Tradition or Cruelty?

At 13, Roger is a bit of celebrity in New York. He has appeared on "Law and Order" and "Sex and the City" and has fans across Manhattan, including a lot of young girls who line up to greet him each day. Roger is a horse—a 1,400-pound red chestnut Belgian carriage horse, to be exact. And despite his popularity around Central Park, Roger, his owner and the rest of his horse buddies are at the heart of a growing battle over the propriety of the carriage industry—an 18th-century tradition that animal-rights advocates say should be, well, sent back to the stalls.

A romantic carriage ride through Central Park is a New York attraction that has drawn tourists for decades, dating back to at least 1935. The clip-clopping of a horse's hooves can be sweet, reminiscent of a bucolic era when the pace was slower. It has also been glamorized by Hollywood and promoted by city administrators across the country. In New York after the September 11 attacks, the carriage-horse operation, along with everything else, shut down—until Mayor Giuliani came to the stables himself, asking the carriage drivers to come back to work to help restore the city to normalcy. "There's something very poignant about looking at these 18th-century horses," says Carolyn Daly, a spokeswoman for the Horse and Carriage Association of New York, an industry trade group. "This is an industry that's popular, charming and well-regulated—and is completely conducive to what this city is all about."

But the sight of a horse-drawn carriage weaving in and out of Manhattan traffic amid blaring horns, aggressive cabbies, bicyclists, pedestrians and roaring buses has never gone without protest. The city has implemented lengthy safety regulations to protect the animals: horses are allowed to carry tourists on streets outside of Central Park only after 9 p.m.; if they appear ill or if weather conditions are severe, they are to be returned to the stables. Nonetheless, New York has the highest carriage-horse accident rate in the country, a fact that came to light last week after the death of Smoothie on Sept. 14, a mare who was spooked by a drum sound and took off running. She caught her carriage in a tree, broke her leg and went into shock. (A second horse, frightened by Smoothie's outburst, bolted into a Mercedes-Benz, though he was not seriously injured.) That grim incident came on the heels of a scathing audit by the New York City Comptroller, which concluded that the animals work without enough water, shade or oversight from authorities. There were two additional accidents involving the horses this summer, one of which sent a cabby to the hospital. All that trouble has renewed nationwide calls for the industry's ban; opponents to the concession have been holding candlelight vigils in front of Central Park. And one local politician, Tony Avella, a city councilman from Queens, is drafting legislation that would prohibit the trade.

The New York Horse and Carriage Association, which represents the city's 68 carriages, 293 certified drivers and 220 horses (all privately owned), has responded by issuing a safety plan that requires additional harness straps on the horses, and driver training. It has also called on the city to ban live and amplified music near horse staging areas, to provide hitching posts to tie the horses up, and additional water spigots, in addition to better drainage for horse waste. "With the city's help and our own initiatives, hopefully we can put this issue to rest," says Ian McKeever, an Irish immigrant and co-owner of the Shamrock Stables, who comes from three generations of horse farmers and has been in the carriage business for 21 years. "We really do have the horses' best interests in mind."

Still, many animal-rights activists are less interested in increased safety measures than in an outright ban in New York and elsewhere. London, Paris, Toronto and even Beijing—as well as a dozen towns throughout the United States—have outlawed the carriage-horse practice altogether. In regions where it still exists, safety regulations vary and are often difficult to enforce. In New York (where a combination of city agencies and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are charged with implementing city rules), horses are allowed to pound the pavement up to nine hours in any 24-hour period—meaning, technically, they could work nine hours a day, seven days a week—but trade rules give them two days of rest per week and three months off in the summer, says Daly.

Housing also varies: in some smaller regions horses can be shipped in daily from farms, returning at the end of their shift. In New York they live in the tiny stalls in urban stables—all five of which are located within 20 or so blocks of the park on Manhattan's West Side—requiring the horses to traverse busy city streets to get to work. That's one of the reasons, activists say, that so many accidents occur. (Last year a horse named Spotty was euthanized after he collided with a station wagon on his way back to his stable, flinging his driver from the carriage and getting himself pinned underneath the car. He's just one of many examples.) "Horses are a flight animal. When they're startled they run," says Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States. "In an urban environment like New York you have thousands of potential sources of commotion that can trigger that flight response. And the idea that you can cut down on the noise is laughable."