Two Minutes, One Email

For the first time, a person has died. Testify for the carriage-horse ban.

On June 17th, eighteen-year-old Romanch Mahajan — visiting Central Park with his family — was thrown from a carriage and killed when the horse bolted after its driver stepped away to take a photo. It was the first known human death in a New York carriage incident, and the eighth horse-related incident in the park in roughly thirteen months. Days later, the City Council agreed to do what it had long avoided: hold a hearing on a bill to end the trade.

That bill is Ryder's Law, sponsored by Council Member Christopher Marte and named for a carriage horse who collapsed and died in 2022 — Marte has said he will rename it Romanch's Law. It would stop the city from issuing new carriage licenses, phase out the rides, and fund a workforce program to move drivers into new jobs. A version died in the Council's Health Committee last November. This time it has a date: on Wednesday, July 15, 2026, at 10 AM in the Council Chambers at City Hall, the Committee on Health, chaired by Lynn Schulman, holds a public hearing on the proposed legislation to begin winding down the trade. The hearing is where this bill lives or dies.

You don't have to be an expert, and you don't have to live near the park. Sign up to testify — via Zoom (web or phone) or in person — through the Council's testimony portal. Public testimony begins right after any invited experts and is limited to two minutes per person, which is plenty: tell them who you are, that you support Ryder's Law, and why a humane, modern city shouldn't run half-ton prey animals through Midtown traffic. Can't make it? Written testimony counts too — upload it at council.nyc.gov/testify or email it to testimony@council.nyc.gov, any time up to 72 hours after the hearing adjourns. And you can watch it all live at council.nyc.gov/livestream (select the "City Hall, Council Chambers" stream).

Sign up to testify →

Then tell your own member to vote yes (find them at council.nyc.gov), urge Speaker Menin and Health Chair Lynn Schulman to advance it, and sign NYCLASS's petition at nyclass.org. New to this? Read the essay: It Was Never Just the Horses.

New York passed a first-in-the-nation octopus-farming ban — now it needs the Governor's signature

Update: the Legislature acted. On June 4, 2026, the State Senate passed S.7421 by a vote of 55–5, after the Assembly passed its companion, A.8043. State Senator Monica Martinez's bill — a preemptive ban on farming octopuses for human consumption, modeled on the laws already enacted in Washington and California — now heads to Governor Hochul's desk. One signature stands between New York and a first-in-the-nation ban.

The case is unusually clear. Octopuses are solitary, intelligent, escape-prone, and require live prey, which makes farming them both a welfare catastrophe and an environmental one — and there are no octopus farms in New York today. The point is to keep it that way, permanently.

Call Gov. Hochul: (518) 474-8390 (Mon–Fri, 9–5), or send a message online. The ask: "Please sign S.7421, the octopus farming ban." Name, zip code, one sentence. Staffers tally calls; they don't debate.

Send the Governor a message →

Background from the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Woodstock Farm Sanctuary. Track the bill on the NY Senate site.

Two animal bills passed both chambers — they need one signature

The Legislature has done its part. Twice. Now both bills sit one signature away from law, and the Governor's office tallies every call. As of late June 2026, both have passed and are still awaiting the Governor's signature — the traveling-animal-act ban would take effect December 31, 2026 if signed.

A.5850 / S.3629-A (Glick / Fernandez) ends the use of wild cats, bears, primates, kangaroos, and wallabies in traveling animal acts — circuses, fairs, roadside shows. It passed the Assembly and then the Senate on May 5, 2026, by a vote of 53–9. New York's zoos, aquariums, and sanctuaries are exempt; the bill targets only animals hauled from venue to venue in trucks and trailers.

A.10272 / S.9207 (Rosenthal) closes the renter's loophole in New York's dog-breed insurance law. Since 2021, insurers can't cancel or surcharge a homeowner's policy because of the breed of dog in the house — but renters were left out, and pit-bull-type dogs keep landing in shelters when tenants are forced to choose between their dog and their coverage. The fix passed the Senate 59–3 on May 5 and the Assembly on May 19. One caution: the Governor vetoed the previous version of this bill in December 2025 — which is exactly why the calls matter this time.

Call Gov. Hochul: (518) 474-8390 (Mon–Fri, 9–5). The ask: "Please sign A.5850, the traveling wild animal act ban, and S.9207, ending dog-breed discrimination in renter's insurance." Name, zip code, done.

Or send a message online →

Track both bills on the NY Senate site: S.3629-A · A.10272.

Protect Prop 12: tell our U.S. Senators to strip the "Save Our Bacon" provision

The Save Our Bacon Act (H.R.4673, Rep. Hinson) would gut state farm-animal welfare laws like California's Proposition 12 and Massachusetts' Question 3 — and with them, the strongest protections farmed animals have anywhere in American law. On April 30 it passed the U.S. House, buried inside the Farm, Food, and National Security Act, after House leadership blocked the bipartisan amendment that would have stripped it.

The fight is now in the U.S. Senate — where New Yorkers happen to have two of the most influential votes in the chamber. Two minutes per call.

Sen. Chuck Schumer: (202) 224-6542
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: (202) 224-4451
Or the Capitol switchboard, (202) 224-3121 — ask for either office.

The ask: "Please strip the Save Our Bacon provision from the Farm Bill and protect Prop 12." Name, zip code, one sentence. Staffers tally calls; they don't debate.

Read H.R.4673 →

Background: Humane World Action Fund on who opposes the Prop 12 "fix."

The UK campaign treating factory farming the way we once treated tobacco

In England and Wales, roughly 90% of pigs are killed in CO₂ gas chambers — a method the industry markets as humane. The government's own Animal Welfare Committee concluded otherwise in October 2025, finding that exposing conscious pigs to high concentrations of CO₂ causes pain, respiratory distress, and fear — what the report describes, behaviorally, as screaming, gasping, and frantic attempts to escape. The same advisory body recommended ending the practice back in 2003. More than two decades later, it is more common than ever.

Project Slingshot exists to close the gap between what we permit and what we would accept if we actually looked. Its opening campaign — Don't Buy It — placed more than 750 ads across 206 London Underground stations and another 2,200 inside Tube carriages, each one challenging that single word, humane. When Slingshot polled the public, 81% of Britons called the practice unacceptable. The point is hard to miss: this persists not because people approve of it, but because almost no one knows it happens. As actor Sir Mark Rylance puts it — "The industry knows we'd object if we knew. So they made sure we didn't."

What makes the campaign worth studying is its strategy. Slingshot is modeled explicitly on the anti-tobacco and anti-drink-driving efforts that came before it: slow, sequenced, high-visibility "drumbeats" designed to make a harmful practice socially indefensible rather than merely illegal. Co-founder Naomi Hallum calls the industry's framing "industrial-scale gaslighting" — "while the pigs get gassed, the rest of us get gaslit." The backers (Diane Morgan, Rylance, Dr. Amir Khan, Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney, MP Neil Duncan-Jordan, and others) supply the one thing that dissolves moral disengagement: attention. The stated goal is to end factory farming by 2040.

It is tempting to file this under British problem. It isn't. The United States runs the same practice at the same scale: of the roughly 130 million pigs slaughtered here each year, an estimated 90% are killed with CO₂ gas — nearly 120 million animals — yet because the pigs are sealed inside the machinery, federal inspectors cannot actually observe the deaths the law obliges them to certify as humane (Animal Welfare Institute, 2023). What the industry has worked to keep unseen, activists have dragged into the light. In the documentary Pignorant (Carbstrong, 2024), investigators Joey Carbstrong and Dan Sheppard smuggled cameras into a Pilgrim's Pride abattoir near Manchester and filmed pigs lowered in metal gondolas into the gas — thrashing, screaming, and gasping for a minute or more before they fall still. It is footage almost no one chooses to watch, and that is exactly the point: the practiced not-looking that lets us eat what we would never stomach seeing is the carnism, and it operates here at home too. New Yorkers can't vote in Westminster, but the lever is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: look at what is actually happening, refuse the product, and refuse the story that sells it.

Visit Project Slingshot →

Read the broader mission at endfactoryfarming.com. Closer to home, send the octopus email above, browse our NYC plant-based directory, and support the US groups doing this work.