SOME BASIC HORSE SENSE
New Yorkers, and the nation alike, will soon be abuzz over 2014 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes champion California Chrome's bid for the Triple Crown at Long Island's Belmont Park. We will earnestly watch on as this magnificent animal is mounted by a determined jockey, loaded into a mechanical starting gate and set loose to race a field of thoroughbreds around Belmont's demanding mile-and-one-half oval track. It will be a grand spectacle celebrated from coast to coast.
Even as California Chrome prepares to run Belmont in the weeks leading to June 7, halfway across the country in Missouri, a hitch of Budweiser's famed Clydesdales is scheduled to make beer deliveries in downtown St. Louis from May 26 through 28. These glorious horses have become Christmas Season favorites pulling the bright red, ornately appointed Budweiser carriage. Pleased onlookers will smile and applaud as the Clydesdales march past next week in the St. Louis city streets. Though a Budweiser brand, they have become a truly American symbol.
Over these same weeks, mounted police units in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia will do their thing. Police officers will patrol city streets and parks perched atop well-trained horses decked out in police colors. Parents will approach the horses with their wide-eyed children, who will pet the horses and revel in the company of uniformed policemen. Civic spirits will fly high.
The tradition of man and horse working side-by-side throughout the cities of America is longstanding. It is a part of our cowboy heritage. It is the stuff of Paul Revere's ride. Horses provided the power for tilling the fields and raising barns in our agrarian past. Like man and dog, man and horse seem to have been made for one another. Equines have long flourished in serving their masters. And their masters in turn have willingly and, yes, lovingly fed, groomed and cared for their horses, assuring their health and well being. The bonds between man and animal run deep. We weep over and mourn the loss of our animals, treating them as equal family members.
Enter Mayor Bill de Blasio. Though not a horseman himself, Mr. de Blasio claims to care more passionately for these animals than do their day-to-day masters, whose very livelihoods depend upon the health, energy and spirits of their horses. He is prepared to shut down a New York City tradition that has pleased tourists and New Yorkers alike for decades, as they momentarily escape modernity and mentally transport themselves into the simpler times and streets of Olde New York. Yes, Mr. de Blasio wishes to rid the city of the horse-drawn carriages serving Central Park. Why? Animal cruelty says the Mayor. Because once in a very long while, a horse may become spooked or a carriage may spill, our Mayor would eliminate the carriages altogether in order to spare the horses cruel treatment. For Mr. de Blasio, the exception apparently is the rule. News flash: rare mishaps do not equal animal cruelty. They are rare mishaps that we must try to make even rarer through reasonable precautions, not elimination of a grand tradition. Mr. de Blasio is small-minded and ill-informed on this issue. Ask Liam Neeson whose invitation to educate the new mayor went unanswered. Mr. de Blasio does not want facts to get in the way of politics, even bad politics.
Look out race horses, Clydesdales and police horses. With Bill de Blasio as your protector, you soon may join America's unemployed.
