered around?
Egregious & consistent mistreatment of the horses.
The past four mayors have all tried to end the practice but the jockeys (drivers?) are part of a powerful transportation union.
If that's the reason, then the solution sounds like a typical bad bureaucratic government - instead of fixing the problem (improved treatment for horses), ban the whole thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50116002 See that.
There is no business here that can afford any capital outlay, this is a bunch of mom-and-pop shops that rent stable slots (I think) and own medallions. No capital outlay -- nothing can really change.
The city could also spend money on the stables. And NYC NYS have spent money propping up stupid small businesses unable to take care of themselves before. But I do not endorse that outcome at all.
In other words, people will lose jobs with no off ramp, horses will get dumped somewhere (because they can't be used for any work, or slaughtered), city will lose one more tradition and get a bit more bland.
No. These are both explicitly addressed in the article.
Are they really “addressed”?
They are mentioned as things the union is unhappy with. The city has said they’ll come up with a transition plan by next year, but there are no details and that doesn’t mean people won’t lose jobs. The bill prohibits the horses from being sold to slaughter or other rides, but doesn’t say where they’d go instead.
I think it’s reasonable to raise concerns about both.
I live here and I'd be thrilled if it loses this particular dumb cruel tradition.
It'd be a very sad world if we banned everything which 'some' people believe is dumb and cruel.
Meat, cars, religious practices, schools, military, anything which pollutes...
Be careful what you're thrilled for! Diversity is good for a reason.
Im not one to take a horse drawn carriage except in maybe two instances, but i see the appeal as a "general tourist", the horse ride around central park is one of those touristy things that seems like you do, because youre there. That being said, i agree that its not great for the horses, and unfortunately i can understand the want for it gone.
I feel for the animals, but it’s the end of an era.
He's doing this because an Indian tourist was killed by a horse - they are quite notorious for being hit by trains, jagannatha etc.
Some people say that it's because forcing horses to work in a dense, heavily polluted urban environment is cruel, but I don't see these rules being applied to Sarah Jessica Parker.
I'll get my coat
> He's doing this because an Indian tourist was killed by a horse - they are quite notorious for being hit by trains, jagannatha etc.
Is that real or just a meme? I mean the part about Indians being notorious for being hit by trains.
India averages 20,000 deaths by train every year. About 16 deaths per 100,000 people.
Compare to 40,000 vehicle deaths in the US (and 960 train deaths, 2.8 deaths per 100,000 people), and 177,000 vehicle deaths in India.
But India only has 1 death per _4.1 billion passenger-miles_. The US is 1 death per 2.33 billion passenger-miles.
Anecdotally, there's a _lot_ of Indians-walking-near-trains-and-getting-hit-posting-them-doing-it videos on reddit.
In any event, the OP is way off target anyway. The poor kid was in a carriage with his mom, the horse got spooked, she fell out and he leapt out to try to save her but hit his head and died.
I guess "deaths per billion passenger-miles" is not a good metric if you want to compare the US and India, because travelling by rail is simply not that popular in the US (I assume the statistic does not include metro systems?). But if you get run over by a train, it doesn't really matter if it was a freight train or a passenger train (<5% of train casualties are actual train passengers).
> I mean the part about Indians being notorious for being hit by trains.
I'm genuinely surprised we don't see more Indian tourists getting hit by cars, at least here in Scotland. There's a bit of a trend on social media over there, where you'll get an Indian couple on holiday in Scotland taking photos of themselves sitting in the middle of a road.
Roads here are often narrow, twisty, fast, uneven, and extremely busy, so it's quite possible if you do this that the last photo ever taken of you will be the frame juuuust before the dashcam triggers.
If you look at the bush on the right of the road here just as the road curves (we drive on the left; this is looking from the back of the Streetview car heading south), when I was up a few weeks ago there was an Indian couple in wedding clothing sitting cross-legged in the middle of the road right at that bend taking a photo. I should actually pull the dashcam footage of that!
Anyway, that's a 60mph road. Do not sit in the middle of busy 60mph roads, no matter how cool the photo is. That was nearly a very short marriage, "until death do us part out into a thin smear with small chunks in for several hundred metres"...
I dont normally up these kinds of posts, but this one got me.
Or because 78% of voters asked for this
Spit my tea out laughing!
SJP :)
It's a shame we live in a social studies world, where endless debates and committees boil everything down to bland, corporate soup.
It's almost as if anything which has got us here, and which makes us human, is being eroded away as competing groups look for clout and want to show off they're the most ideologically purist.
If horses aren't being looked after, or drivers aren't playing by the rules, you can design for that. City centres should be designed for people first and foremost, and be a celebration of our achievements and histories, not glorified carparks.
Having horses around cities is beautiful, and is a reminder of our histories and who we are. I love seeing the horses in my city trotting around with their beautiful carriages, it's part of the fabric of the city.
It's the same thing with bullfighting, horse racing, greyhounds, etc. It's performative as fuck to whinge endlessly about this shit when there's literal factory-scale slaughterhouses operating.
Levy all animal-related industries and pump that money into animal welfare, and let the animal rights activists make engineering solutions to issues with this money rather than endlessly cry, ban, whinge, cancel, shitpost, etc.
Good riddance, let’s see this play out
They for some reason made the area around Central Park more sophisticated
They made it more of a tourist trap.
Horses only know a human world and removing them from it is wrong, very very wrong, if they have any right, it is to stay.
Horses KNOW there purpose , and ENJOY there work and those who are part of that also know and enjoy there co joined lives, which at times is as close to magic as to be found.
But let me fuck right off, and may the sterilisation bring you some sort of shiny
comfortable pristine experience.
Even if you think this is true generally of horses and humans, I can't understand feeling that it remains true regardless of setting and conditions for the horse? Like, they're overworked, never ever leave cement and heavy traffic and loud city noises and small confined spaces.
Agree with the sentiment, but it's "their"
Liam Neeson (yes, that one) wrote an op-ed defending these carriages in the NYT, back in 2014:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/opinion/carriages-belong-...
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