Horse Business

Today I went somewhere that needed a considerable amount of driving. While driving I usually like to listen to the radio, lacking anything else to do. Now, when one listens to the news for a while one can hear the same things over and over again.

Today one of these over and over again items was the stopping the horse and carriage rides around Manhattan's Central Park that has been around, I guess, forever.

Our newly and very popularly elected Mayor DiBlasio promised that he would do everything in his power to stop these horse rides. He claims the horses are ill treated and to make them do what they do is cruel and inhumane.

This thing kind of bugs me.

Our esteemed mayor has nothing to do but worry about possible cruelty to horses? He doesn't care that all the people in this business will lose their jobs and most of all the horses will become sausages, burgers, soap, glue and whatever else they can be made into? Now that is not inhumane and not cruel?

Since when work is cruel and inhumane?

Horses are work animals from the beginning of time. I grew up in Hungary and before I left the country we probably had more working horses than trucks. There were several classes of work horses.

The Post Office had the most beautiful horses. Well fed, slim and very well groomed. The mail carriages were usually rubber wheeled thus it was easier to pull. They were used to deliver mail and packages and it worked fairly well.

The beer companies had these monstrosities that looked like the Clydesdales. Huge, strong very well fed and kept horses who were pulling the heavy carts loaded with wooden barrels all over Budapest to deliver beer.

Then there were other parts of commerce and businesses that used horse drawn carts to have their merchandises delivered. These horses were more abused than the first two groups. Some of these horses were worked senselessly and cruelly.

I am not even talking about agriculture where horses really did the all the daily chores on the fields. But since they were owned by their farmers they were better cared.

So, what's the point of all this?

The point is that pulling a few tourists around a park is no cruelty for a horse. That horse is better off than many others living in countries where they really make them work. The cruelty is when that poor animal stands in the stall doing absolutely nothing. It is in the horse's genes to work. Turning him into sausages IS inhumane.