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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Why can't they pass legislation to get the horses treated better instead of banning them?

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?

You think the animal rights activists who are opposing the carriages are tolerable of the meat industry? This is just low hanging fruit.

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.

Horseshit sucks and being around those animals in a city sucks so it’s an easy sell.

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.

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.

There’s nothing more cruel about halal slaughter, as long as they stun (which most do), than the common method.

That's a load-bearing "as long as".

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.

I’m not saying I endorse this, but that is why.

Presumably any and every religious tradition on slaughter is better than max-capitalism factory farming style?

What's objectionable about halal?

> 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.