Rants & Raves

Rant

From www.centralpark.org:

The idea for my first rant came about when I was walking down Central Park South and Central Park West in New York City a couple of weeks ago. It was after 8:00, but it was still pretty light outside. All along these two streets were horse-drawn carriages, some with drivers, some without. The drivers who were there were for the most part sleeping, and a few of the horses looked quite unhappy to be there. One kept stamping his feet, others were looking around all over the place. One horse had to deal with a man who didn’t look like he belonged there and seemed to be bugging the horse. Now, I’ll see horse-drawn carriages all the time, since I work close to Central Park. However, seeing all these horses in a row seemed very sad to me.

It isn’t natural for horses to be tethered up to a vehicle that is used only for luxury. I can understand better a horse used for helping out on a farm and such, but these horses are used for the sole purpose of transporting people, usually tourists, around in a fashion that isn’t needed. The rest of us walk or take the bus, etc. and there are many tour buses around Manhattan (one of them stops right outside the building where I work). Why can’t more people take these forms of transportation instead? They cost about the same, and with a tour bus you even get someone who points out the sights to you.

The treatment of these animals has got to stop. We should not have to exploit other beings for our own entertainment. Just from looking at the horses along Central Park, I’ve noticed that people try to interact with the animals all the time. Imagine just standing there and having crowds of people bugging you, trying to pet your head, and getting mad when you ignore them. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening to these horses. There is a pouch in back of the horses so they can evacuate when they need to, so that you wouldn’t have to walk through horse feces everywhere you turned. However, the horses’ tails naturally fall in this pouch and probably pick up who knows what. Because of the placement of the pouch and the carriage above, the tail doesn’t have much space to move around.

One way to stop this is NOT TO TAKE THE RIDES. Obviously, if no one wants to aid in the exploitation of other animals in this fashion, the carriage companies will have to try something else, like treat their horses better.

Rave

These are only the things that I noticed. I knew nothing of what happens to these horses before and after they work for the day. So I looked on the Internet and found some interesting sites to read.

One of these sites is Project Equus, a horse protection organization in Colorado. To look specifically at the horse-drawn carriage issue, click on F.Y.I., then Carriage Horses. The entire site is worth looking at, however. This site gave me a lot of information on the medical side of what happens to these horses, the side that regular people wouldn’t see. It’s not a “poor us” site which tries to elicit your sympathy by showing animals with big eyes who “need your help”. They give the facts, which are so appalling that you can’t help but do something about it. They also give excellent suggestions as to how to end this problem. For instance, rallies against carriage companies are worse than the original mistreatment of the horses. Instead, we can try to “educate lawmakers about equine health.” (from www.projectequus.org)

Another site to look at is Red Wings, a horse sanctuary in California. This site does have pictures, but the pictures are only there to help illustrate what happens to horses all over the country. To look at their page on carriage horses, click on Equine Issues, then Carriage Horses at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, the picture for this page won’t load properly. This entire site is worth looking into as well.

If you don’t want to get into a letter writing campaign to get lawmakers interested, which I agree is a daunting task, you can donate to these two sites. Tell them that you want to stop this, so they know there are people interested in this issue.

And if you think that I only presented one side of this story, a search on Google for “horse drawn central park” mainly showed me sites inviting me to partake of the wonderful carriage rides in New York City’s Central Park. These are the only two sites I found in the first 200 pages that said anything of substance.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 29th, 2002 at 12:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.