Animal News

Dallas joins other U.S. cities in considering ban on horse-drawn carriages

Horse on Dallas street in front of Adolphus Hotel.

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Horse carriage rides represent an idyllic experience, an activity to celebrate the holidays or a platform for romance. But detractors say that the use of horse carriages in urban settings such as downtown Dallas puts animals and humans at risk: Street traffic, the sound of a horn, and unfamiliar objects on the road can cause a horse to spook.

UPDATE 6-26-2024: Dallas' City Council is expected to vote on 24-1971, an ordinance to amend the Dallas City Code to remove horse-drawn carriages at no cost to the City.

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Risks such as these are among the factors being weighed by the Dallas City Council's Quality of Life Committee, who took up the topic of a possible ban at their meeting on December 5.

The issue is not unique to Dallas. New York has had multiple events involving horse-drawn carriages that have brought the cruelty of the practice to light: In July 2023, a horse named Billy died after being forced to pull carriages during a punishing heat wave, and in August, another horse collapsed in Hell’s Kitchen.

Jerry Finch, Founder and President of Habitat for Horses, says that horses used under these circumstances are pushed beyond their limit and suffer from heat exhaustion, loss of weight, and severe hoof issues.

"The stress of being on crowded streets, breathing exhaust fumes, denied adequate water, constantly walking on paved roads in weather extremes often leads to severe medical issues," Finch says.

Other cities such as New York, San Antonio, and Philadelphia have all recently proposed similar bans. Cities that have already instituted bans include Chicago and Salt Lake City.

Dallas has an active group petitioning for a ban, founded in 2021 by Gloria Carbajal, a social worker and avid animal lover who created a Facebook page called Ban Horse Carriages in Dallas and who holds monthly events at Klyde Warren Park to create awareness.

“I just knew that nobody was stepping up to the plate to spearhead this in Dallas," Carbajal says.

Carbajal partnered with Jodie Wiederkehr, Executive Director of Chicago Alliance for Animals and executive director of the Partnership to Ban Horse Carriages Worldwide, who successfully led an effort to ban horse-drawn carriages in Chicago in April 2020. The Chicago ban went into effect on January 1st, 2021, providing the three horse carriage operators in the city ample time to phase their businesses out.

“We have no desire to put people out of jobs. We just want to end a cruel and outdated activity," Wiederkehr said in a statement.

Dallas has four horse-carriage operators, but the dominant player is Northstar Carriage, which offers rides from Klyde Warren Park and West End. (The other three companies are focused primarily on private events.) A representative from Northstar claimed that the company follows coding rules and guidelines, takes good care of the animals, and keeps log sheets.

Dallas City Council member Adam Bazaldua, who chairs the Council’s quality of life committee, supports a ban.

“I don’t think we should have a place for horses on our streets,” Bazaldua told the Dallas Morning News. “I think it’s inhumane for the animal. I think it’s overall dangerous for having safer streets."

During the December 5 meeting, council member Gay Donnell Willis concurred, saying that "as a society, it may be time to just move beyond this" practice.

But District 14 council member Paul Ridley said he was opposed, feigning laughable concern about the future of the horses.

“These horses have a purpose in life and that’s to work,” Ridley said. “If we ban this operation, what’s going to happen to those horses? They’re probably going to be put down because they are expensive to maintain, and if they don’t generate income, there’s no motivation to keep them around."

The industry is monitored by the Transportation Regulation Division, under the Department of Aviation, who said in a statement that "compliance is monitored through periodic field audits to verify requirements are being met."

Aviation department director Patrick Carreno told council members that his office knew of no record of any accidents involving North Star Carriage.

But People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which keeps a national list of horse-carriage related accidents, recorded two accidents in Dallas in 2014. In both cases, the horses got spooked and threw people out of the carriages, then ran freely down the street.

In other cities that have instituted bans, the horse carriages have been replaced by electric-driven carriages, resulting in no losses of jobs, the most common objection raised by carriage companies.

"There's no need to keep these overworked horses toiling on hard, loud, congested urban streets," Carbajal says.

politics animals

Winter weather warning

Forecasters warn of 'potentially catastrophic' winter storm in Texas

Photo by Uliana Sova on Unsplash

This weekend could bring ice to Dallas-Fort Worth and beyond.

With many Americans still recovering from multiple blasts of snow and unrelenting freezing temperatures in the nation’s northern tier, a new storm is set to emerge this weekend that could coat roads, trees and power lines with devastating ice across a wide expanse of the South, including Texas.

The storm arriving late this week and into the weekend is shaping up to be a “widespread potentially catastrophic event from Texas to the Carolinas,” said Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“I don’t know how people are going to deal with it,” he said.

Forecasters on Tuesday, January 20 warned that the ice could weigh down trees and power lines, triggering widespread outages.

“If you get a half of an inch of ice — or heaven forbid an inch of ice — that could be catastrophic,” said Keith Avery, CEO of the Newberry Electric Cooperative in South Carolina.

The National Weather Service warned of "great swaths of heavy snow, sleet, and treacherous freezing rain” starting Friday in much of the nation’s midsection and then shifting toward the East Coast through Sunday.

Temperatures will be slow to warm in many areas, meaning ice that forms on roads and sidewalks might stick around, forecasters say.

The exact timing of the approaching storm — and where it is headed — remained uncertain on Tuesday. Forecasters say it can be challenging to predict precisely which areas could see rain and which ones could be punished with ice.

Meteorologists at WFAA say it's too early for an exact forecast across Dallas-Fort Worth. But it's good to start being weather aware.

Here’s what to know:

Cold air clashing with rain to fuel a 'major winter storm’
An extremely cold arctic air mass is set to dive south from Canada, setting up a clash with the cold temperatures and rain that will be streaming eastward across the southern U.S.

“This is extreme, even for this being the peak of winter,” National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Jackson said of the cold temperatures.

When the cold air meets the rain, the likely result will be “a major winter storm with very impactful weather, with all the moisture coming up from the Gulf and encountering all this particularly cold air that’s spilling in,” Jackson said.

Texas could be a harbinger for other parts of the South
Some of the storm’s earliest impacts could be in Texas on Friday, as the arctic air mass slides south through much of the state, National Weather Service forecaster Sam Shamburger said in a briefing on the storm.

“At the same time, we’re expecting rain to move into much of the state,” Shamburger said.

Low temperatures could fall into the 20s or even the teens in parts of Texas by Saturday, with the potential for a wintery mix of weather in the northern part of the state.

Forecasters cautioned that significant uncertainty remains, particularly over how much ice or snow could fall across north and central Texas.

“It’s going to be a very difficult forecast,” Shamburger said.

An atmospheric river could set up across the Southern U.S.
An atmospheric river of moisture could be in place by the weekend, pulling precipitation across Texas and other states along the Gulf Coast and continuing across Georgia and the Carolinas, forecasters said.

“Global models are painting a concerning picture of what this weekend could look like, with an increasingly strong signal for ice storm potential across North Georgia and portions of central Georgia,” according to the National Weather Service's Atlanta office.

Highway and air travel could be tangled by the storm
Travel is a major concern, as Southern states have less equipment to remove snow and ice from roads, and extremely cold temperatures expected after the storm could prevent ice from melting for several days.

The storm is also expected to impact many of the nation’s major hub airports, including those in Dallas-Fort Worth; Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Polar air from Canada to keep northern states in a deep freeze
Unusually cold temperatures are already in place across much of the northern tier of the U.S., but the blast of arctic air expected later this week is “will be the coldest yet,” Jackson said.

“There’s a large sprawling vortex of low pressure centered over Hudson Bay,” Jackson said of the sea in northern Canada that’s connected to the Arctic Ocean. “And this is dominating the weather over all of North America.”

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