The Left’s War on Horses | FrontPage Magazine

At Grand Army Plaza, beneath the golden equestrian statue of General Sherman, thehorses stand, lazily flicking their ears, and occasionally glancing around as a yellow taxi driven by an angry Pakistani wheels around past the Plaza Hotel, brakes squealing, an Al Qaeda friendly Nasheed blaring through the open window.

Feathered plumes, scarlet red, sapphire blue, electric purple, matching the colors of the plush linings of their carriages, stir faintly in the wind. The drivers, wearing black top hats and colorful suits, chat with each other while waiting for a tourist from Baltimore or Beijing to take a ride. The horses stir, shaking their heads, as the Chinese artists sketch caricatures for 5 bucks a piece and the African vendors lugging sacks of fake Rolexes or pirated Fendi handbags look around suspiciously for the cops.

Like true New Yorkers, the horses of Central Park pay little attention to what is going on around them. No matter what happens, they yawn, showing their teeth and showing how little it moves them. But though the bored urban equines do not know it, their world is about to change. The horse is not ordinarily an endangered animal, but if New York’s new progressive mayor has his way, the horses of Central Park will be extinct and the only equine in sight will be General Sherman’s golden horse sneering down at the parvenu jewelry shoppers of Fifth Avenue.

On the other side, at Columbus Circle, beneath the looming tower of Time Warner Center where CNN personalities chatter endlessly, pedicabs offer rides for three dollars a minute. One enterprising competitor has even cut his fare down to a measly two dollars.

The drivers, mainly Nigerians, who have taken over much of the tourist trade in the city, hassle tourists, urgently calling them over. “Hey guy.” “Madam, madam, come here.”

There are no proposals to ban the pedicabs. The only animal they exploit is the human animal, and it isn’t always clear who is exploiting whom.

Turkish pedicab driver Savas Avci was caught ripping off tourists by offering them a $1 a block ride with a $100 per person minimum written in fine print on the card. Surprised Irish and Asian visitors completed a 10 block ride and were hit with a $400 bill. The pedicab scam wasn’t illegal, but it was typical of a new tourist trade dominated by foreign scam artists, who unlike the carriage horse drivers, have no roots in the city and no sense of tradition.

Meanwhile a twenty minute horse carriage ride, complete with warm blankets and cocoa, runs to fifty bucks.

Though the horses huffing clouds of warm breath into the cold air of a March morning may not know it, they have long been the targets of an urban predator that their instincts, wired for warning them of cougars and rattlesnakes, had not prepared them to detect. While the horses grew complacent in a city whose predator food chain culminates in the rare coyote that crosses the George Washington Bridge, they were being stalked by the city’s true predator.

Homo progressivus’ hunting call is a whine emitted through a megaphone at a rally and he marks his kills with regulations.

Horses have long been the chosen prey of Homo progressivus and this election, PETA, an animal rights organization that killed 2,000 cats and dogs in one year, and NYCLASS, a wealthy anti-horse group dominated by a real estate tycoon who appears more interested in seizing the stables where the horses live, than in their welfare, finally got their way.

Bill de Blasio, who had picked fights with such New York traditions as the Columbus Day Parade and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, vowed to get rid of the horses in his first week in office.

The week passed and the horses stayed.

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