The new King of New York City is determined to outdo Bloomberg in the BAN EVERYTHING FUN  business, and has decreed that the charming tradition of horse driven carriage rides in the city was coming to an end.

“We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period,” de Blasio said on Monday. “It’s over.”

Is that the Royal “We”, Your Highness??

Of course he has the approval and campaign dollars of a radical animal “rights” group, NYCLASS.  Check them out.  Same sort of nonsense that drives urban people to run around naked and throw paint on people.

(They want to BAN fois gras???  I don’t like these people)

Let’s see what people that REALLY know about carriage horses have to say about this:

Tommy Hughes, driver of Oscar, 33 years in the business:

“It’s all politics. It’s got nothing to do with the horses. These horses are vetted. They got more rules and regulations now than they ever had. They get like five weeks vacation. Most horses actually get more time than that. If you send a horse up, you don’t leave him for five weeks. You leave him for two or three months. Everybody has two horses for their carriage. When this horse goes to Pennsylvania, he’s there for four months.

When [de Blasio] was on the city council, there was a bill that came forward about the horse and carriages industry. He didn’t vote against it. So now all of a sudden he’s against it. That says there’s more to it.”

Christina Hanson, a carriage driver had this to say:

“de Blasio] doesn’t know anything about horses. He hasn’t had a pet since childhood. So he doesn’t even know about dogs. That’s a telling sign. That’s a sign that he’s a radical animal rights person because animal rights people don’t think you should own dogs or cats. That animals belong out there someplace and not in the city, not in our apartments, not in our homes, not in our lives. So he doesn’t know anything about horses.”

Another driver, Dave Koch, driver of Mabel, 30 years in the business:

“A mammal has been bred to pull for 8,000 years starting with denuding the forests of Europe when civilization first began so they’ve been bred to do nothing but pull. A ridden animal horse is more contemporary—3,000 as opposed to 8,000—so these animals have been pulling stuff for many thousands of years. This is very easy on them. An animal that does this for most of its life will work well into its twenties, even. I’ve worked horses out here that were 32, 33, 34.

Then they get retired. There isn’t anything that’s ultimately deleterious to the animal by pulling, bearing tires on a smooth surface. There is no argument to be made that that’s going to harm the horse whatsoever. You’ve got a group of people who are being fed nonsense. The guy who’s funding all this is a real estate guy.

His name is [Steve Nislick, co-founder and president of NYCLASS]. He’s interested in buying the land. The stables are located right by the Javits Center and they want to put hotels up in there.”

And there you have it.   Greed cloaked in animal advocacy.  Shocked, I’ll tell ya….SHOCKED!

Here is the REAL reason NYCLASS and deBlasio (who benefitted from NYCLASS running $774,000 worth of ads attacking his opponent Christine Quinn) want the horses gone:

“Mostly, though, I find it curious that one of the leaders of the anti-carriage horse forces, which propose that they be replaced by electric-powered faux Model Ts (the ultimate symbol of … Detroit?), is Steve Nislick. He’s the chief executive of Edison Properties, which owns warehouses and parking lots in far-west midtown, which happens to also be home to the city’s five carriage horse stables.

The nonprofit advocacy organization Mr. Nislick co-founded, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, maintains that a horse ban would represent “a windfall for the carriage industry from the sale of its multimillion-dollar stables alone,” 64,000 square feet of “valuable real estate on lots that could accommodate up to 150,000 square feet of development.” “Nuff said?”

Ah….the smell of horse manure…..I kinda love it.

It appears that the two biggest horse’s asses in NYC don’t belong to any of the soon-to-be-banned pampered carriage horses.

That honor falls to Mayor deBlasio and Steve Nislick.