According to the New York Post, a carriage horse was flogged by its driver after it collapsed on a busy street. Apparently, the horse was exhausted and couldn’t continue to wherever it was headed to.
Its driver in his attempt to force it to move struck it repeatedly.
An exhausted carriage horse collapsed during the evening rush hour in Manhattan on Wednesday — lying on the asphalt while his driver repeatedly struck him and ordered him to “get up.”
The animal’s knees buckle in video footage as the driver jerks the reins and slaps the horse in an attempt to make it stand on 9th Avenue and West 45th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Get up! Get up! Get up! C’mon, get up,” the frustrated driver commanded as traffic backed up on the busy avenue around 5 p.m.
Onlookers were disturbed by the flogging. “What if I slapped you around like that, bro?” one concerned bystander asked.
“Stop slapping him,” another woman was heard pleading. “I’m trying to get him up, alright,” the driver said, as he whipped the horse with the reins twice.
The dejected horse then laid down on its side and rested his head on the street as the driver removed his carriage with the help of a pedestrian.
A group of police officers then arrived and were filmed dousing the horse with water, finally getting him on his feet after more than an hour, according to video and witnesses.
The NYPD’s mounted unit then transported the animal to an unknown location for treatment, according to police.
The incident horrified witnesses and advocates and came after a brutal extended heat wave that finally broke Wednesday.
“I saw the horse collapse. He obviously was malnourished, dehydrated, hungry. The guy started whipping his horse and telling him to get back up instead of giving him water,” Uber Eats driver Kelvin Gonzalez, 25, told The Post.
“I told him, ‘Yo, stop whipping him, give him some water. That’s a horse, not a machine.’
“It’s really sad, man. You can tell that horse was not taken care of. You can tell he was exploiting that horse. The horse was hungry, he was thirsty. You can tell the horse collapsed from the thirst.”
The horse “tried to get up like 10 times and it kept collapsing,” before police put “adrenaline up his butt,” Gonzalez said.
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