Another carriage horse collapsed and died in NYC. City Council can stop this.
City Council must pass Ryder's Law to put an end to the inhumanity of the horse carriage industry.
Every single day, carriage horses in New York City are worked to deadly levels of exhaustion.
These horses are forced to pull massive carriages through the city for long hours every day, even in the excruciating summer heat. At least 30 carriage horses have died in NYC since 1982.
Let us be clear: horse drawn carriages are not a necessary or needed mode of transportation. On the contrary, they are a tourist trap that makes money for the carriage horse owners at the expense of the safety and well being of the animals.
New York City Council can end the suffering and exploitation of these horses. It is beyond time that they do.
There are between 180 and 200 working carriage horses in New York City. Most of the horses are stabled at the Clinton Park Stables – a dilapidated, multistory tenement building in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan. (Others are kept at either the West Side Livery or Chateau Farms.)
The conditions inside the stables have been knowingly inhumane for decades. It is both reported and documented that the horses are kept in stalls too narrow for them to lie down; they almost never have access to turnout (time outside), and are only allowed to leave their stalls to work.
The horses at the Clinton Park Stables must travel a mile and a half each way to get to Central Park to work, being forced to breathe in vehicle exhaust and are surrounded by the chaos of the city – a dangerous and inhumane environment for a horse.
On June 9, a 16-year-old carriage horse named Deniz collapsed and died while pulling a carriage of tourists in Central Park.
Viral videos show Deniz taking his last breaths, the carriage driver offering him no comfort.
“Deniz was a beautiful, good horse and beloved by his caretakers. Deniz was last seen by the NYPD Mounted Unit’s veterinarian in March and found to be fit. Sadly, horses, just like other domesticated animals, have catastrophic and sudden health incidents,” Eric Loegel with TWU Local 100 told Newsweek.
What Loegel did not disclose was that the veterinarian who had seen Deniz in March has a slate of ethics violations going back decades.
Camilo Sierra, a disgraced veterinarian, has been sanctioned at least seven times by the New York State Gaming Commission and had his veterinary license suspended twice. Sierra has more violations with the state Gaming Commission than all but one other veterinarian in the last 40 years. Despite all of the evidence of gross malpractice, the NYPD in 2025 awarded him a $734,400 contract to care for the NYPD mounted unit for the next five years.
Horses have long been collapsing on New York City streets.
In 2022, a 26-year-old carriage horse named Ryder collapsed in Midtown Manhattan. A video went viral showing his carriage operator, Ian McKeever, attempting to pull Ryder up from the ground, hitting him, and yelling at him to get up as the horse stayed on the ground and dropped his head. Ryder was moved to a farm in upstate New York following the incident, where he was euthanized just two months later.
Even though Ryder’s story is not an anomaly, a bill was named after him – Ryder’s Law – that seeks to phase out and ultimately ban horse drawn carriages in the city.
Even though there is ample support for the bill amongst city council members and the public alike, pressure from the Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents the carriage drivers, has so far made the bill unsuccessful.
New Yorkers do not support the carriage horse industry.
A poll conducted in 2022 by the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Voters for Animal Rights found that 71 percent of New Yorkers support a ban on horse carriage rides.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to put an end to the horse carriage industry. In December last year, then-Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, on the eve of his swearing in, pledged that he would work with the carriage drivers’ union to bring about a ban.
It is time for him to hold true to his word.
Both Zohran and City Council have an obligation to end the inhumane horse carriage industry and NYC residents have an obligation to hold them accountable until they do.