The rush to ban Central Park horse carriages is – Latest News
Last month’s terrible accident that killed 18-year-old vacationer Romanch Mahajan has introduced a stampede to ban the town’s horse-drawn carriages — context and even rational consideration be damned.
Mahajan’s household testified at a City Council listening to Wednesday in favor of a ban; anybody listening would’ve had a exhausting time holding back tears.
But New York City sees different lethal accidents all of the time — with out prompting a rush to outright ban automobiles, construction work or e-bikes.
And the testimony from these within the industry — those who’d lose their livelihoods, not to point out, in all probability, their horses — was highly effective, too.
The metropolis’s 200 or so drivers, largely immigrants or immigrants’ kids, average all of about $65,000 a 12 months from the commerce; the overwhelming majority who work as impartial contractors or owner-operators get no employer medical insurance coverage or different perks.
For many, as one driver famous (an appeal to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and different socialists?), this is an industry the place “the workers own the means of production.”
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What utter conceitedness for council members to suppose they will write off the ache of destroying drivers’ careers just by “retraining” them for different work.
As a spokesman for the their union famous, the invoice’s “worker development” provisions gained’t lead to jobs that come anyplace close to those the drivers now have.
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As for the horses, the invoice is a “death sentence,” one horse veterinarian testified: The concept that forcefully-retired equines will dwell out peaceable lives at pastoral sanctuaries is pure “fantasy.”
In the background, the years-long drive for a ban depends on myths hyped up repeatedly by animal-rights fanatics about how the horses are supposedly “mistreated” and the rides “dangerous.”
If truth, the horses are properly cared for; they and their stables are subject to common inspections.
Mahajan’s death was the primary ever within the industry’s more than 160-year historical past.
E-bike accidents, in contrast, have killed 133 people simply since 2019 — and by no means thoughts automobiles and trains.
Yet no one’s speaking about banning them.
If the activists had actual proof of horse mistreatment, the town may step up inspections, require higher coaching, higher implement the considerable guidelines already on the books and so forth.
That’s how we deal with fatalities in each different commerce.
No matter how a lot the activists play on public emotion, banning an total (if tiny) industry — a longtime metropolis icon and vacationer attraction — and placing its employees out to pasture isn’t simply overreaction, it’s downright merciless.
The council ought to (to paraphrase Nancy Reagan) simply say neigh.
