Monday, October 19, 2015

Horses

There's currently a plot to get rid of horse drawn carriages in Cincinnati. A group calling itself Unbridled Freedom wants to ship these horses off to the slaughterhouse & their owners to the unemployment line. On their Change.org profile page they offer no information about their organization. Why so clandestine? Are they animal rights activists or just pet food manufacturers? A serious red flag.
Over on Charnel 12's Facebook page commenters say the horses look great, the horses look terrible, the horses are happy, the horses are sad, the horses are crazy, the horses slow down traffic, the horses breathe polluted air, the horses should run free in the wild, the horses should sit around on farms...
Charnel 12 article states that the horses & their living conditions are routinely inspected & have had no citations.
Here's the deal, these horses would likely die if they were turned loose on the plains. They would get dirty, have no health care and they would starve.
They would also get bored.
Horses are social animals. They like to interact with other mammals and they like having something to do. Furthermore the notion that the automobile should be a one size fits all transportation solution has led to more problems than it has solved.
We have used horses for millennia. We have bred them for greater size & strength. For the thousands of years we used horses & oxen on the roads, pretty much nobody died on the roads. With the introduction of the automobile, between 1900 & 1920 road fatalities in the US went from 50 to 11,000. Nowadaays we hover around 33,000 per year. There's also the lives lost drilling & fighting for oil.
You can also figure in thee costs of the roads, signage, policing, and healthcare costs due to breathing auto emissions. yup, humans breathe that stuff, too.
So, rather than ban the horses, I say let's expand their use. Both pulling carriages & single horseback riding. We could expand routes up Spring Grove Avenue to Northside & out on Eastern Avenue to Mt Lookout. Cars can use Central Parkway, I-75 & Columbia Parkway. Wee could have loops connecting the business districts of Hyde Park & Oakley.
FWIW, there are bridle paths in Mt Airy Forest.
The city should be a place to live - not a place to dodge wannabe race car drivers. We should add horses, camels, Segways, skateboards, rickshaws, bikes, buses & street rail to the mix. Cleaner air, a quieter town, healthier, safer people, lotsa fertilizer...
Don't support this recondite initiative - make horses part of the solution.

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