By a 40-7 vote, the New York City Council on Thursday approved a long-debated ban on horse-drawn carriages, as of June 2028. That’s 20 months from now, a long time in which much can happen.
Big questions have not been answered, such as how carriage owners will be reimbursed for hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in medallions, what the city will do to help them, the drivers and additional workers find future employment, as well as the fate of the horses when the ban goes into effect.
The legislation puts restrictions on what can be done with them, including prohibiting their sale or transfer for slaughter, resale for slaughter and sale to carriage companies elsewhere. (For another view of the carriage horse industry, click on this link.)
In a statement opposing the measure, Council Member Jim Gennaro emphasized the action involved, “what the New York City Council has never done before: eliminate a legal and regulated industry.”
He pointed out, “This industry’s official regulators, the NYC Department of Health and the NYPD Mounted Unit, affirm this industry’s safety record and affirm the humane care of the horses in this industry. This same industry has made reasonable requests for improvements, such as hitching posts and access to water, requests denied by the Central Park Conservancy.”
The Transport Workers Union, representing the carriage drivers, indicated it will take legal action. And while Mayor Zohran Mamdani supported the bill, he hasn’t committed to signing it. The law can go into effect without his signature, however.
“This bill is a train wreck of constitutional and due process violations,” Union President John Samuelsen stated.
“It offers nothing concrete for blue-collar drivers and carriage owners, who will be financially crushed, stripped of their jobs, their licenses, expensive city-issued medallions, small businesses and way of life.”
Many of those who long have been in favor of the ban, especially on social media, seem ignorant about horses, including what it costs to keep and care for one. They think the carriage veterans will be running free in green pastures. Where? Who will pay their board, and cover farrier, veterinary and feed costs for several decades? It’s not unusual for horses to live into their late 20s.
Who will keep track of what happens to the horses. Will those people even know if they wind up in a kill pen somewhere, and if so, what will they do about it?
The legislation is called Romanch’s law, after 18-year-old Romanch Mahajan, who died when he hit his head on the ground after jumping from a carriage. The horse pulling it had spooked, apparently due to “stray voltage” under ground. The teenager was trying to help his mother, who fell out when the horse bolted.
That incident finally pushed passage of the long-considered ban, even though it was the only human death attributed to the carriage industry in 150 or so years.
There are, however, those who contend the ban at its roots, is a real estate play enabling the West Side stables where the horses live to be available for development.
If so, that could lead to a possible solution. How about this? For permission to develop the West Side property, the buyer would have to pay for construction of a stable in Central Park, where horses could continue to work without having to go to their stalls via city streets, one of the big objections to the carriage business. c
For an idea of how to make that happen, look no further than Wellington, Fla., “The Winter Equestrian Capital of the World.”
In order to develop the land at Equestrian Village, where the Winter Equestrian Festival’s dressage show was held, the Village mandated that the main showgrounds down the road would have to be expanded to include space for dressage.
No expanded showgrounds, no development.
But work is close to completion on the showgrounds, and when it is finished (long before the original 2028 deadline), construction can get under way in earnest on dwellings to be constructed at the former Equestrian Village.
So the question to be asked is why there was no push in the past to move the horses to Central Park? A decade ago, former Mayor Bill de Blasio said his team was researching logistics for building a stable in the park, but nothing happened.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) contends that “suffering is built into the horse-drawn carriage industry. Carriage rides are no walk in the park for horses made to haul them.”
In this era of social license to operate, more radical groups, such as World Animal Protection, maintain that using horses for sport, racing, and entertainment is fundamentally exploitative and “inflicts intentional harm, coercion, and suffering on sentient beings.”
There are those who call for the end of horse racing and equestrian events. With the animal rights agenda in play, that can have further reverberations, threatening using horses for sport or even simply riding and driving. And what about the mounted police horses?
So the carriage horse ban may have even more importance as a precursor. Author James Baldwin put it this way, “If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
