Garrisons in the squares to say enough to the exploitation of horses to pull tourist carriages. This is the protest launched by Lav – Anti-vivisection League at a national level, also involving its Tuscan branches Florence, Lucca and Pontedera.
In Florence – Saturday afternoon – Piazza Santa Maria Novella was the meeting place: a flash mob was staged here to «ask the municipal administration to respond with a valid, ecological, zero impact on the environment and animals alternative to the licenses still remained in force. Many people stopped to express their consent. Another city is possible.”
Protest on Saturday toon Piazza San Michele in Luccahome to another flash mob: «The carriage horses – is the message sent from the city of the Walls – live like slaves, subjected to arbitrary and violent use in the name of an anachronistic and unacceptable tradition. Maintained only to protect the economic interests of a few people and despite the wider possibilities of replacing carriages with electric vehicles, without repercussions on the employment level for the operators currently employed in animal-powered transport”.
At the beginning of January, right in the center of Lucca, a horse that was pulling a carriage had gone wild due to the explosion of a firecracker in Piazza Napoleone, overwhelming a bench.
In Pisa the appointment is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at 4.30 pm in Piazza Arcivescovado, with a flash mob organized by Lav Pontedera. Lav underlines how hundreds of horses are exploited to pull tourist carriages: «Forced to work – we read on the national website – for many hours a day, with loads up to 900 kilograms, exposed to increasingly extreme climatic conditions, subjected to a very high level of stress to move in traffic and forced to carry out a task in which they have no way of interacting positively with their surroundings. The carriages did not stop even in the scorching heat of recent summers: two horses died in Palermo and one in Caserta, just to mention the last few.” «This is why – concludes Lav – we have been committed to obtaining for years the abolition of animal-drawn transport services, as well as the ban on the use of equines for the transport of things and goods throughout the national territory”.
