Earlier this week we told you about how, after a horse-and-buggy driver was caught on video muttering racial and anti-gay slurs at a group of animal-rights advocates at New York Pride, out tennis legend and PETA spokeswoman Martina Navratilova wrote NYC’s lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, imploring her to condemn the “scurrilous” horse-and-buggy industry altogether.
Quinn got the message—
kinda: She wrote a letter of her own—to the carriage-drivers union, Teamsters Local 533—telling it, “the behavior depicted in this video is reprehensible and unacceptable from anyone, and is especially unbefitting of an industry the City Council has made sure treats its animals humanely.”
But she’s sticking by carriage drivers as a whole, telling Navratilova she supported “allowing an industry that generates vital jobs and tourism for our city to continue.”
Vital jobs, really? We’re not sure farriers and stable boys are right up there with firefighters and school teachers.
Footmen and valets, maybe. But not farriers.
B
What “officially” happened is that she got the union to sign these drivers up for some “sensitivity training”. What probably actually happened is that the head of the union called these miscreants in and told them that their behavior put every driver’s job at risk, and these drivers probably got an offer they couldn’t refuse – shape up or go swimming with the fishes (if not literally, at least figuratively).
Keep in mind that it is the Teamsters Union. Someone in it probably knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa#Disappearance .
Kev C
Tourists to NYC should avoid this horse and buggy scam. The horses are mistreated, the drivers are crass, the rides are a grossly expensive, and the people who ride are gauche, tacky losers.
Anonymous
Free the horses from the slave drivers riding them….