New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio is shutting down horse-carriages.

On reading the headline, I thought it was going to be a case of disrupting the public. They hold up traffic or cause disturbances on the sidewalk. Maybe some people got hurt or something. Or the inconvenience of horse poo.

Evidently, he’s more concerned about the horses. This will, no doubt, be old news to most of you with ties to the city. But seriously: Animal rights? What are the statistics for animals injured or killed by this “dangerous” activity? I glanced around and didn’t really see any. Meanwhile, a lot of these horses are either going to be killed or are going to take spots in shelters for other horses that will be killed.

Was there really no way to improve animal safety through regulation? Yes, yes, being an ignoble right-leaning individual I might be rolling my eyes at stringent regulation of this sort of thing. But that would certainly be better than killing the industry, I’d think.

Honestly, I might even prefer that this be about something as frivolous as horse poo. At least that, even if I don’t disagree, I can understand. Or I could even be convinced that “Dude. Seriously. Horse poo everywhere. We mostly want to use this as leverage to make them clean it up.” But the only purpose of this seems to be to make ourselves feel better by not having to watch those poor horses pulling people around.