Last Friday night, the local Time Warner News NY1 aired a report about fatalities at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, linking horse racing with the contentious Central Park carriage horse issue. On the face of it, it’s not a stretch to consider the issues together; both, after all, raise issues of equine welfare; both have made headlines recently; both have been the subject of scrutiny by animal rights advocates.

The report shows a clip of Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose vow to ban the carriage horses was a central tenet of his mayoral campaign, looking somewhat befuddled in response to what appears to be a statement by a reporter about the number of equine fatalities at Aqueduct.

“That’s a statistic I had not heard more before, and obviously concerns me,” said the mayor. “I need to find out more about it.”

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