Comment by gaiagraphia
3 days ago
Did the locals realise before or after tucking into their burgers?
Banning something just because kids 'might' (would love to see a % chance on this) die on the streets is alarmist nonsense. Should we ban trains and cars, too?
There's ways to mitigate cruelty and exploitation, just like we do for humans.
What's the difference between this and people keeping pets couped up indoors and exploiting them as 'emotional support', etc? If animals are meant to be wild and not exploited, people should at least be consistent.
We didn't ban horses, we banned touristic carriage rides specifically because the few companies that operated treated their animals questionably. You can still see horses, just not ones that are getting abused.
And for what it's worth, even if you provided your animals with the greatest care (which they didn't), just putting them to work for 12 hours a day on a hot paved street was largely seen as abusive.
It might not have happened often that a horse fainted or died on the job, but when it did it caused enough of an uproar to pressure the people in charge to do something. As someone who has witnessed it, you really only want to see that once.
I'm kinda curious what other horses you'd have in the streets, there?
I've lived in the UK, and now Finland, and generally the only time I see horses are when ridden by the police.
(In Scotland it was common-place to see mounted police outside Rugby and Football matches, apparently the increased height gave them good visibilty. I'm sure they trained and selected for even-tempered horses, but I always imagined the combination of thousands of shouting pedestrians and horses was a bad one. If a horse got spooked things would end pretty badly, and quickly.)
We have mounted police (that's the MP in RCMP) along with their stable (barrack?) that I think they organize group things with (to get the horses in training used to crowds maybe?), for a time the stable where the carriage horses used to stay were turned into a zoo type of thing where you could hang with the horses until they figured out where to go, and then most of them went to refuges outside the city. Admittedly horses are a rarer sight in the city now, but they also don't belong there at all.