Horse Drawn Buggies In NYC Must Go!!!!!

They are a fixture in and around Central Park In NYC all year around. They are the little horse drawn carriages that take tourists mostly for a slow ride around the park and the surrounding city streets for a fee. There are about 175 of them registered in the city and about 350 or so horses to pull them in shifts. While it all looks so romantic to people as they ride by the part that most people never see is the toll that it takes on the horses that have to pull these things around the city and the harm it does to these usually shy and easily frightened animals. Horses are skittish even under the most serene circumstances but when they are placed in the middle of all that hectic traffic in Manhattan they can be easily rattled and there have been a number of incidents over the last several years where in horses have been spooked by ambulance sirens and horns and have bolted and caused injuries and even deaths to riders and pedestrians.
For the horse itself it is no easy life. They are forced to live literally in the middle of the street and pull a carriage behind other cars in traffic while breathing in the tail exhaust from the cars in front of them and living mostly a nose to tailpipe life which can cause them respiratory problems that can kill them. In the summertime the heat from the pavement on the city streets can reach in excess of 200 degrees while they are pulling their buggies and some horses have collapsed from heat stroke under these conditions. The hard pavement of the streets is also hard on their feet from the constant pounding and can do damage to their limbs and in some cases horses have had to be "Put Down" after suffering this kind of damage. In the wintertime the horses are forced to pull buggies through the snow and some have slipped and broken limbs which has lead to their deaths. Because real estate space in Manhattan is among the most expensive in the world the stables that the horses are kept in are only a little larger than their own bodies and in many cases the horses are forced to sleep standing up because there is no space for them to lay down to sleep. Their food in the stables is often thrown on the floor for them to eat and this causes it to be contaminated and they as a result sometimes get sick.
I have been a lifelong New York resident and I never have gone on one and i never will. I don't like the thought that i might be adding to the suffering of some poor animal and adding to their pain. There have been calls for years from animal rights groups in the city to ban these horses from the streets and convert the buggies to motorized ones and eliminate the suffering of these animals but so far the City Council and the Mayor have done almost nothing. Mayor Mike Bloomberg has said in the past that we need the horse and buggies in the city for tourism and as a result has been willing to do little to stop it.

Common Myth About Colon Health Exposed

Maybe you have seen the infomercial that runs usually in the middle of the night. The one with the two guys talking about colon health and about how your intestines are clogged with fecal matter (shit) that piles up inside your large intestines and stays there for years and that they have a pill that you can take to "clean out your system." Its a great little informercial especially if you happen to be having something to eat at the time. The one little problem with it is that its not true. Rest assured that you do not have any fecal matter stuck to the walls of your large intestine today that your digestive process converted from some sandwich that you ate in 1992. Fecal matter does not accumulate inside the walls of your large intestine, it moves through it. It does not get stuck to the walls of your intestines and stay stuck there for years and years and you dont need a pill to clean it out. At the most your body would require about three days from the moment you eat something to pass it through your entire digestive system and either use the food you ate for energy or remove it from your body as waste. Three days give or take.

Abandoned Yachts New Sign Of Economic Times

It is usually not one of the leading economic indicators that most analysts would look to but if you were anywhere near the coast of Florida these days you would not be able to miss it. There are dozens of Yachts literally bobbing in the waves off Florida that have been abandoned by their once wealthy owners. The economic downturn has hit many formerly wealthy people hard and they are shedding all of their toys too. It costs a fortune to keep a yacht and maintain it and many owners are simply putting the boats out to sea in order to get rid of them and the costs that go along with maintaining them. Some have even gone so far as to scrape off the names and serial numbers from the boats to prevent authorities from tracing them back to their owners. There are so many of them now in fact that they are causing a little bit of a maritime problem in that they drift aimlessly out at sea and sometimes can end up in busy shipping lanes and cause a hazard. There is a small fine and some jail time even if the boats can be successfully traced back and the owners found. It has become a last resort for any boat owner who has not been able to sell their once proud sailing vessel to just simply sail it out into the Florida keys and ditch it.