TEL AVIV (Press Release) – CHAI (Concern for Helping Animals in Israel)’s based in Alexandria, Virginia, and Hakol Chai’s campaign to ban cart horses in Tel Aviv, and eventually around the country, achieved its first goal with the banning of horse-drawn carts from Tel Aviv streets. For over a decade, CHAI and its sister charity in Israel, Hakol Chai, pressured the Tel Aviv municipality to regulate, and later to ban, the practice of horses pulling heavily-laden carts through city streets. These animals are often starved, beaten, made to work in the hot sun without water, and not provided with veterinary care. CHAI was the first organization to raise this issue and the first to undertake a campaign to ban horse-drawn carts.
CHAI’s presented its concerns to city officials in 1999. When they were rebuffed, CHAI repeatedly exposed incidents of horse abuse in Jaffa, the old part of Tel Aviv, and rescued and rehabilitated abused horses. A Hakol Chai video of abused animals was shown on TV, and the organization exposed an extreme horse abuser in Jaffa named Nissim, who hacked horses apart with an axe while they were still alive and sold the meat in the market as meat. In 2003, Nissim started up again, and Hakol Chai organized a raid on his facility and closed him down again, this time for good.
In 2005, Hakol Chai’s attorney wrote letters to the Ministry of Transportation, the Tel Aviv Mayor, and other Mayors around the country to raise awareness of the issue and call for a ban on the practice. Hakol Chai also organized an international letter writing campaign to government officials. 2007 saw Jaffa plastered with Hakol Chai posters saying “A horse is not a truck! Hundreds of miserable horses and donkeys around us. Don’t be indifferent! If you see a horse or donkey in distress, demand that the city act!”
Hakol Chai’s formal written proposal to the City resulted in Council holding a special meeting to discuss the issue. Outside the Council meeting, Hakol Chai protesters staged a demonstration, joined by the Green Party and other organizations. The municipal veterinarian at sided with Hakol Chai in saying only a ban, not regulations, would work because city lacks the funds to inspect horses and has no facility to house them even if they removed them from their abusers. The Mayor, pressured by cart owners, continued to decline to impose a ban.
In 2009, 350 supporters of Hakol Chai’s campaign crowded into a Tel Aviv venue featuring a protest concert at which popular Israeli entertainers volunteered to perform. This event was part of an international coalition of organizations throughout the world called Horses Without Carriages International that seeks to end horse-drawn carts and carriages. The event was followed by a civil disobedience action in front of City Hall, at which protesters blocked the entrance and handed out hundreds of flyers on one of the city’s busiest streets.
At long last, Tel Aviv’s Mayor issued a ban, and Hakol Chai will continue to press Mayors of other cities around the country to do the same. Said CHAI’s Director, Nina Natelson, “We are pleased that, at long last there will no longer be sights of thin, injured, beaten cart horses in Tel Aviv, and we will continue pressing Mayors of other cities in Israel to issue similar bans.”
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Preceding provided by Concern for Helping Animals in Israel