Archive for month: March, 2013

NYC Carriage Industry Open House To Feature More Stables, More Attendees

NEW YORK, (HCANYC) – Horse enthusiasts from across the country are again coming to the Big Apple to spend a weekend with New York City’s iconic carriage horses, at the 2^nd annual ClipClopNYC – Weekend with the Carriage Horses, March 22-24.

“We’ve been impressed with the interest we’ve had again this year in coming to our stables and seeing how we operate,” said Christina Hansen of the Horse and Carriage Association of New York City, which hosts the ClipClop event. ClipClop is sponsored by Mane ‘N’ Tail and supported by the Carriage Operators of North America and Teamsters Local 553. “Last year, the ‘carriage horse issue’ had been in the media and all over the internet, so it was unsurprising that at our first event we had a big and enthusiastic crowd, but this year, despite things being quieter and less eventful, we’re going to have even more people in attendance. It just demonstrates the interest people have in what we do in this iconic business,” says Hansen. When all is said and done, there could be close to 200 visitors at the stables on Saturday, March 23.

This year’s event will feature stable tours of both Clinton Park Stable and West Side Livery.  Last year’s event was limited to only Clinton Park Stable. “We added West Side Livery, the second largest carriage stable – and one of the oldest – because we want people to see the similarities in the way horses live across the industry, regardless of which stable they’re housed in,” Hansen says. “Between the two stables, ClipCloppers will see where three-quarters of the carriage horses live; and how they live is consistent across all four carriage stables.”

Tours of the stables are free, and lunch will be provided. Registration is required, however.

Saturday night at ClipClop will feature a gala fundraiser at the famous Rosie O’Grady’s in Midtown to benefit Blue Star Equiculture, a 501c3 non-profit draft horse sanctuary and working-horse advocacy organization in Palmer, MA.  Blue Star was honored last year at the inaugural ClipClopNYC with a fundraiser at the Ritz Carlton, which kicked off Blue Star Equiculture’s carriage horse retirement program in partnership with the Horse and Carriage Association. This year’s Gala Fundraiser is a four-hour cocktail reception, with a silent auction.  Tickets are $150, with $75 going directly to Blue Star Equiculture.

“We have this really first-rate partnership with Blue Star Equiculture,” says Hansen. “Blue Star Equiculture understands the industry and the challenges it faces from people who don’t understand the industry. Because Blue Star has a very strong educational mission, in training the next generation of teamsters for working with equine partners on the farm or in the city, we couldn’t think of a better organization to support as we bring in horse people to our city to educate them about our business.”

Last year at ClipClop, Horse and Carriage Association President, Stephen Malone, retired Paddy, his co-worker for 12 years, to Blue Star Equiculture. Paddy was the first official retiree of the NYC carriage horse retirement program. Since then, several more NYC carriage horses have retired to Blue Star Equiculture and have found adoptive homes. Paddy continues to serve as an ambassador for carriage horses and working horses everywhere; he keeps active in retirement teaching beginners how to harness and drive a horse.

“People are always saying they want to ‘help’ the NYC carriage horses,” says Hansen. “Well, our horses don’t need help while they’re working in New York! They have 24-hour-a-day stablemen and amenities most horses never get! But they have our help when they’re ready to retire, and we do need help counteracting the misinformation that the animal-liberationists have put out about our industry. So ClipClop is a great opportunity for people who actually want to help the carriage horses in a meaningful way. You can take a stable tour and become a voice for the truth about how the horses live, so their homes aren’t taken away by people who don’t know what a good home is for a horse.  You can come to the Gala and support carriage horses in retirement and the good work that Blue Star Equiculture does advocating for the continued and expanded use of horses in our communities. That’s helping carriage horses.”

One group of people the Horse and Carriage Association would like to truly help horses? New York’s City Council.  “They’ve been invited,” says Hansen. “In fact, our doors are always open, but we would love for city councilmembers to come tour the stables and meet and mingle with the folks that are coming out to see our horses – the Pony Clubbers, the representatives from CONA, the horse people from across the country, and our local neighbors who just want to know more about the carriage horses they know and love.”

ClipClopNYC grew as response to the rampant misinformation put forth by animal-rights anti-carriage-horse groups. Equestrians, notably those on the Chronicle of the Horse forums, wanted to do something to 1) verify for themselves that the carriage horses of New York City receive excellent care and 2) serve as expert ambassadors to the rest of the public to educate them about New York’s amazing working horses.

Horse people of all disciplines are invited to attend and get an opportunity to tour the carriage stables and find out what it really takes to work with a horse in Central Park.  Hansen explains, “We figure that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then being here and meeting our drivers, our vets, our farriers, our stable managers, and of course our horses is worth a million!”

For more information, to register for stable tours, or to purchase gala tickets to support carriage horse retirement at Blue Star Equiculture, please visit www.clipclopnyc.com

To learn more about the fine work Blue Star Equiculture does, visit www.equiculture.org

LOS ANGELES, (WFLF) –  A $2 billion budget cut to the USDA prompts slaughter plant inspector furloughs within days of discovering USDA  intentions to approve horse slaughter inspections inside the US.  Secretary Vilsack told the House Ag committee that due to the federal sequester each USDA inspector will likely be furloughed 11 to 12 days at a time. The White House says USDA inspectors furloughs will cause meatpacking plants to shut down periodically. “USDA inspections must take place on site at each U.S. slaughterhouse in order for its meat product to be legally available for interstate commerce, ” explains Katia Louise, of the Wild for Life Foundation (WFLF). “The former ban on the spending of taxpayer dollars for USDA inspections of horse slaughter, had helped to keep foreign special interests from slaughtering our horses inside the U.S.”  As pointed out by Wild for Life Foundation’s Saving America’s Horses, the  inclusion of the defunding language in the farm bill was however quietly stripped in Nov 2011, by Senators Blunt, Kohl and Congressman Kingston, leaving America’s horses virtually unprotected. The Senate will be opening this year’s Ag appropriations bill next week. The house simply carried over the existing language and passed it as is, therefore the 2013 bill does NOT include the defunding language.  The bill now goes to Senator Mikulski and the subcommittee members, but they will have to answer to the American public; of which over 70% oppose horse slaughter. WFLF urges America’s citizens to support the protection of America’s horses from this barbaric creulty by calling the Senate subcommittee to restore the defunding language.

“Proponents of slaughter argue that it would be better to slaughter horses in the U.S. where we can supposedly insure their humane treatment,” observes Ms Louise.  “But numerous governmental reports and undercover investigations show that USDA inspections fail to stop insidious abuses from taking place inside our slaughterhouses. Substantial documented evidence reveals egregious violations and a total lack of enforcement by the USDA in U.S. horse slaughterhouses before they were shut down in 2007. If horse slaughter plants are reopened in the U.S., horses will undoubtedly suffer torturous agony on U.S. soil again.” As revealed in the new PSA series from WFLF, “International Health Alert” and “Duped”, the U.S. horse slaughter cover-up puts people and horses in harm’s way — And American consumers are more concerned than ever that horse meat will make, or has possibly already made its way into beef products in the United States as it has done in Europe. Evidence of health hazards surfacing amidst the international horse meat scandal has resulted in several major companies, including Tesco, Nestlé and Ikea, pulling food from grocery shelves in 16 countries after tests showed beef products actually contained up to 100% horse meat. In the absence of a federal ban, over 100,000 American horses are shipped across federal borders to slaughter plants in Mexico and Canada each year and from there the horse meat is shipped primarily to the EU. “But most people don’t realize that U.S. horses are treated with many substances known to be toxic to humans; substances that can be lethal when ingested by humans, and many of which have been banned from the human food chain in most countries.” – WFLF’s Facts that Refute the 7 Most Common Myths About Horse Slaughter.  “… And Foreign consumers of horsemeat are not made aware of the associated health risks directly related to the substances administered to U.S. horses.” As Congress works to cut the budget through federal sequester and other possible means, it should also continue to prevent the additional spending of millions of dollars, simply to allow our nation’s horses again to be subjected to cruel slaughter for the satisfaction of foreign markets. Prior to 2006, USDA spent approximately $5 million annually for inspections at U.S. based horse slaughter plants.  If the USDA were to re-institute such expenditures in the face of these critical billion dollar budget cuts, it may very well lose and never regain the trust of the American people. Wild for Life Foundation (WFLF) is a 501 (c)(3) grassroots nonprofit charity dedicated to saving, protecting and preserving wild and domestic equines. The Saving America’s Horses Initiative is an international consortium of equine professionals dedicated to educating the public and raising awareness for responsible equine ownership, the preservation of America’s wild horses on open rangelands, and the protection of all equines from slaughter. Learn more: http://www.SavingAmericasHorses.org/ http://youtu.be/peP_78ATJwc http://youtu.be/S3UwE1hVaS0 ###

Estimating variance components and predicting breeding values for eventing disciplines and grades in sport horses.

Animal. 2012 Sep;6(9):1377-88

Authors: Stewart ID, White IM, Gilmour AR, Thompson R, Woolliams JA, Brotherstone S

Abstract
Eventing competitions in Great Britain (GB) comprise three disciplines, each split into four grades, yielding 12 discipline-grade traits. As there is a demand for tools to estimate (co)variance matrices with a large number of traits, the aim of this work was to investigate different methods to produce large (co)variance matrices using GB eventing data. Data from 1999 to 2008 were used and penalty points were converted to normal scores. A sire model was utilised to estimate fixed effects of gender, age and class, and random effects of sire, horse and rider. Three methods were used to estimate (co)variance matrices. Method 1 used a method based on Gibbs sampling and data augmentation and imputation. Methods 2a and 2b combined sub-matrices from bivariate analyses; one took samples from a multivariate Normal distribution defined by the covariance matrix from each bivariate analysis, then analysed these data in a 12-trait multivariate analysis; the other replaced negative eigenvalues in the matrix with positive values to obtain a positive definite (co)variance matrix. A formal comparison of models could not be conducted; however, estimates from all methods, particularly Methods 2a/2b, were in reasonable agreement. The computational requirements of Method 1 were much less compared with Methods 2a or 2b. Method 2a heritability estimates were as follows: for dressage 7.2% to 9.0%, for show jumping 8.9% to 16.2% and for cross-country 1.3% to 1.4%. Method 1 heritability estimates were higher for the advanced grades, particularly for dressage (17.1%) and show jumping (22.6%). Irrespective of the model, genetic correlations between grades, for dressage and show jumping, were positive, high and significant, ranging from 0.59 to 0.99 for Method 2a and 0.78 to 0.95 for Method 1. For cross-country, using Method 2a, genetic correlations were only significant between novice and pre-novice (0.75); however, using Method 1 estimates were all significant and low to moderate (0.36 to 0.70). Between-discipline correlations were all low and of mixed sign. All methods produced positive definite 12 × 12 (co)variance matrices, suitable for the prediction of breeding values. Method 1 benefits from much reduced computational requirements, and by performing a true multivariate analysis.

PMID: 23031512 [PubMed – in process]