This is a bigger deal than it might sound. Despite lots of consensus that the horse carriages are bad, it has taken years to get this done. It infamously stalled during De Blasio's mayoralty too, for example.
This is also an L for the TWU, and I suspect there will be more of those to come in the following months.
It seems kind of strange that the entire meat industry exists and is tolerated, yet a few horses in Central Park are making people so angry. Surely these horses have far better lives than the cows did that everyone's tucking into over lunch?
They're in proximity to people that run on a progressive threadmill.
When it became socially opportune to so i've seen city folk elsewhere shift their animal rights stance to defend halal slaughter laws deeming it to be progressive because it's tied to a group lower on the proverbial ladder.
Animal welfare laws don't give atheist butchers the option to be cruel. They're required to stun the animal first. Why give halal/kosher butchers the option to be cruel? Especially if you claim "most do" choose to stun.
Be kinder to animals, change "most do" to "all do" by removing the religious exception.
...and then come the progressive types to defend 1000+ year old ritual slaughter customs.
In the US at least, freedom of religion does grant some exceptions. The Amish do not participate in Social Security and Medicare, for instance, but I cannot opt out. I’m not sure how it works other places.
> Presumably any and every religious tradition on slaughter is better than max-capitalism factory farming style?
It's really not. You're mixing two things, "max-capitalism factory farming" alludes to how the animal is treated while it's alive, e.g. caged hens vs free-range hens, while what we're talking about here is animal suffering via religious ritual slaughter.
Kosher and halal slaughter are not animal-friendly. They mandate cutting the animal's throat but preserving its spinal cord so it feels every possible pain in its last moments alive as the blood drains out.
Stunning it before death and/or putting a bolt through its brain would be a lot more humane, but those methods didn't exist when those religions came up their rules, so of course not one iota of progress can be added.
You'll see that authorities in e.g. the UK have been asked to regulate kosher/halal butchers, require them to at least stun the animal before doing their ritual slaughter... and the authorities chose not to, and let them keep their religious exemption to animal cruelty laws. Kosher and halal slaughterers can choose to stun the animal first, which would be humane, but they don't have to.
I don't normally talk about downvotes but whomever downvoted the informative comment from amiga above should not have, it was very interesting, I learned from it, and as such it's in line with hacker news ideal.
There's nothing strange about this. You're just failing to recognize the obvious.
Would you seriously have the heart to, say, kick, injure, and torture a calf or lamb that you know was heading for slaughter and was going to end up on your plate?
Do you also fail to see why people ban torture despite still permitting killing in circumstances like capital punishment or war or self-defense or whatever? Would you be okay with getting tortured during your life if you were sentenced to death?
Just because society blessed your excuse to kill a living being, that doesn't make it strange or illogical to oppose your cruelty or their torture during their life. I'm not even taking a position here; this is so obviously not hard to comprehend. If you're looking to point out hypocrisy, this is not an example of it.
You should re-read the comment you replied to. It was not commenting on the killing of animals, but rather on the horrific ways animals are abused while they live. The killing is the least odious part of the meat industry.
Everyone is talking about the slaughter method in the other threads...
Anyway, even in that case, I can't make sense of this logic. You're expecting people to condone cruelty on their own front porches in the city that their government has full jurisdiction over until they tackle the cruelty of industrial agriculture in other jurisdictions? I guess they can't tackle homelessness in their neighborhood either until they feed and shelter the children in Africa? Otherwise they're hypocrites?
But the activists are not the point. Animal rights activists are a minority, things change because the majority or a significant share of people backs them.
In this case this large group that backs banning horse drawn carriages is very likely eating industrially produced meat. That’s the inconsistency, 95% of Americans eat meat and a substantial share cause far greater inhumanity on animals through their diets which are completely optional (as in, they could vote with their mouth and stop it), than these horse drawn carriages which they want to ban.
I think if a bunch of horses were dropping dead in my city from heat exhaustion, and the only upside to having them was that they congested the roads and left shit everywhere, then I would weigh the two and probably say better to not have them. Turns out 78% of registered New Yorkers agree. Maybe they are all massive hypocrites and should actually support this, since they also eat meat.
I do not know. I have not looked into this issue on the merits. I have just observed the gridlock and status-quo bias around it.
I suspect though that mandating better conditions would have the same effect --- the horse tourism business probably stops penciling out if they have to make the required changes. And given that, TWU would fight it just as hard --- a de jure or de facto ban has the same effect as far as they are concerned.
Fascinating, thanks. Sounds to like they must not have tried hard enough if that's the case. Surely they could enforce it through audits/inspections/fines/etc. if they really wanted to?
They probably were unwilling to impose penalties that would be strong enough because they would also put them out of business, and until they were willing to ban it outright they were uncomfortable with that outcome.
If that's the reason, then the solution sounds like a typical bad bureaucratic government - instead of fixing the problem (improved treatment for horses), ban the whole thing.
There is no business here that can afford any capital outlay, this is a bunch of mom-and-pop shops that rent stable slots (I think) and own medallions. No capital outlay -- nothing can really change.
The city could also spend money on the stables. And NYC NYS have spent money propping up stupid small businesses unable to take care of themselves before. But I do not endorse that outcome at all.
This usage is etymological. So its fine. I don't like it when we trash and etymology, but in this case we're restoring it, or at least not making it worse.
("ex normal" doesn't clearly mean "evil"/"sinful", and Latin already had it as "big".)
I saw a post that said roughly "I thought computing was doomed to be 'Linux, Python, and HTTP' for the rest of my life. Now we're free". That's it. Let it sink in. We're free. We can make the computer do whatever we want.
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