12/06/2026

There is a true story, documented in one of the most authoritative historical works ever written about New York — *Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898* by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (Oxford University Press, 1999, Pulitzer Prize for History) — which is well worth revisiting today, as the Italian Parliament debates the proposed bill to ban the slaughter of horses. It is the story of a crisis that seemed intractable, of economic interests that appeared untouchable, of established traditions that were thought to be immutable. And of how all this, within the space of a few decades, was already history.

A city drowning in manure

In the second half of the 19th century, New York was entirely dependent on horses. Every good, every passenger, every load was transported by these animals. The city was home to over 100,000 horses, each of which produced on average between 7 and 16 kilograms of manure a day. The result, precisely documented by Burrows and Wallace, was that over 1,100 tonnes of horse manure accumulated on New York’s streets every day. Added to the flies, typhoid epidemics and childhood diseases caused by this accumulation were the carcasses of dead animals, left to rot on the pavements. The city’s vacant lots were occupied by mountains of manure as high as fifteen metres. A typically New York architectural feature — the raised external steps at the entrance to buildings — was created precisely to allow residents to access their homes without wading through the organic sludge that flooded the streets.

In 1898, the first international urban planning congress in history was held in New York. The agenda had just one real topic: manure. Delegates from all the world’s major cities gathered to find a solution. They did not find one. The conference, scheduled to last ten days, was abandoned after three. The problem seemed truly intractable.

The objections of then, the objections of today

Anyone who, in those years, had proposed removing horses from the streets of New York would have faced objections in some respects similar to those circulating today in the Italian debate. Economic: a ban on slaughter would cause employment losses across the entire horse meat supply chain (transport, trade, breeding) and market distortions. Cultural: the horse as food is part of tradition, history and identity, and a custom rooted for centuries cannot be abolished by decree. Practical: so where would all these animals end up? Who would bear the costs of their upkeep? Would we not risk creating a situation worse than the current one?

These are objections that IHP is all too familiar with, as it has heard them repeated for years with only minor variations. There is talk of local culinary traditions that need protecting, of ‘regulated and monitored’ supply chains that must be preserved, of the economic impact on farmers, and of the risk that a ban without adequate monitoring mechanisms will drive the practice underground rather than eliminate it. Some of these concerns deserve serious answers, and IHP takes them seriously. But the underlying argument — that a change of this magnitude is simply too costly, too complicated, too disruptive to be feasible — is exactly the same one that paralysed delegates at the New York congress in 1898.

The solution no one had foreseen

The ‘Great Manure Crisis’ was not resolved by a government plan or an international conference. It was resolved because society changed, and that change brought with it new technologies and new economic advantages. The electric tram — far more so than the car — was the first and decisive factor in this transformation: silent, smooth-running, capable of carrying far more people without producing manure or corpses. As the costs of maintaining horses rose and the tram became more reliable and economical, the transition accelerated. By 1912, motor vehicles in New York outnumbered horses. A crisis that seemed to condemn urban civilisation to vanish beneath tonnes of manure had dissolved in little more than a decade.

It must be said honestly that the transition was neither painless nor spontaneous. Before the tram structurally resolved the problem, a long process of institutional reform was necessary. Colonel George Waring, appointed sanitation commissioner in 1895 by the reformist mayor Strong, created the first organised corps of street sweepers — the ‘White Wings’, so called for their white uniforms — and enforced basic hygiene rules for the first time. Without that phase of good public administration, the city would not have held out until the advent of the tram. The lesson, therefore, is twofold: structural changes require both innovation and political will.

What this story tells us about Italian law

Those who argue today that a ban on the slaughter of equines is impractical because it would ‘destroy an industry’ are using the same argument as those who, in 1895, claimed that removing horses from New York would destroy the transport economy. The argument was true in the short term. In the long term, history had already proved it wrong.

The consumption of horsemeat in Italy has been in freefall for years: slaughter figures have fallen from over 70,000 animals in 2012 to around 22,000 in 2024. The industry is already contracting due to market dynamics and cultural change, regardless of any legislation. Regulatory action would merely accompany — and accelerate — a transition already underway, just as Waring’s health legislation accompanied the advent of the electric tram.

HP supports the proposed legislation against slaughter not because it believes that bans alone are sufficient. We have been saying this for years: without effective reform of the equine registry, without genuine traceability and without dedicated resources for the end-of-life care of animals, any ban risks pushing the problem into the shadows rather than resolving it. But this is not an argument against the law: it is an argument for getting it right. It is precisely the difference between banning something in the abstract and building a system that makes the ban enforceable and verifiable.

The Great Manure Crisis reminds us that problems which seem eternal have a precise historical duration. What appears immutable — an economy, a habit, a tradition — can change in surprisingly short order, if society decides to do so and the institutions support it. New York did not sink in manure. And Italy will not sink if it decides that horses are not to be eaten.

Source: Edwin G. Burrows e Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press, 1999 (Premio Pulitzer per la Storia 1999).

Photo: checkpeds.com