Liam Neeson's Home Taken Over by PETA Protestors: Horse-Drawn Carriages Are 'Not Humane,' Activists Say
Liam Neeson's home was protested by animal rights activists Saturday who were upset that the Taken actor is the sole celebrity voice supporting New York City's horse-drawn carriages. New mayor Bill De Blasio has vowed to replace the horse-drawn carriages with vintage electric carriages, but Neeson said in a recent New York Times editorial that the tradition should be left alone.
Liam Neeson's home on Manhattan's Upper West Side was picketed by around 60 people from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and NYCLASS, a non-profit created to end the horse-drawn carriages in NYC. The group came with signs depicting dead horses and slogans like "worked to death" and "horses + traffic = death."
"Liam Neeson has made the shameful choice to be the only celebrity voice on the side of the cruel, outdated horse carriages," Ashley Byrne, a spokeswoman for PETA, told The New York Daily News. "Any New Yorker can see that this industry has been responsible for over a dozen accidents over the past few years alone."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"It's not safe and it's not humane," she added.
However, Neeson disputed PETA's characterization of the horse-drawn carriage industry in his piece for The New York Times.
"It has been my experience, always, that horse, much like humans, are at their happiest and healthiest when working," the April 14 editorial read. The horse-drawn carriage trade is a "humane industry that is well regulated by New York City's Departments of Health and Mental Hygiene and Consumer Affairs."
"In contrast to the terrible toll of traffic accidents generally on New Yorkers, the carriage industry has a remarkable safety record," he added, citing statistics. Horse-drawn carriages have made over 6 million trips in traffic in the past 30 years with only four horses killed by motor vehicles and no human deaths.
Horse-drawn carriages have been ended in other major cities like London in 1947, Paris in 1965 and Toronto in 1998, though.
"It's 2014, not 1914. It's time for a change," Peter Wood, an animal protection investigator, told the Associated Press. "Horses don't belong in traffic, surrounded by buses. They don't belong in the city; it's outdated, it's cruel."
"Life attached to a carriage with a poop bag attached to your rear end – that's no life," he continued.
Still, Neeson said the electric carriages wouldn't be the same as horse-drawn carriages, calling them a "signature element of New York's culture and history." His publicist had no comment for the most recent protests.
