A carriage horse that had worked in New York City for less than two months collapsed and died at a Manhattan intersection Tuesday afternoon, officials said.
The horse, a 15-year-old mare named Lady, was found unresponsive near the corner of 11th Avenue and West 51st Street around 2:30 p.m. by police officers responding to a 9-1-1 call, officials said. She was pronounced dead after being brought to a Hell’s Kitchen stable.
No criminality is suspected in the death, the police said. The city’s health department, which regulates carriage horses, is investigating, a spokeswoman for the agency said. A necropsy will be performed to determine the cause of death.
New York’s horse carriage trade — a vestige of old-world charm to some and a form of animal abuse to others — is politically divisive, and Lady’s death quickly became fodder for the running debate over whether horses should be doing such work.
Edita Birnkrant, the executive director of the animal rights organization NYCLASS, accused city officials and the Transport Workers Union, which represents carriage drivers, of colluding to harm the roughly 200 horses that carry passengers around Central Park. The current rates are $72.22 for the first 20 minutes and $28.89 for each additional 10 minutes.
“Our city is protecting the abuse of animals instead of protecting the animals from abuse,” Ms. Birnkrant said.
Lady appeared to be the first carriage horse to have collapsed and died while working since a 15-year-old horse named Charlie did so in 2011. Ms. Birnkrant said that other carriage horses had died outside the public eye as a result of such work.
She specifically criticized Mayor Eric Adams and Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, for failing to support a pending bill known as Ryder’s Law. The law, named for a horse that collapsed on a busy Hell’s Kitchen street in 2022, would ban horse-drawn carriages in the city by June 2026.
Lady’s death occurred about two weeks after a Manhattan jury acquitted Ian McKeever, Ryder’s driver, of an animal cruelty charge in connection with the horse’s collapse.
A spokesman for Mr. Adams disputed Ms. Birnkrant’s claims on Tuesday.
“We are looking into this troubling incident,” the spokesman, Zachary Nosanchuk, said in a statement. “We’ll always work to keep all New Yorkers — including our city’s animals — safe and healthy.”
A spokeswoman for Ms. Adams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Christina Hansen, a carriage driver and spokeswoman for the industry, said Lady was on her way back to the stables after giving two rides on Tuesday. The horse arrived in the city in June and worked for about six weeks after undergoing a physical examination that found no obvious or underlying health problems, Ms. Hansen said.
Noting that 15 is a relatively young age for a horse to die, that the industry is regulated by several city agencies and that the cause of Lady’s death has not been established, Ms. Hansen said it was unlikely that pulling a carriage had been a factor.
“Horses, like people, sometimes just die,” she said.
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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