The carriage industry loves and cares for our horses like family. We live and work together every day, side-by-side. The health and wellbeing of our family, employees, horses, and especially our guests is a priority above all else.
We have seen a dramatic increase in activists attempting to disrupt or assault our animals in the last few weeks. There have been countless cases of verbal attacks on carriage drivers. We’ve had people make attempts to physically touch the horses while verbally attacking our guests. Our employees have been physically assaulted. We’ve gone to court for protection orders. We have had people lay down in front of the horses and now this latest instance we have an individual in a dinosaur costume harassing the horses, causing a reaction and injuring one of our drivers.
In all these instances, our employees have acted first in the best interest of the animals and our guests. The activists have not. We have seen the attacks get more and more brazen and we fear that the result will be the death of one of our family – a horse, an employee or a guest.
These attacks follow the increasingly irresponsible rhetoric coming from organizations that have one goal – to do whatever it takes to shut down horse carriages in Charleston. Facts don’t matter, reason doesn’t matter. The rhetoric we are hearing today is directly causing the increase in human attacks on our horses and people.
This is Charleston, the most polite city in America. We must come together as a community and say enough is enough before it is too late before we have a more serious incident occur.