Angry and dishonest: Anti-horse-carriage protesters can be so fervent, they scare the horses they claim to love. (Dan Callister)
Last week, after a hansom cab driver was caught on video yelling anti-gay and anti-black slurs, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn demanded that carriage drivers sign up for sensitivity training. Sure — but the protesters who verbally and physically attack the drivers should take the same class.
Quinn wrote to the Teamsters, which represents drivers, after tennis legend Martina Navratilova saw a carriage driver calling protesters “dykes” and “n——” last month. Navratilova sent an open letter to the speaker, noting, “As evidenced by the hateful, bigoted carriage driver in the video, everything about this industry is stuck in the 19th century.”
Of course, no one should ever use such cruel speech. But protesters use calculated cruelty on drivers on a regular basis — and some of it spills over onto the horses.
It’s not to defend hate speech to say that a driver would have to be a saint not to respond to the abuse hurled each weekend.
Not long ago, I witnessed the same type of incident that Navratilova likely saw (and I’ve seen a muted version of it several times). Two women, one older and one younger, stood just a foot away from a driver, screaming at the top of their lungs that he was a “murderer” and a “killer.”
Their piercing screams were scaring the horse. The driver patted his horse and, in refuting the murder charge, said to the protesters, at first quietly, that “he’s alive.”
The women screamed “murderer” louder, and the man began to shout that “he’s alive.”
This went on until the man screamed “dykes.”
Acceptable? No. But it’s a double standard when a group of protesters is allowed, unprovoked and untruthfully, to call someone a “murderer,” which has to be the worst slur of all.
Protesters engage in other hateful and unacceptable behavior. They berate families who approach carriages for a ride, saying that they’re participating in murder. They don’t try to deter customers with facts, but with shouted intimidation.
They brandish photos of a dead horse lying in the street — misleading photos: The horse died last year not of maltreatment, but of a common ulcer that is hard to detect, according to the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which polices the trade.
Showing this photo as evidence of maltreatment is akin to showing a photo of a man dead on the street of a heart attack as evidence that his employer treated him cruelly.
In the past, they’ve brandished photos of another horse, who died when a drummer startled him and caused him to run into a post.
(That’s an argument for New York to enforce its noise laws: Illegal noisemaking makes all of us want to bash our head into something.)
As for Navratilova saying that one driver’s name-calling painted the whole industry poorly: Perhaps she needs training to learn not to paint such a broad brush based on one person.
Are carriage horses mistreated? If so, the advocates need better evidence.
What is a fact, though, is that the real-estate and “affordable” housing industries would love to get their hands on the Far West Side stables where the horses live.
Walk west toward the Hudson River, and you’ll see horse drivers brushing and feeding horses where real-estate developers would rather house 20-somethings in tiny-unit “luxury” high-rises for a few years before the 20-somethings put their furniture on the sidewalk and decamp for the suburbs, making room for a new batch who pay high taxes without demanding services.
At any rate, if horse drivers can’t lose it after being severely provoked, the protesters should adhere to some ground rules, too:
* Stop wielding sensational photos that don’t provide evidence for your cause.
* Stop calling non-murderers “murderers.”
* Stop interfering in legal business deals between driver and customer.
* Most important, stop yelling.
Screaming induces health-killing stress in humans as well as horses — and if you need to scream, your argument must be weak.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.