On a Wednesday afternoon in Central Park, an 18-year-old tourist named Romanch Mahajan climbed into a horse-drawn carriage with his family. Minutes later he was dead, thrown to the pavement when the horse bolted. He died doing something New York City still sells to visitors as charming.
One week earlier, 100 miles away, Philadelphia voted to ban horse-drawn carriages for good. Penny helped get that bill passed, and in this episode she tells the story of how a fight that simmered for half a century finally became law: the patience to bank small wins, the readiness to move the moment an opening appeared, and the compromise that closed a dangerous loophole without sinking the bill.
Then she turns to the harder question. By every measure Philadelphia used, New York should be the easy case. The accidents aren’t rare, and the public is already there. So why hasn’t New York acted? Because of the one thing Philadelphia didn’t have at the end: an operating industry with real political power behind it, unionized drivers and the jobs argument that has blocked a ban for years. And now there’s a new danger. In the wake of this death, lawmakers may reach for a modest “welfare” bill that lets them look responsive while the carriages keep rolling, the “fix” that gets passed instead of the ban that’s needed. This is a case study in how animal protection laws get passed, and how they get quietly killed.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why the Philadelphia companies closing was in part luck, not strategy, and what the real strategy was
- How to foresee loopholes while there is still time to close them
- Why banning an entire use of animals is hard but CAN get done if public opinion supports it
- How to spot the substitute “reform” bill that gets passed instead of a ban, and quietly kills it
Key Takeaway
Law doesn’t create public opinion, it follows it, so the advocate’s job is to build the record, watch for the opening, and when the moment comes, ask for the law that prevents the harm instead of the smallest fix you think you can get.
Episode Highlights
00:00 Family Tragedy Sparks Debate: A fatal carriage accident in Central Park brings attention to the risks of horse-drawn tourism.
00:39 The Illusion of Nostalgia: The practice is marketed as charming, but puts horses and people in danger amid busy urban chaos.
01:30 Industry Response and Blame: The driver’s union blames individual error, pushing for more training, not a ban.
02:26 Philadelphia’s Breakthrough: Philly’s recent vote to ban commercial carriage horses and the strategy that made it possible.
03:46 Moving from Protest to Policy: Behind the scenes of the campaign, including the role of persistent advocacy and building political momentum.
05:01 Building Progress Step-by-Step: How small legislative wins and documented violations paved the way for an eventual ban.
07:45 No Industry, No Opposition: The carriage industry’s collapse in Philly removed the most powerful barrier to change, jobs.
08:30 Closing Legal Loopholes: Ensuring the new law blocks unsafe, non-commercial rides and prevents a return of carriages.
11:03 New York’s Uphill Battle: Despite repeated incidents and strong public support, New York’s industry and unions have kept a ban off the books.
13:08 The Jobs Argument vs. Public Safety: City Council faces pressure to act, but incremental reforms threaten to derail true change.
15:31 The Dangers of Incrementalism: Why modest welfare reforms can stall real progress and let dangerous practices persist.
16:25 Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights: The core question: make animal use safer, or end it altogether?
19:13 Lessons for Advocates: Action steps for advocates, and why timing, persistence, and readiness are essential to winning lasting change.
Transcript
Penny Ellison:
On Wednesday afternoon in Central Park, an 18 year old named Romanch Mahajan got into a horse drawn carriage with his family. He was visiting New York from India. The driver climbed down to take a photo of the family in the-carriage. And while he was doing that, the horse bolted. The-carriage tore through the park, clipped another carriage near Tavern on the Green and flipped. Before the carriage flipped, Romanch was thrown onto the pavement and hit his head. He died from his injuries that evening.
I want to stop there before I talk about law or politics, because a young man is dead. He was 18, he was on vacation with his family and he died doing something New York City still sells to tourists as charming.
That’s the lie at the center of the carriage horse industry. It asks the public to see nostalgia. What’s really there is a large, powerful animal in a crowded urban environment, surrounded by traffic and people, noise and bicycles, sirens, cameras and children. It only takes one spook, one mistake, one unattended moment, and the result can be irreversible. The driver’s own union was quick to tell us where to put the blame. He broke a rule, they said. A driver is never supposed to step away from the horse and this one did, to take a photo. The union called it unacceptable, said it supported a full investigation and called for better driver training and tougher exams.
And let me give them their due. The driver who walked away to take that picture will live with it for the rest of his life. And the rule he broke is a real rule. But look closely at what the union’s doing there. They’re pinning it on one man and one mistake so that the fix becomes more training, not no horse-carriages. That’s exactly what they want you to think. When the safety of passengers, pedestrians, drivers and the horses themselves depends on no human ever making a single mistake around a frightened 1800 pound animal in a crowded park, the system itself isn’t safe. It’s just waiting to fail. And this week it failed on a teenager.
One week earlier, Philadelphia chose not to keep pretending. On June 11, city council voted to ban horse drawn carriages. I helped get that bill passed and today I want to talk about how we did it. Because the how is the lesson. Then I want to talk about why New York, where a young man just died, is so much harder to move. And what advocates need to do before this moment slips away.
Welcome to the Animal Advocate where we arm animal lovers with the information and inspiration you need to become effective advocates. I’m your host, Penny Ellison, and and I’ve taught animal law and Advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. If you’ve ever thought someone should do something about that, I’m here to guide you on your journey to being that someone. You can find us on the web at animaladvocacyacademy.com and that’s where you’ll find show notes and resources. And you can send us your comments on episodes and ideas for topics you like to hear on future shows. So on to today’s topic.
Back in February, I sat down with Janet White, founder of Carriage Horse Freedom., for an episode called From Protest to Policy. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Janet spent nine years working on this issue in Philadelphia, from street protests to drafting legislation to coming up with a viable alternative, an e-carriage named Carline. After that interview, she asked me to help get Philadelphia’s bill across the finish line. So I didn’t watch this one from the outside. I worked on it. And I want to tell you how we did it. Because running a commercial horse drawn carriage in Philadelphia is now illegal and punishable by a fine of $1,000 a day.
And here’s how that became law. For decades, the fight in Philadelphia wasn’t a fight to ban carriages. A ban wasn’t on the table. There were-carriage companies, horses, drivers who needed the work and a tourism industry that kind of liked that clip clop past Independence Hall. Any council member who proposed shutting it down could be accused of killing jobs over a problem that many voters never really thought about. So advocates did something smart. They didn’t hold out for the perfect bill.
They took what they could get, kept the issue alive, and built the record. So in 2000, after a carriage company was convicted of animal abuse, Councilman Frank DiCicco pushed through tighter rules. The temperature cutoff dropped from 94 degrees to 92, two degrees. That didn’t solve the problem because the problem was never only the temperature. The problem was the practice. Janet made exactly that point when we talked. Drop the temperature a few degrees and you haven’t fixed the danger of putting horses in traffic.
But that small change still mattered because it put the city on record that these animals needed protection their owners wouldn’t provide voluntarily. It built a foothold and it kept the issue alive in City hall during all the years when the votes for anything bigger weren’t there. That’s patience. Not patience as in just waiting around. Patience as the discipline to bank partial progress, keep the door open, and be ready when the political winds change. And eventually, the winds did change. In 2017, a court injunction shut down one of the two operators over building code violations and abuse claims. In 2023, the last remaining company closed, too. The owners sold the stable to a developer and walked away. Carriages had been on Philadelphia’s streets since the 1976 bicentennial. And now, for the first time in 50 years, the city had no carriage businesses left.
Now, let me be clear about something, because I don’t want you to take the wrong lesson from this. Those closures weren’t a strategy. The first company got shut down by the city over the conditions in its stable. The second one closed because a developer wanted the land it sat on and apartments were worth more than horses. That’s not advocacy. That’s luck. The strategy was everything that came before it. The years Janet spent building the record, the relationships, the documented violations, and the electric carriage alternative, all of it. So that when luck finally cracked the door open, there was a finished, vetted, coalition backed ban ready to push through before anyone could refill those stables. Luck made the opening readiness made it law. Think about what those closures did to the politics. For decades, the strongest argument against a ban was jobs. Ban carriages – Put drivers out of work, hurt people just to help horses. That’s a real argument, and it won over a lot of council members.
But once both companies were gone, the jobs argument evaporated. There were no drivers left to displace, no business organized to fight back, no industry standing in front of council saying a ban would destroy working families. The thing that had protected the carriage trade for decades, its economic footprint, was simply gone.
Now, a weaker advocate might see that and think, the fight’s over, the company’s closed. Why pass a law against something that isn’t happening? When I asked Janet that question whether she still needed the ban, her answer came back instantly. Of course we do. Because nothing stopped a new company from just opening tomorrow. She understood that an empty field is when you build the fence. The absence of carriages wasn’t a victory. It was an opening. That was the moment to make certain no one could ever put horses back on the streets pulling tourists in Philadelphia. The opening you’re waiting for doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like nothing’s happening at all. So that’s when we moved.
And then in the weeks before the vote, another problem surfaced. Videos started circulating of individuals running horse drawn carriages on South Street. That’s a very busy pedestrian street. And these weren’t the old carriage companies. They weren’t necessarily formal businesses. They were people operating in ways that looked genuinely unsafe. That mattered, because a bill that only banned commercial carriage businesses might not reach someone giving rise for free or claiming not to be operating as a business at all. So we pushed to close that gap. The final law bans commercial horse drawn carriages outright. If someone wants to operate a non-commercial animal drawn carriage (in other words, if someone claims they’re giving rides for free), they have to be licensed and inspected by both the Department of License and Inspections and and the city’s animal control agency.
Now think about the practical effect of that. You can’t charge for rides, you have to get licensed, you have to be inspected, you have to satisfy two separate agencies and you have to expose the whole operation to city oversight. Are people likely to go through all that so they can give free carriage rides? Probably not. That’s why this is in practical terms a ban. It outlaws the business model and makes the supposed non-commercial alternative so regulated, so limited and so unrewarding that it’s unlikely to become a back door.
That’s what good legislative work looks like. It doesn’t always look like the cleanest first draft. Sometimes, as it did here, it looks like starting out with something handed to you that’s less than perfect, spotting the loopholes before the vote, pushing hard enough to close them, and accepting language that gets you the protection you need without blowing up the whole bill. That’s the needle we threaded. Compromise isn’t surrender and it isn’t a dirty word. Done right, it’s how a long running campaign becomes a law on the books.
And then there’s New York. If public safety is the argument, New York should be the easy case. The accidents there aren’t hypothetical and they aren’t rare. Before Ramansh Mahajan died this week, a horse named Rider collapsed on a Manhattan street in 2022 and was later euthanized. A horse named lady collapsed and died pulling a carriage. In 2025, a horse named Bambi spooked and ran riderless through Central Park with passengers still aboard. And eight days before Ramansh was killed, a horse named Denís collapsed and died in the park after eating a toxic ornamental plant growing along the curb. The Central Park Conservancy counted seven horse related incidents in just 13 months. By every measure we used in Philadelphia, the case is already made. And yet New York’s Council hasn’t acted. Ryder’s Law, the bill that would phase out the carriage industry and replace it with electric carriages has been introduced, reintroduced and killed. Last November, it died in committee on a 4 to 1 vote despite the backing of the sitting mayor and broad public support.
Why? Because of the one thing Philadelphia didn’t have at the end: an operating industry with organized political power behind it. The carriage drivers in New York are unionized, roughly 180 of them represented by the Transport Workers Union. They’re by and large working immigrants supporting families. And the union frames any ban as an attack on blue collar jobs. That’s a potent argument, and it isn’t a dishonest one. These are real livelihoods, and it’s exactly the argument that blocked Philadelphia for decades. It’s the argument that disappeared in Philadelphia only because the companies closed on their own. In New York, the businesses are open, the unions organized, and so far the politics haven’t tipped toward a ban.
So the strongest argument for a ban, public safety, keeps running into the strongest argument against one, jobs. And in New York, jobs has been winning. But this week’s events may change that. Pressure will be high to take some action, and when the pressure builds to address an issue, the real risk isn’t the ban loses, it’s that it never gets voted on at all. When a tragedy creates pressure, politicians can’t ignore anymore, but they still don’t want to support a ban, they reach for something smaller. Something that lets them look responsive without taking on the industry directly.
Right now in New York, that something has a name. It’s a competing bill introduced the same day as the latest version of Ryder’s Law, and it’s backed by the driver’s union. It wouldn’t ban carriage horses. It would adjust conditions. Let drivers start earlier in the morning when it’s cooler. Order a study on hitching posts that might make it harder for horses to bolt. Commission another study years down the road on safer routes. That strategy is how momentum for a ban dies, and it’s used all the time. Offer a softer alternative that’s easy to live with and the industry never has to win the argument against a ban. Lawmakers pass the smaller bill, call it reform, grab a headline and move on. That’s the trap.
And I want to be fair. Better conditions aren’t nothing. Cooler hours matter. Studying safety is a good thing. But none of it answers the question that matters. Would any of it have prevented this tragedy or any of the others? A hitching post study doesn’t change the fact that a horse can bolt. Cooler morning hours don’t change the fact that a 2,000 pound animal not built for hard pavement is navigating city streets that plenty of people are afraid to even drive on. Enhanced driver training, the very thing the union asked for this week, doesn’t change it either, because the whole danger is that it only takes one lapse, one time. A future study on what routes might be safer doesn’t touch the danger built into the practice itself.
A modest fix is often not a step toward a ban. It’s the opposite. It’s what gets passed instead of a ban. Then the pressure lifts. We’ve dealt with it. The headlines fade. The industry survives, the carriages keep rolling. And that’s why the distinction underneath these two bills matters so much.
I’m going to put my professor hat on now. Just briefly, there are two different ways to come at the use of animals. One is the animal welfare approach. It accepts that we use animals and asks how to make that use less cruel or less dangerous. Bigger cages, cooler working hours, better inspections. A study on hitching posts. The other is closer to an animal rights approach. It asks a different question. Not “how do we treat the animal better while we use it?” But whether we should be using the animal this way at all. So welfare asks how. Rights asks whether.
And “whether” solutions that seek to end a use entirely are extraordinarily hard to get passed. The reason’s almost always the same. The uses advocates most want to end tend to have industries behind them. Businesses, jobs, money, trade groups, unions, tradition, political relationships. Factory farming, animal testing, puppy mills, and yes, in New York, a unionized carriage horse industry. When money, labor and tradition all line up to defend a use, a legislature will rarely vote to end it outright.
So advocates get pushed again and again toward the welfare compromise. How about a little more room? A lower temperature cutoff? Another study. A safer route, A better rule around the edges of the same practice. And my friends in the animal rights movement use that fact to argue that laws are a dead end for animals. They say legislation can never deliver what we really want. To truly protect animals, it can only deliver an endlessly, slightly less cruel version of the same uses. For years, I’ve pushed back on that pessimism about law as an avenue for change with one example: carriage horses.
Yes, I’d say welfare reforms are easier to pass than bans. Cooler hours are easier to pass than ending an industry. But with carriage horses, the welfare fix doesn’t solve the problem, because the core danger isn’t the temperature, it’s the horse in traffic. And, unlike so many other animal use issues, ending the use of horses to pull tourists around cities has broad public support. And that’s the most important thing. People may disagree about food systems or the use of animals in research, but a lot of people already understand that horse drawn carriages in a modern city are unnecessary, dangerous and cruel.
And law does not create public opinion. Public opinion leads law, so you can get a ban where you have the public opinion behind it. So this, I often told my animal rights friends, is the case where law can do the bigger thing if you time it right. Philadelphia just proved that.
So here’s what I want to say to everyone in New York who’s been waiting for the right moment to act. The moment is now. You’re not waiting for an empty stable. You’re not waiting for the industry to collapse on its own the way Philadelphia’s did, because it won’t. Your opening is a young man is dead, the public is paying attention, and a new mayor took office, having campaigned on getting these horses out of the park. That’s the crack in the door.
And here’s the part that should give you hope, not despair. The hardest piece of the work is already done. New York doesn’t have to draft a bill. The bill already exists. Ryder’s Law is sitting on the table right now. Reintroduced, championed, ready to move next to the welfare bill that was filed the very same day. The readiness Philadelphia spent nine years building. New York already has. So this isn’t a question of whether New York is ready. It’s a question of whether the Council spends this moment on the law that ends the danger or lets it slip away into a study and an earlier schedule. And openings like this one don’t stay open. The grief fades, the headlines move on, and the industry is betting it can run out that clock. The welfare bill is the dead end my animal rights friends always warned me about just dressed up as progress, the equivalent of a slightly larger cage. Ryder’s law is the harder, better path. And the unbearable truth is that a young man’s death may have just handed that harder path its best chance in years. The question is whether New York’s City Council spends that chance on a hitching post study or on ending the practice that that put Romanch Mahajan in harm’s way.
So what do we take from all this? First, public safety can move an animal protection law further than welfare alone. The danger a frightened, huge animal poses to people reaches voters and lawmakers that an animal welfare argument does not move. Second, you don’t always get to wait for your opposition to collapse. Philadelphia’s jobs argument disappeared when the companies closed. New York’s won’t. So the opening becomes a shift in public attention instead. And you have to seize that before it fades while the opposition’s still in the room. Third, an empty field is a great time to build a fence. We did this twice in Philadelphia. The carriage ban was one. The other was banning the retail sale of puppies and kittens, which we passed during a window when no pet store in the city was selling them. The absence of a harmful practice isn’t the same thing as a law preventing its return. Lock in the win while no one’s fighting back. And finally, beware of the animal welfare bill offered as a substitute for the ban. Modest improvements can sometimes be real progress. Those dogs in Pennsylvania’s puppy mills are probably better off with exercise and health requirements than without them. But a welfare bill can also be the thing lawmakers pass to relieve pressure and avoid the harder vote. The question is always whether the reform prevents the harm or just manages the optics.
If those lessons hit home and you want them laid out in more detail, I built a free private podcast series that walks through the principles behind campaigns like this one and the practical mechanics of moving an animal protection law into your own town. The episodes are short, and you can listen to them on a walk. If you’ve ever thought someone should pass a law like that in my city, this is how you become that someone. Go to animal advocacyacademy.com/fourcs to download it. That’s F O U R C S.
For your Be the Change Action this week, pick one animal use in your own community that everyone treats as normal: carriage rides, maybe pony rides, petting zoos, animals used in festivals or carnivals or other kinds of entertainment. Then ask one question: Is this a use we should be making safer, or one we should be ending? Because hope isn’t a policy. And after this week, no one should need another reminder of that. Philadelphia shows what happens when advocates are ready and the opening comes. New York shows what happens when a city keeps kicking the can down the road.
Delay isn’t neutral. Every day New York waits, the carriages keep rolling, another horse gets put back between the shafts, and another family climbs in because the city’s told them it’s safe …enough. So no, this isn’t the week for a study. It isn’t the week for a softer schedule or a better hitching post. It’s the week to say plainly that some uses of animals can’t be made safe enough, humane enough, or modern enough to justify keeping them. Philadelphia waited for the field to empty. New York probably won’t get that luxury, which means doing the harder thing, building the fence while the field is still full.
And, for every advocate listening, that’s the work. Build the record. Watch for that opening. And when the moment comes, don’t settle for the smallest thing they’ll give you Ask for the law that prevents the harm. I’m here to help.
That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. If today’s episode got you thinking about what you can do to change things for animals, I want to make sure you know about the four Cs of legislative advocacy for animals. It’s a free audio series I put together that gives you a real framework for making legislation happen. You can find it at animaladvocacyacademy.com/fourcs. and you can find all our episodes and show notes at animal advocacyacademy.com. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and if you know another animal advocate who should be listening, send this one their way. Questions on today’s topic or anything else, just email us at podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com we’ll write back, or we’ll feature your question in a future episode.
Remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better. Until next week, Live with Compassion.
