Millions of people fill the streets of New York City. They walk, jog, and continuously jabber to each other and into phones. Even more drive and ride in cars, buses, motorcycles, and bikes. This all makes for a hodgepodge of noise and movement. Now imagine plopping a noise sensitive horse down in the middle of all this and expecting them to pull carriages all day. Plainly it is cruel.
The streets themselves pose a problem. Pieces of plastic, rocks and metal could get lodged in their hooves and cause them to be lame, the horse equivalent of being too injured to work. Horses that wear shoes are less likely to be struck lame by an object on the street but a stray rock could still find it’s way into the frog or sensitive part of there hooves. Horses need there hooves cleaned before and after any ride. This prevents rot and damage to the horses hooves. But when they are walking around all the time and probably getting all kinds of stuff in their hooves without a chance to have them cleaned like the horses in N.Y it can cause serious damage. In short, just for their hooves horses should be taken off the streets. When they aren’t pulling tourists around, the horses stand still attached to their carts in a long line on a street bordering Central Park usually without food or water. This street also happens to be where a bus stops. Sometimes one can see them with buckets of either food or water. This is doubtfully enough though. The kind of horses that pull carts in N.Y should eat three quarts of good quality feed twice a day. Six quarts wont fit in a small metal bucket. Ideally clean, fresh water should be available at all times for horses. You should also water your horse before and after a ride. This is not available when you are pulling around a cart or standing in rows on the street. Water for horses should be changed twice a day to prevent dirt and other nasty bits of things from contaminating the water. I imagine this is even more of a problem in the city where dust from cars, buses, and bikes could easily blow into the little water they get. Also horses that work all day like the horses pulling carriages in New York should have access to more water than generally inactive horses. So those buckets out once or twice a day does not suffice.
Now the strongest argument against horses in New York is the sound. The never ending noise. New York City is home to more than eight million people (according to the official New York City statistics). That’s just the people that live there. At least 40 to 50 million people visit New York City every day (according to the official New York City statistics) for work, visiting, and just plain having a vacation. Now that is all great, New York City is filled with fun and very famous things to do, but that definitely doesn’t make it a good place for horses. Horses are much more sensitive to sound and movement than humans. According to the ASPCA they hear all the sounds we hear, plus about another half octave higher. Horses, being prey animals, need to have good hearing to prevent being killed by predators. I bet you have seen videos or heard stories about horses spooking or freaking out about loud noises or sudden movements. Often no matter how well they are trained horses can still spook at a loud noise or a sudden movement. Even though these carriage horses aren’t in the mainly busy part of the city there is still an over loud of sounds and actions that could freak out a horse enough to make it unsafe to the people in the carriages as well as the horse pulling it.
Now it is only fair to take into account the people who run these operations and believe that they are not cruel. On the Central Park site there is a page about the horse carriages. They have a few rules like that carriages are not permitted to go out in temperatures higher than eighty nine degrees or lower than nineteen degrees. They also don’t allow rides below 34th street. Now this keeps the horses out of extreme temperatures and busy roads but this still does not help the food and water problems, the harmful things in the road, and there is still people, sound and movement. It would take quite a lot of resources to make New York City suitable for horses, and I don’t think that the city is willing to make those major changes.
To conclude, a city, especially a large one like New York, should not be home to horses because of all its dangers and problems. Horses are amazing creatures who deserve to be treated with the kind of respect that can’t be given to them in a crowded city. So that is why horse carriages should be banned from New York City.
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