Please sign a petition urging the Atlanta City Council to ban cruel horse-drawn carriages. Atlanta carriage horses are forced to work long hours late into the night pulling heavy carriages on the crowded streets of downtown Atlanta, dodging traffic, breathing in exhaust fumes, surrounded by crowds of people and frightening loud noises. Atlanta carriage companies are allowed to force horses to work in temperatures up to 95 degrees, regardless of the heat index. Even when horses are overheated and exhausted, if people want a ride, the drivers will not turn down the money to allow the horses to rest. Exhausted horses will sometimes resist giving rides and have to be pulled into the streets by the reins. See a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmDMpeZDWLg

Georgia Animal Rights and Protection (GARP) and Atlanta Carriage Horse Advocates have been documenting and reporting violations for years, and Atlanta has never taken action to ensure enforcement of Atlanta equine-drawn carriage codes. Atlanta has no system of oversight and no code enforcement, and horses suffer the consequences. Horses are worked while lame, missing shoes, cracked hooves, painful pastern dermatitis, burst hoof abscesses, respiratory ailments, and open wounds caused by the rubbing of old ill-fitting harnesses.

With no previous experience handling horses, drivers are only required 35 hours of training. They jerk the horses’ sensitive mouths, dangerously leave carriage horses on the streets completely unattended for long periods of time, and frequently run red lights without even slowing down for pedestrians in the crosswalk.

The living conditions for Atlanta carriage horses are dismal. During the winter of 2022, GARP documented an Atlanta carriage company stable keeping horses in small holding pens 24 hours a day, standing ankle-deep in urine and feces-soaked mud with no shelter from the rain. See a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0x0FCZm8b8&t=2s

Another Atlanta horse-drawn carriage company keeps their horses in a small dark concrete building except when they are pulling carriages on the streets of downtown Atlanta.  

Atlanta carriage horses are treated like replaceable money-making machines. They are used, abused, used up, and most likely sold to slaughter. Watch a short video of an Atlanta carriage horse driver talking about wanting to blow his horse’s head off with a shotgun or sell the horse for slaughter when she could no longer make him money. He used and abused this horse for over a decade and the horse has now been replaced by a new one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIuyYi6LBd4

Forcing horses to pull carriages on city streets is cruel. Carriage horses can develop respiratory ailments from breathing in exhaust fumes, and they can suffer debilitating leg problems from standing and working on hard concrete surfaces. They work long, monotonous hours with no food breaks, just to carry passengers for a 15-minute joyride around downtown Atlanta.

It’s time for Atlanta to join Biloxi, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Reno, Santa Fe, Camden, Broadway at the Beach, Kenneth City, Key West, Deerfield Beach, Palm Beach, Panama City Beach, Pompano Beach, Treasure Island, Montreal, London, Paris, Beijing, Mumbai and ban cruel horse-drawn carriages.