By Julia Friedrich
December 4, 2017
Introduction: Ron Glaser is a sixty-five year old man who started working as a carriage driver on June 27th, 2012. Because of the stigma surrounding the horse-carriage industry, Ron pretended he didn’t speak english for a whole year when he started working as a horse-carriage driver. Previously, his trusted friend warned him about the hatred that carriage-drivers received from the animal activists; he told him, “don’t tell anyone you are a horse-carriage driver.” As the years went by, Ron gathered his thoughts on the topic, fell in-love with a horse named Dante, and concluded that these horses are “the luckiest horses in the world” because they are “overfed and underworked;” The horses also escaped the slaughterhouses for a warm, comfy spot in a Manhattan stable. Though the stables are in-danger of being bought by wealthy-property owners, the dedication of the stable-owners surpasses any amount of money. One of the stable-owners turned down an offer of 25 million dollars to keep the horse-carriage business in-tact. As the horse-carriage rides are still up and running, Ron is glad to keep his job and witness a turning-point in the horse-carriage business. This december, he is enjoying the beautiful snow, and tipping his stable-hands 20 dollars each because he understands their dedication, and his own.
My name is Ron Glaser.
I’m sixty five. I was born in the USA, a native New Yorker living in Manhattan. There is my wife, we’re married thirty one years now. My first seventeen years was in photo offset reproduction and the printing industry, which was quietly back then New York City’s second biggest industry, and I followed that with eighteen years as a furniture manufacturers outside sales representative
You need to take a three part test to get a certificate that you passed the course and you bring that certificate with you down to the Department of Consumer Affairs where you get you apply for a horse drawn carriage driver’s license. My first day of work was June 27 of 2012.
It’s it is a six day a week job, but I don’t like working in the rain so I I’ve worked a 11 to 13 days straight. Waiting for it to rain and that would be the day I’d take off but in the end taken four days off each month is how it averages out over the years.
The horse can’t be out of the stable more than nine hours a day. . And less in the winter because it just doesn’t make sense for me to be out on the street waiting for a ride after 11 PM when it’s 28 degrees and there’s nobody on the street so that’ll end the day. I had no idea that horses are as smart as they are and have come to respect horses. I enjoy being in their company, and I want to treat them good. Without the horse, I don’t have a job. You have people that have a horse that looks as if they always depressed and it’s guaranteed these people don’t know the first thing about a horse, so I find myself at times politely informing them about horses.
Look at its leg as it’s like this is the position it’s in. I say that when you stand in one place you shift the weight, then what you’re looking at is something every horse in all the world thought was that’s how they shift their weight. That’s how their back leg will be positioned when they’ve shifted their weight and sure enough when I asked you know anything about what it wants. Now you know one thing about horses.
My favorite horse is Dante. He comes out when I’m there. He’s good nature, not skittish he’s calm and relaxed on tours, he’s not a youngster.We build up our relationship just by me working with him and I observe him and that’s how you get to know horses.
His watching of me is it’s like kind of food based, so much so if I walk up to the carriage he sees it as ‘Oh maybe I’m going to hand him the bucket of grain!’ Grain is his favorite food in all the world or maybe I’m just going to slip him a carrot. His world revolves around the food. Whether it’s a reward or it’s coming to him anyway, and they know when they’re being rewarded and they know when they have expectations. At the end of each ride they go through this bucket of grain in the course of their nine hour shift so they know already at the end that they are rewarded and you can see them get a little excited because they know they’re going to get the bucket.
An unsettled horse won’t stay still. If there is something a horse doesn’t like he’s going to let you know about it.
Horses are very smart. If Dante feels he hasn’t received the correct amount of grain he might take a couple of steps towards the traffic. He never takes the last step, but he knows it’s going to get the driver over. The driver can’t take the chance of the horse walking in traffic. Once he’s got the driver by a carriage, the horse hopes the driver gets the message, and will pass him a bucket of grain. So, the horse is manipulating the human.
It costs a driver money to get out the door of the stable. He’s got to tip the stable hands because they’ve brought the horse down and they help you harness the horse attachment to the carriage, and then when you come back to the stable it’s the reverse. Then I’ll bring the horse up to its stall in the stable and there are a few drivers that it’s a very small very simple math: every day you work that’s ten dollars and if you work at least three hundred days a year I believe that comes out to three thousand dollars and for some drivers they take care of it all themselves.
There are at least one hundred forty active carriage drivers for the sixty eight carriages and out of that hundred forty maybe ten or twelve of the drivers are born in the USA and out of those ten to twelve born only like maybe five or six are native New Yorkers.
He had various careers. I know he had kids, he lived two blocks away from me, and when I would do the alternate side of the street-parking shuffle, it was right outside the building he lived on.
Out of all the ethnicities, most of the carriage drivers are Irish.I’m talking about Irishman that came from Ireland. They were horsemen, they knew horses, they knew carriages, and it was their business. Now forty-percent of the carriage drivers are Irish, seems to be decreasing, and you have new ethnic groups that have come in.
There’s a bunch of carriage drivers that started as stable hands, literally shoveling manure, cleaning, and mucking out stalls. They may have had horse experience, and then ended up becoming carriage drivers. They saved their money and ended up becoming carriage-owners. I’m trying to think of their nationalities, but it’s like the whole world is here driving carriages.
Before there was traffic, the horses paved the way. There were no cars or trucks or buses, so there were horses. There’s a fountain in the park and it was built for horses to have a drink. The passenger can take in scenery and views, panoramas, the roads, and the design of the park; they were built around carriage-rides.
The majority of my customers are tourists. I get Manhattanites. When I get Manhattanites, I say, ‘if you like I’d be glad to tell you some park history.’Sometimes they’ll say ‘oh we’re from here’ as if that implies they know about the park. So, I politely tell them it’s been my experience that even if somebody lives in Manhattan all their life, they don’t know about the park and then I take them on the tour.
The animal activists have an anthropomorphic, emotional opinion that they’ve inserted into an ideology. I believe their ideology is that the horses are enslaved and that horse carriage drivers are cruel and inhumane. The mayor of New York City has called the carriage drivers immoral.
These horses are not the thoroughbreds that run-around the racetrack. The animal activists will go horseback riding and don’t care about the horses working. But, when they see a horse pulling a carriage, they think the horse is working. Draft horses are more muscular, have a larger skeletal structure than a thoroughbred, which merely races around the track. You put a draft horse in a field with nothing to do but graze and poop; that is an unsettled horse because he needs something to do and this need is unfulfilled. The animal activists enjoy a lovely picture of a nice pasture and a beautiful horse, but the minute that horse is attached to a carriage-that’s bad. The animal activists will look at a horse, and they’re content and comfortable. They’re practically falling asleep on their feet, they lower their head, and they will look at the horse claiming that the horse is depressed. The animal activists like to see the horse standing straight with his head up in the air, and his ears up. That’s a horse that is a moment away from completely freaking out. But this is how backwards their thinking is because they don’t know the first thing about a horse. They can’t find a veterinarian or an equine behaviourist to support their position. They want to free the horses from this cruel and inhumane business. They really don’t have an answer to where they would free the horses to.
Wild horses are not going to get their inoculations for about a half a dozen diseases. The wild horses don’t live half as long as the cared-for horses. Every year over a hundred fifty-thousand horses are sold at auction, and the majority, over ninety percent, are bought by kill-buyers. Kill buyers ship the horses in packed cattle cars to Canada or Mexico where they’ll be slaughtered for their meat. When they refer to all the poor horses, these Know-Nothings who walk by feeling sad for the poor horses don’t know that these horses are the luckiest horses in the nation. If they hadn’t been bought at auction or from by an Amish farmer, they would end up dog-food.
The animal activists make it their business to get in our faces. They’ve been dragged into court because they were interfering with our lawful commerce. They have been disrupting our business and bringing children to tears over pictures of dead horses.
The animal activists want to give people the idea that they want to end this business because they love horses, but I’ve never see them petting a horse. It’s the weirdest phenomenon. The animal activists don’t pet the horses, or talk to the horses, or get face-to-face with the horses. They accuse the industry of being cruel and inhumane; ‘animal abuse’ is a catchy phrase.
I’ve seen some of the pictures the animal activists put up. Their favorite picture is when a horse is lying on the street. But, like a horse, humans can trip and fall. When the News gets a picture of a horse that tripped and fell, they write that the poor-animal was de-hydrated or overheated. The horse slips, falls, gets up, now someone could have film, but the media will show the picture of the moment, that one moment, the horse was lying on the street.
My friend- my one friend who was in this business. He told me, very seriously, ‘don’t tell people you’re a horse-drawn carriage driver’. But, those were the old days, at that point in-time, seventy-six percent of people in New York City believed that horse carriage rides were cruel and inhumane.
I’m glad I was around for the turning point, which came when our current mayor promised to abolish this business on his first day in office. Liam Neeson wrote a letter to the New York Times inviting the mayor to visit the stables and talk to the stable-hands. Of course, the mayor didn’t come, but a hundred members of the media came, and they learned how well the horses were cared for. From that point on, the animal-rights activists had to change their whole story. They proclaimed that the horses shouldn’t be in traffic. I saw the night where a reporter asked the mayor, ‘well what about the police mounted unit?’ The mayor responded, ‘oh that’s comparing apples to oranges.’ The police mounted-unit horses are in traffic the whole day, while the horse drawn carriages are only in traffic from the stable to the park. Otherwise the horses are in the park or alongside the park.
I was extremely worried for the future of the business. In fact, everybody in the business was asking me, ‘what are you going to do in this business ends?’ I can say I am a genuine example of the truth prevailing. But, these animal-rights activists will never give up. Back in the 80’s, the city council hired a professor of veterinary medicine to check out the horse carriage business, and he reported back to the city council that these horses were overfed and underworked. And the whole thing dropped in the late 80’s, but it came back around 2009 or 2010. I’ve been in this business since 2012.