Stuff the ferrets, Mr. Mayor — and save the horses.
That’s the loud-and-clear message from the city’s horse-carriage drivers, who couldn’t understand Wednesday how the de Blasio administration could consider lifting the city’s ban on ferrets while still vowing to run the iconic steeds out of Manhattan.
“Maybe we should get ferrets to pull the tourists around in carriages,” said a fuming Ian McKeever, spokesman for the Horse and Carriage Association.
“I’m glad he’s feeling kindly toward small, furry animals,” McKeever said of news that the city Health Department is considering lifting the 1999 ban on ferret ownership. “But why isn’t he feeling kindly toward the big, furry animals?”
Or, as carriage driver “Sal” said as he stood on Central Park South with his Percheron mare, Jess, “Ferrets can go to hell.”
Meanwhile, the city’s outlaw ferret owners, and advocates for the furry, friendly pets, were rejoicing. “Right now, the city can remove the ferret from your home, place it in a shelter and give you no information for where it is,” said Ariel Jasper, a 23-year-old Brooklyn College student who successfully lobbied the city to consider lifting the ban.
Jasper, of Staten Island, won’t say whether she owns a ferret herself but asserts they are clean and affectionate pets that sleep 18 hours a day.
“They bond with their owners, and they’ll wag their tails and even giggle when they’re happy,” Jasper says.
Giggle? “It’s this funny little sound they make,” she explained.
Ferrets are legal in the vast majority of the United States, including the rest of New York state. But they were banned under the Giuliani administration 15 years ago due to the since-remedied lack of a rabies vaccine and misconceptions about viciousness.
“The Giuliani administration made them sound like killer shrews from some 1950s sci-fi movie,” said one Manhattan-based ferret rescuer.
“If cats and pit bulls are legal, how could a ferret be illegal? It’s absurd,” said Robert Shapiro, director of Social Tees Animal Rescue on the Lower East Side.
“Hopefully, hedgehogs will be next,” said Trisha Kiefer, a hedgehog advocate and breeder from Suffolk County.