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?
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.
I’m not saying I endorse this, but that is why.
What's objectionable about halal?
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.
Read more about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shechita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_ritual_slaugh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronarcosis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_bolt_pistol
You'll see that authorities in e.g. the UK have been asked to regulate kosher/halal butchers, require them to at least stun the animal before doing their ritual slaughter... and the authorities chose not to, and let them keep their religious exemption to animal cruelty laws. Kosher and halal slaughterers can choose to stun the animal first, which would be humane, but they don't have to.
The fact that kosher/halal are very similar is a hilarious wrinkle for the culture war aspect that OP was pushing.
Would you seriously have the heart to, say, kick, injure, and torture a calf or lamb that you know was heading for slaughter and was going to end up on your plate?
Do you also fail to see why people ban torture despite still permitting killing in circumstances like capital punishment or war or self-defense or whatever? Would you be okay with getting tortured during your life if you were sentenced to death?
Just because society blessed your excuse to kill a living being, that doesn't make it strange or illogical to oppose your cruelty or their torture during their life. I'm not even taking a position here; this is so obviously not hard to comprehend. If you're looking to point out hypocrisy, this is not an example of it.
The dairy industry is worse.
Anyway, even in that case, I can't make sense of this logic. You're expecting people to condone cruelty on their own front porches in the city that their government has full jurisdiction over until they tackle the cruelty of industrial agriculture in other jurisdictions? I guess they can't tackle homelessness in their neighborhood either until they feed and shelter the children in Africa? Otherwise they're hypocrites?
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.