Enough With The Fucking Central Park Horses Already

Every time I walk through Central Park, I think the same thing: enough with the fucking carriage horses. They look absolutely miserable. It’s horrifying to see them out there on 100 degree days trotting around the park. They leave huge piles of shit all over the city, and in this day and age—where we have lithium battery-powered scooters, skateboards, and unicycles—it simply just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m ashamed to say that until today, I hadn’t felt strongly enough to actually write about the well-being of these animals. Some of my close followers know I was vegan for a long time and still eat mostly vegetarian, but the last thing I want to do—or be accused of—is preaching what works for me as something that should work for somebody else.

This is why I love being a libertarian: it allows me to put a name to my stance of “not telling other people how to live.” But that doesn’t mean I can’t have opinions.

I’m sad to say it took this post on Twitter this evening—showing a horse collapsed and dead in the middle of Manhattan—for me to finally be compelled to write this piece.

Some of my friends in Philadelphia know I’ve spoken out about the carriage rides offered in Old City there, but I’ve never gotten on a pedestal and preached about animal rights, mostly because I always found other vegans and vegetarians so fucking annoying that I didn’t want to identify as one of them.

I ate vegetarian and vegan for both health and ethical reasons, having witnessed tons of footage from factory farms—a rite of passage in the punk rock scene of the 1990s and early 2000s where PETA was prominent. All of my favorite bands were animal rights activists, and I understood the cause completely.

Later in life, I had the fortitude to make the decision to eat fewer animal products on my own, knowing that we had other options and that factory farming was not just unnecessary, but also completely dehumanizing and humiliating for the animals involved.

But being active in the jiu-jitsu scene and the running world, you realize very quickly that many people are hell-bent on eating meat — some people, almost exclusively.

Many of the athletes I admire, the podcasts I listen to, and the people whose opinions I respect are all meat-eaters. A lot of them follow carnivore or keto diets. I completely respect that. I know eating meat can be healthier than eating tons of carbohydrates. I understand the case for it. That’s why I never bring it up to anybody and barely ever talk about it. But for me, it just doesn’t work.

This isn’t a diatribe about what people should eat or how they should live their lives. Rather, I just want this to serve as a common-sense wake-up call: we don’t need horses in the middle of fucking Manhattan anymore. There’s nothing normal about seeing a horse in a crosswalk.

New York is a city with millions of people crammed into 15 square miles. There is nothing about Manhattan that is conducive to a horse’s normal lifestyle. Their presence is completely unnecessary—it’s purely for show at this point. And you’d think being a Democrat-run city — the party of empathy and equality — this wouldn’t even be an issue. But for some reason it is.

This is not the 18th century anymore. Horses aren’t a necessity. For police, for park rides, for anything, unless you live in Montana or Texas. We replaced horsepower in transportation with engines that create horsepower. The point? We don’t need fucking horses to create horsepower. And we definitely don’t need them to be dragging a couple fat fuck tourists who just left The Cheesecake Factory in Times Square around a 1 mile loop in Central Park because said obese Americans are too lazy to actually walk.

Imagine broken horses and their evolutionary biology trying to adapt from carrying 150 pound, Marlboro Red chain smoking, whiskey drinking cowboys in the late 1800s to carrying a family of 4 that weighs a collective metric ton after consuming a 10,000 calorie dessert with 400 grams of sugar called “The Chocolate Lava Mountain” in 105 degree heat, being fed grain with no water while taking “breaks” standing up on 57th Street. Is it any wonder the horses are dropping dead?

And listen, I don’t want to be out of touch. Nobody knows better than I do about holding onto things that have become antiquated. I’m the first guy to defend protecting historical statues activists want to pull down, and I’m far closer to the historical meaning of the Second Amendment than to the argument for updating it because of the evolution of weaponry. I can appreciate history and “the way things used to be.”

But everything about this video of a poor animal dying without dignity in Central Park—among millions of people walking around refreshing Instagram, paying for overpriced retail products, taking selfies, hailing taxi cabs and discussing dinner reservations—is horrifying. The fact that the horse is dying in the middle of a city where it never belonged in the first place is one thing. The fact that some other world class twat is walking around filming it, using the horse’s suffering to boost their social media presence, is an even more horrific commentary on the human race.

I’m not some 22-year-old activist with no grasp on how the world works, asking for something unreasonable. It just feels like in this day and age, there are zero redeeming reasons to continue the practice of horses pulling carriages in major U.S. cities. I don’t need the entire world to become animal rights activists, nor am I advocating for anyone to eat the way I do.

At this point, I’m just advocating for an idea whose time has finally come—and whose basis for being put into action, in my opinion, appeals only to the most basic principles of respect, dignity, and integrity for other living beings. That should make sense to most people, regardless of race, religion, color, creed, or political view.

Let’s just call it a day on horse-drawn carriages and pretend it’s the year 2025. The horses haven’t evolved to our fat asses, but maybe we can prove to them that we’ve evolved in our thinking.

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