Chicago without horse-drawn carriages?
Activist seeks a ban as owners deny animal cruelty
A dozen protesters have lined up beneath the limestone spires of the Chicago Water Tower, but only one wades out into the stream of shoppers and tourists.
Strikingly tall, with long, blond hair and a sunny smile, Jodie Wiederkehr carries on two and sometimes three conversations at once. She helps a frazzled father sign her petition calling for a ban on horsedrawn carriages in Chicago. She somehow knows that the man standing a few feet away, staring awkwardly into the middle distance, wants to sign her petition too.
When an enthusiastic woman with a hot-pink umbrella lingers, Wiederkehr grows more expansive, offering a glimpse into the hundreds of hours of volunteer work she has done, monitoring the horses’ treatment.
“The law is the horses can only work six hours in a 24-hour period,” Wiederkehr says. “We’ve documented them working from 11 a.m. to midnight — and then they’re on the street again the next day.”
“Those poor babies!” the woman with the pink umbrella says, her eyes wide.
In the past four years, Wiederkehr, leader of the 1,600-member Chicago Alliance for Animals, has helped push an obscure issue into the spotlight with protests such as this, an active Facebook page and dozens of “monitoring sessions” in which volunteers descend on the Magnificent Mile to document alleged mistreatment of carriage horses.
And her cause is gaining ground. A proposed horse carriage ban that she supports has 26 sponsors in the City Council, or enough votes to pass, provided the measure is allowed to go to a vote.
“I give Jodie a lot of credit,” said Ald. Raymond Lopez, one of the sponsors of the proposed ban. “She has been at the forefront of this issue for as long as I can remember. She and her dedicated team have spoken at almost every City Council meeting for about a year and a half.”
Lopez said he is optimistic about the ban’s chances in 2020.
To her allies, Wiederkehr, 50, is a dedicated champion of the voiceless, a veteran animal rights activist who has put in thousands of unpaid hours fighting for carriage horses, while living in a one bedroom apartment and supporting herself as a bartender and food server.
“She’s warm, incredibly personable and laid-back, but she’s also got these amazing leadership skills where she can just galvanize people, including myself,” said Barbara Krantz, a founding member of the Chicago Alliance for Animals.
“Her gift is her ability to take what she cares about and go with it. She gives all of her time. She’s relentless — in a good way.”
To her detractors, Wiederkehr is a starry-eyed idealist who doesn’t understand horses — their strength, their breeding, their capacity for work — and could do real harm to humans, both carriage drivers and tourists.
“There’s no animal cruelty going on, and there’s no activity detrimental to these horses’ health occurring on the streets of Chicago,” said Jim Rogers, owner of Great Lakes Horse & Carriage, during a phone interview in which he occasionally interrupted himself to tend to his 4-year-old son.
“This whole issue exists because that’s what animal rights activists do: They create an issue that doesn’t exist, and they come up with a solution. And they use emotional appeals to pull people in their favor, because no one wants to see an animal suffer. We had a (City Council) committee hearing about this roughly a year ago, where we had experts come, we had veterinarians come, and all of them expressed that there isn’t any cruelty going on.”
The carriage ban is currently in the City Council’s license committee, where it stalled last year, never making it to the full council for a vote.
A vegan who lives in Lakeview with two rescue cats, Wiederkehr traces her love of animals to her childhood in tiny Preemption, Illinois, three hours west of Chicago. Her backyard was a cornfield, and she grew up with dogs, cats, rabbits and guinea pigs. Her mother took in stray cats and found homes for them; at one point, she cared for an injured raccoon, at another, a lamb that had been rejected by its mother.
“We had this baby lamb in a pen in our living room,” Wiederkehr recalled, laughing.
Wiederkehr moved to Chicago after college and, at the suggestion of her thenboyfriend, embarked on a career in animal protection, working at the National Anti-Vivisection Society in Chicago and later for the Committee to Protect Dogs in Massachusetts, where she led an effort to collect 150,000 signatures to place the anti-dog-racing Greyhound Protection Act on the 2008 ballot.
In 2015, she was part of a small group of activists who founded the Chicago Alliance for Animals, a group intended to bring together the city’s various established animal rights groups and effect change, largely through legislation. The group chose the horse carriages as its first cause, in a move that reflects Wiederkehr’s results-oriented practicality.
“This is one issue when it comes to animal welfare where you can see it,” said Wiederkehr. “You can’t get into the animal laboratories, same with factory farms of slaughterhouses. This is right in front of our eyes, and we’re not breaking the law when we document (it).”
But strategy wasn’t the only consideration. Wiederkehr, who can’t assist with stray cat neuter-and-release because she ends up keeping the cats, is frankly emotional about the animals she is fighting for.
“I love horses,” she said, tearing up during an interview at the Water Tower protest.
“What the (carriage) operators say is I didn’t grow up with (horses): I’m not an expert, so I should have no opinion on this. I will say horses hold a very big part of my heart. I think they’re so gentle and beautiful, and they seem to have been abused more than any other animal. They just — they have no voice in this world.”
In 2017, the first year of horse-carriage monitoring by Wiederkehr and her Chicago Alliance for Animals, the city issued 334 citations for violations of the city’s horse-carriage regulations, according to CNN. Wiederkehr said many of those citations were due to her group’s work.
The citations were for working horses for more than six hours at a time, working horses in temperatures of 90 degrees or above, failing to provide water at the proper intervals, and committing traffic violations, such as failing to properly signal a turn or operating without turning on the required lights during evening hours, records show.
In 2018, the city’s three horse carriage companies agreed to a settlement regarding the 2017 citations, paying over $20,000 in fines. Rogers said the city threw out many citations, and the carriage companies agreed to the settlement only because fighting the allegations would have been more costly.
Among the allegations that he disputes: that he and his colleagues are overworking their horses. City regulations say only that a horse cannot work more than six hours in a 24-hour period, but not what constitutes “working.”
Rogers said activists count the time a horse stands at the curb as working; he counts only the time when the horse is actually in action, pulling the carriage.
Disputes between the activists and the carriage owners can get very involved, with both sides piling on details. Take the case of Forrest Gump, a Belgian draft horse. Wiederkehr and her fellow activists called in a complaint in August, saying Forrest Gump was working with a limp and open sores on his leg.
An animal control officer sent the horse home for the day, a victory for Wiederkehr, who often mentions his case. But the horse’s owner said that one of his alleged sores was actually a chestnut, or a naturally occurring growth found on horses’ legs.
As for the other alleged injury: “He had a little scratch on him — it could have been a fly bite. He could have rubbed his shoe on his leg,” said Forrest Gump’s owner, Debbie Hay, of Antique Coach & Carriage Co.
“Such a minor skin abrasion — such a minor, minor thing. It just happened to have a drop of blood on it. The next day the veterinarian looked at it and said, ‘It’s nothing more than an abrasion; it’s a nonissue. This horse is not lame at all.’”
In recent weeks, Wiederkehr has been emailing aldermen, rallying activists on Facebook and appearing at City Council with allies in tow. On Oct. 2, she and her supporters hand-delivered a petition with 20,000 signatures to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office.
As Wiederkehr led the Water Tower protest, temperatures dipped, rain threatened and gray clouds blotted out the sun. But she and her fellow protesters closed out the demonstration in good spirits, with Wiederkehr cheerfully noting that one of her fingers seemed to be suffering from an old case of suspected frostbite, and a pal chiding her for not dressing more warmly.
Wiederkehr said with a laugh that she hates the cold.
But she would be back downtown the next day, monitoring the carriage horses, documenting their treatment, making her case hour by hour, day by day.