08/07/2016

(28 June 2016)

Yet another tourist horse-drawn carriage in an accident, this time in Piazza Venezia in Rome. A witness reports that the horse pulling the carriage took fright and then collapsed to the ground in full view of the public, after a motor scooter cut across his path.
An employee of the Rome transport service assisted the carriage driver in getting the horse back on its feet, but no veterinary assistance was called in to ascertain whether the horse was unharmed.

Carriages are old fashioned, they belong to bygone centuries, they are anachronisms and they are totally incompatible with today’s cities, with their congested and noisy streets, streets choked with motorised vehicles of every type and dimension. It is clear that a horse pulling a carriage will be subjected to very harsh physical and psychological stresses (it is not hard to imagine how a horse must feel in the midst of city traffic), and that the situation is dangerous for the animal, as it is for humans. This danger is amply illustrated by the ever more frequent accidents reported in the press.

Let us take a closer look at the life these carriage animals live. Each morning the ’botticelle horses’ leave their pokey cramped stables for the city roads, where they spend long hours in harness, either kept standing still, or pulling loads which are very often not checked for limits. Add to this the absence of proper veterinary checks, which would anyway be insufficient to ascertain their real state of health, given that these animals are subject to a totally unnatural lifestyle, quite incompatible with their basic nature.

The admiring tourists climb aboard the carriages, yet without a thought for the horse, and no-one really knows the lives these poor creatures live; above all no-one knows what happens to them once they can no longer work. There is very little known about where they end up, just as in many other areas where equids are used, and this is clearly something which should be subject to proper investigation.