Of Horse Carriages and Incremental Abolition

As an abolitionist, my focus isn’t on working to reduce cruelty in industries that use and abuse animals. Instead, my focus is on eliminating the uses of animals. Naturally, I can do that in my personal life by being a vegan and by having a vegan household (no leather furniture, no silk or wool clothes, no honey in the cupboard, no wool in the carpet, and cruelty-free products in the bathrooms). No, I’m not saying my home is perfectly vegan. No one with a non-green home is out of the woods when it comes to animal use and abuse.

When it comes to my activist life, viable opportunities for abolition in my lifetime include:

• Ending greyhound racing.
• Ending the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest.
• Getting elephants and big cats out of zoos and marine mammals out of water parks.
• Ending circuses that use animals.
• Maybe the banning of some animal products like foie gras and veal (but the geese and calves are going to be killed somehow, anyway, so I’m not sure how much of a victory that would be).
• Perhaps some kind of illegalization of fur or some types of fur (not methods of capture or slaughter, as that’s not an abolitionist goal). If that would mean people would buy more of the legal types, it doesn’t seem to indicate progress, though.
• Putting the rodeo behind us, in the history books where it belongs.

Finally, I would think the horse-drawn carriage would be the easiest use of animals to ban. The only reason they still exist is it makes the town or city some extra cash, as with greyhound racing. But unlike greyhound racing, the horses can work up to nine hours at a time, every day of the week, and stand on hot asphalt without shade all day. The carriages aren’t safe for the horse or the surrounding people, but the public often doesn’t get the real story of how dangerous they are. Last week, there was an accident on Central Park South in Manhattan that wasn’t reported by the media. Here’s what the Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages reported:

Sometime during the afternoon of Friday the 13th, there was an accident involving a horse and carriage near the hack line on Central Park South. This was reported to us by a friend who observed a horseless carriage parked on CPS. Thinking that this was odd, she investigated and learned that a taxi had crashed into the carriage at Grand Army Plaza leaving some visible damage on the front. The horse would have been connected to the front of the carriage and quite possibly was injured.

She was told that the horse had to be walked back to the stable – West Side Livery on 38th St. just off 12th Avenue – two miles away. Our friend notified the ASPCA and they arrived on the scene about 20 minutes later. The carriage license plate is #1235.

No officials – not the ASPCA, the NYC Mounted Police, Parks Department – or anyone from any of the agencies that are supposed to oversee this industry were on site. We have heard from many people that there are numerous accidents that never get reported. It is not in the interest of the industry to report them so if they can get away with avoiding this, they will. And – drivers are not required by law to report an accident. We want to know what happened to the horse!

Then there was the accident in Indianapolis caused by a man under-the-influence while driving a van (and crashing it into the horse carriage). This incident prompted PETA to call for a ban on carriage rides in Indianapolis.

What can you do to jettison this hideous use of animals into the past?

• Don’t take a carriage ride.
• Educate your friends and family in the event they have fallen for the marketing ploy that it’s "romantic" to put people and horses in danger.
• Write your legislators asking them to ban the carriages.
• Write departments of tourism and tell them you won’t be visiting, for instance, Charleston, because you can’t bear to watch the horses operating when it’s 98 degrees. (I was thinking of moving to Charleston, but decided against it JUST BECAUSE OF THE HORSE CARRIAGES.)

For more tips, go to the Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages.