It’s reining again
Carriage-ban group launches new ad blitz
They’re making hay again about carriage horses.
The deep-pocketed animals-rights group NYCLASS is reviving its push to get horse carriages off the streets, with an ad campaign aimed at pressuring City Council members to approve the ban.
The ads, which start Thursday, are expected to cost more than $1 million by Election Day.
“You wouldn’t force your dog to weave through lethal city traffic. You wouldn’t force your dog to sleep in a place like this,” the narrator says as videos show trucks and taxis zooming around a horse carriage and a shot of a horse in a stall.
“Yet that’s exactly what frightened carriage horses are forced to do — every single day.”
The narrator concludes, “Tell your council member: NYC streets aren’t safe for horses.”
NYCLASS’s donors — including Edison Properties honcho Stephen Nislick and recycling executive Wendy Wiu — helped raise at least $900,000 for Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign in 2013 and for a nonprofit he controlled, the Campaign For One New York.
A de Blasio-crafted compromise last year would have cut the number of horses by two-thirds and restricted the popular tourist rides to within Central Park’s boundaries.
But the deal collapsed af- ter the union representing carriage drivers came out against it, and the council never took up the issue.
Since then, NYCLASS members have heckled the mayor at public events for his failure to deliver on his 2013 campaign promise to end the carriage rides on “Day One.”
The presumptive Republican nominee for mayor, Staten Island Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, said she would push to restrict carriages to “in or around Central Park,” a position that mirrors de Blasio’s.
NYCLASS’s new proposal also supports restricting the number of streets open to horse carriages instead of a total ban.
“I don’t like the horse carriages out on the street. It’s unsafe for the animals and for people,” Malliotakis said.